Chikungunya is a serious health threat. Mosquitoes once limited to tropical I regions are spreading north to the U.S., carrying both dengue fever and Chikungunya, a virus that causes fever, chills, headache, and punishing joint pain that can persist for years. Once a relatively obscure illness limited mostly to Africa, Chikungunya (pronounced chicken gunya) has transformed over the past decade […]
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At least half of the world’s killer whales will become extinct because of toxic waste in the oceans within the next century according to researchers. Some areas despite efforts to control the pollutants of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) still remain at high levels. Research scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) are saying that if we don’t bring down the […]
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European researchers have once again warned that the thinning of the Antarctic ice shelf means that the flow of glaciers on the frozen continent could accelerate, with a consequent rise in sea levels. They examine, in two separate studies, the increasingly precarious state of some of the ice shelf. When the shelf, consisting of ice floating on the ocean, melts, […]
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New research indicates that accelerating ice loss in vulnerable West Antarctic ice shelves is almost inevitable in the coming century as surrounding waters warm. This development could suggest that previous predictions of one to three feet of sea level rise by 2100 were too conservative. The study reveals that, irrespective of aggressive human efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions and […]
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A bright blue dwarf snakehead fish that can wriggle around on land for up to four days at a time and a snub-nosed monkey that sneezes when it rains: Those are just two of 211 new species found over the past five years in the Eastern Himalayas, the World Wildlife Federation reports. The region, which spans central Nepal, Myanmar, and […]
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In 2015, scientists predicted that a massive solar eruption would hit Earth just before New Year’s Eve. It was expected to cause power fluctuations, radio blackouts and even affect GPS reception. There was a small chance it could make the Northern Lights visible in the San Francisco Bay Area. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that the Aurora Borealis […]
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The newest professor in the University of Rhode Island’s College of the Environment and Life Sciences, Hollie Putnam, thinks some corals and shellfish might have good enough “memories” to buffer the changes in ocean chemistry that are resulting from the effects of climate change on coral reefs. A native of Minnesota who earned a doctorate at the University of Hawaii, […]
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Some new thinking may have brought astronomers a step closer to solving the mystery of how our moon formed. Researchers have long believed that the moon was cleaved from a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. Yet recent tests of lunar rock samples suggest that the moon’s chemical makeup is too similar to Earth’s to […]
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With temperatures in excess of 800 F, Mercury is one of the last places in the solar system you’d expect to find ice. But when NASA’s Messenger spacecraft transmitted its first optical images of the closest planets to the sun, that’s exactly what scientists discovered. Mercury sits about 36 million miles from the sun, which is roughly 57 million miles […]
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You might not be a resident of Antarctica, but “no biggie”, say artists Lucy and George Orta. They’re giving out Antarctica passports, anyway. You can apply for an Antarctica passport online through the Antarctica World Passport program. In 1959 the Antarctic Treaty stipulated that the southernmost continent “shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become […]
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