Did You See That Press Release? Favorite Restaurants, Movies and … Words

With thousands of news releases published each week on PR Newswire for Journalists, no one can possibly keep up with every one of them. Here are some of our favorite releases from the past week that you might have missed.

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Source: PRNewsFoto/OpenTable Logo

OpenTable Restaurant Reviews Reveal Top 100 Restaurants in America

As we cheer the end of another year of delicious dining, OpenTable is pleased to celebrate the 2014 Diners’ Choice Award winners for the Top 100 Best Restaurants in America and highlight the Top 10 honorees.

These awards reflect the combined opinions of more than 5 million restaurant reviews submitted by verified OpenTable diners for more than 20,000 restaurants in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. See the full release to learn what restaurants made the list.

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NASA Rover Finds Active, Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill.

“This temporary increase in methane — sharply up and then back down — tells us there must be some relatively localized source,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team. “There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock.” See the full release to learn more.

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Source: AP Photo

Gone but Not Forgotten: Gone With the Wind Still America’s Favorite

It may have premiered 75 years ago, but it would appear that Wind has still got legs. When asked to name their favorite movie of all time, the septuagenarian Civil War epic Gone With the Wind is Americans’ top pick again (the film was also America’s favorite movie in 2008).

With six movies in the can and a much-discussed trailer now making the rounds for Episode Seven, Star Wars soars into the same runner up position it held in 2008.

Meanwhile, Titanic is doing anything but sinking; after not making The Harris Poll’s top 10 in 2008, the 1997 love story may not quite be king of the world this time around – but surely rounding out the top three is none too shabby. See the full release to learn what other movies made the list.

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Merriam-Webster Announces ‘Culture’ as 2014 Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster Inc. announced its top 10 Words of the Year for 2014. This year’s list was compiled by analyzing the top look-ups in the online dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com and focusing on the words that showed the greatest increase in look-ups this year as compared to last year.

The results, based on approximately 100 million look-ups a month, shed light on topics and ideas that sparked the nation’s interest in 2014. The Word of the Year, with the greatest number of look-ups and a significant increase over last year, is culture.

Culture is not associated with any one event, but instead dominated the headlines this year, on topics ranging from “celebrity culture” to “rape culture” to “company culture.”

In years past, lookups for the word culture spiked in the fall, as students encountered the word in titles and descriptions of courses and books, but this year lookups have moved from seasonal to persistent, as culture has become a term frequently used in discussions of social phenomena. See the full release to learn what other words made the list.

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Source: AP Photo

AAA: 98.6 Million Americans Traveling this Holiday Season, Up 4%

AAA projects 98.6 million Americans will journey 50 miles or more from home during the year-end holiday season, an increase of 4% from the 94.8 million people who traveled last year.

This upward trend marks the highest forecast growth rate for the year-end holiday season since 2009 and the highest travel volume for the holiday period on record. (AAA data dates back to 2001.) The year-end holiday period is defined as Tuesday, Dec. 23 to Sunday, Jan. 4.  See the full release to learn more.

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Larry Grady is online content manager at PR Newswire for Journalists. He has worked in business media for nearly 30 years and enjoys reality TV and daydreaming about travel and wine.