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The Amazon rainforest is teetering on the precipice of a dangerous tipping point, new research warns. It’s gradually losing its ability to bounce back after disturbances like droughts or other extreme weather events. With enough time and forest losses, scientists say, large swaths of the Amazon could fall into an unstoppable spiral that would transform … Read more
More than three-quarters of the world’s largest rainforest has become less resilient to drought since the early 2000s, with areas near humans and with lower rainfall being the worst hit Environment 7 March 2022 By Adam Vaughan An area deforested for gold mining, along the Interoceanic highway linking Peru and Brazil in the Amazon region … Read more
Hammered by climate change and relentless deforestation, the Amazon rainforest is losing its capacity to recover and could irretrievably transition into savannah, with dire consequences for the region and the world, according to a study published Monday. Researchers warned that the results mean the Amazon could be approaching a so-called “tipping point” faster than … Read more
Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China and a third suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals—possibly those sold at the market—into … Read more
Scientists deliberately infected young, healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 – and now, they’ve shared their first results from that experiment. The new study, published Tuesday (Feb. 1) in Springer Nature’s preprint database, In Review, has not yet been peer-reviewed, but it could provide insight into how mild COVID-19 unfolds, from the moment … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope has fired its thrusters and reached its orbital destination around a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet, NASA said Monday, a key milestone on its mission to study cosmic history. At around 2:00 pm Eastern Time (1900 GMT), the observatory fired its thrusters for 5 minutes … Read more
In 2021, there was an upsurge in peculiar sightings reported, thanks to people with smartphones or other video gear that captured these strange glimmers in the sky. Could these unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) be satellites, technology deployed by foreign governments, falling space junk or maybe even floating specialty balloons or purposely faked unidentified flying objects … Read more
We can all let out a collective sigh of relief. With its primary mirror array fully unfolded, the major components of the beleaguered James Webb Space Telescope are now deployed, and it continues to calmly make its way to its destination. The deployment, completed on 8 January 2022, marks a pretty important milestone for … Read more
The sun is just a little bit closer in Earth’s sky right now. Earth is at its closest to the sun Tuesday (Jan. 4) in its 365.25-day journey. This milestone, called perihelion, coincidentally happens near the start of the Gregorian calendar year observed by much of the world, including in North America. The exact moment … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will travel to a special spot where the gravity from Earth and the sun is balanced Credit: Matthew Twombly Advertisement The most ambitious space telescope built to date is about to start peering at the universe through infrared eyes. The $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is designed to see … Read more