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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Between fighting wildfires and rerouting the Iditarod, Alaska has had a tough time with climate change. But at least there’s one good outcome: local food. In Bethel, a town in southwestern Alaska, farmer Tim Meyers is taking advantage of rising temperatures to grow food in the previously inhospitable tundra. NPR reports: At the 15-acre organic farm, which has been operating for more […]
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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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Kīlauea is a currently active shield volcano in the Hawaiian Islands, and the most active of the five volcanoes that together form the island of Hawaiʻi. Located along the southern shore of the island, the volcano is between 300,000 and 600,000 years old and emerged above sea level about 100,000 years ago. The immediate effects of a volcanic eruption is […]
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