Tracking Trends, Breaking News
One of two engines powering a Japanese moon lander during its descent to the lunar surface Jan. 19 suffered a malfunction of some sort just 160 feet above the lunar surface that sharply reduced its power, the Japanese space agency said Thursday. The spacecraft touched down at a safe, lower-than-expected velocity, but it was moving too fast
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DNA from a type of “chewing gum” used by teenagers in Sweden 10,000 years ago is shedding new light on the Stone Age diet and oral health, researchers said Tuesday. The wads of gum are made of pieces of birch bark pitch, a tar-like black resin, and are combined with saliva, with teeth marks clearly
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Copenhagen — Archaeologists in Denmark have found a small knife inscribed with runic letters dating back almost 2,000 years, the oldest trace of writing found in the country, the Museum Odense said on Tuesday. Runic letters, called runes, are the oldest alphabet known in Scandinavia. They were in use from the first or second century
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Some regions of Europe could see “devastating” economic losses in the coming decades due to the rising oceans, researchers say. A new study found that under the worst-case scenario for emissions and sea level rise, the European Union and United Kingdom could lose 872 billion Euros (about $950 billion) by the end of this century,
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Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than scientists previously estimated, according to a study released Wednesday in the journal Nature, with the loss believed to be 20% worse than previously reported. Since 1985, Greenland’s ice sheet has lost approximately 5,091 square kilometers of ice researchers found using satellite imagery. Scientists said earlier estimates did not
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Scientists in China on Tuesday announced that they have cloned the first healthy rhesus monkey, a two-year-old named Retro, by tweaking the process that created Dolly the sheep. Primates have proved particularly difficult to clone, and the scientists overcame years of failure by replacing the cloned cells that would become the placenta with those from
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A team of scientists has discovered four new species of octopus in the waters off Costa Rica, the Schmidt Ocean Institute said Tuesday. So far, only one of the new species of deep-sea octopus has been named. All four new species, found in a 100-square-mile-sized area off Costa Rica, are in the process of being
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Artificial intelligence could be used to prevent planes from creating planet-warming condensation trails, or contrails, according to a new study. Exactly how much impact contrails have on global warming is still being studied, but one recent study found the feathery streaks in the sky can trap enough heat to account for about 35% of the aviation
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Workers were just starting construction on a new apartment complex in northeastern Brazil when they began finding human bones and pottery shards, their edges worn smooth by time. Soon, excavations at the site in the coastal city of Sao Luis had uncovered thousands of artifacts left by ancient peoples up to 9,000 years ago —
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In Lissa Schneckenburger’s garden in Brattleboro, Vermont, the tomatoes seem happy; so do the bees. And the reason may be because of how she enriches the garden – with her own family’s urine. “When we tell people about it, they’re mostly confused,” Schneckenburger said. “They’re just like, ‘What? Why? What?’” Welcome to the world of
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