Japan decided to resume Antarctic whale hunt after a hiatus despite an IJC ruling, which prompted international outrage. The International Court of Justice ruled in March 2104 that Japan’s decades-old whale hunt in the Antarctic should stop, prompting Tokyo to cancel the bulk of its whaling for the 2014/2015 season. The order from the United Nations court was binding and […]
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Here’s a novel idea for putting the brakes on global warming: Ask everyone in the world to paint their roofs white. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu raised the idea last week at a conference in London, noting that the proposal, first put forth by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, would reflect enormous amounts of sunlight off the […]
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Children who attend schools near busy roads could see their brain development hindered by air pollution, according to a new study by Spanish scientists. Researchers in Barcelona spent a year tracking the developmental progress of more than 2,700 children ages 7 to 10 at 39 schools in the city. They found that the cognitive skills of students at schools near […]
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Ocean temperatures first collected during one of the great 19th-century voyages of exploration confirm one of the consequences of climate change: humans have managed to warm even the deepest parts of the ocean. A new study in Nature Climate Change calculates that the amount of heat absorbed by the ocean has doubled in the last 18 years. A third of […]
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The continued melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet is progressing faster than expected, and the resulting rise in sea levels will have a global impact.The stark new findings point to a potential sea-level rise of up to 10 feet or more in the coming centuries. This increase in the global sea-level will threaten many major cities, including New York, […]
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Earth may owe its existence to the planet Jupiter. New research shows that the giant planet played a key role in the formation of the solar system by barreling through it like a cosmic wrecking ball, destroying existing planets and creating debris that coalesced into new ones, including ours. Astronomers began examining this theory after finding that virtually all of […]
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A floating island made out of plastic the size of Hawaii made entirely from plastic bottles could become the hottest postcode on earth, and is part of an incredible environmental vision for the future. CGI images show how a team of Dutch scientists plan to take 44 million kilos of plastic waste currently bobbing around in the Pacific Ocean and […]
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Like many human families, killer whales often rely on the wisdom of matriarchs to help them endure hardships and thrive, new research has found. Male orcas usually live for about 50 years, but females often survive well into their 90s, making them one of the few mammalsthat live for decades after they stop reproducing. Marine scientists studied the behavior […]
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For the first time, a mission designed to set its eyes on black holes and other objects far from our solar system has turned its gaze back closer to home, capturing images of our sun. NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has taken its first picture of the sun, producing the most sensitive solar portrait ever taken in high-energy […]
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“Knowing what a chicken looks like and what all the chickens before it looked like doesn’t help us to understand the egg,” says Taras Gerya. The ETH Professor of Geophysics uses this metaphor to address plate tectonics and the early history of the Earth. The Earth’s lithosphere is divided into several plates that are in constant motion, and today’s geologists […]
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