Years

It’s Possible to Accidentally Develop an Allergy to Red Meat. Here’s The Science

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When a 56-year-old farm worker from just outside Kansas City in Missouri, US, began noticing a rash on his waist and arms within hours of chowing down on a hamburger seven years ago, he wasn’t sure what to make of it.   Like so many with alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the path from tick bite to … Read more

5 Out-of-This-World Telescope Photos of Space to Get You Excited For The JWST Launch

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The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It’s also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us.   Astronomers rarely use their telescopes to simply take pictures. The pictures in astrophysics are usually generated by a process of scientific inference and … Read more

30 years and $10 billion later, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally on the launch pad

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NASA and the astronomy community have poured $10 billion and more than two decades into just one piece of machinery. Now they are facing the moment of truth. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, also known as Webb or JWST, is finally in French Guiana, perched atop its rocket, ready to bid farewell to Earth and … Read more

Stellar Video Shows Comet Leonard as It Zips by Earth For The 1st Time in 80,000 Years

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Since early this year, skywatchers on Earth have been tracking Comet Leonard, a kilometer-wide dirty snowball made of ice, rock, and dust. Now, as it heads towards a close encounter with the Sun on 3 January 2022, several spacecraft – with the distinct advantage of having an unobstructed front-row seat to the action – have … Read more

Scientists Unearth a Ginormous Triassic Sea Monster That Once Roamed The ‘Superocean’

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A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so unexpectedly colossal, it reveals that its kind grew to gigantic sizes extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking at least.    The discovery suggests that such ichthyosaurs – a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas – grew to enormous sizes in a span of only 2.5 … Read more

US Life Expectancy Has Taken Its Sharpest Drop in More Than 75 Years

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US life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years in 2020, final official figures showed Wednesday, the steepest drop in more than 75 years driven in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic.   Life expectancy at birth was 77.0 years for the total US population last year, down from 78.8 years in 2019, according to the Centers … Read more

Shocking Fossil Reveals Car-Sized Millipedes Scuttled on Earth 326 Million Years Ago

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If creepy crawlies make you uncomfortable, be glad you weren’t living in the Carboniferous period (around 100 million years before the dinosaurs arrived) in what is now Northumberland in the UK.   Scientists have made an astonishing discovery along this part of the coast of northeast England: a 326 million-year-old fossil, showing traces of the … Read more

Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ could meet its doom within 3 years

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Time is melting away for one of Antarctica‘s biggest glaciers, and its rapid deterioration could end with the ice shelf’s complete collapse in just a few years, researchers warned at a virtual press briefing on Monday (Dec. 13) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).  Thwaites glacier in western Antarctica is the … Read more

Winter solstice 2021 brings the year’s longest night to Northern Hemisphere

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The winter solstice of 2021 occurs today (Dec. 21), marking the official beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and it brings good news:  From tomorrow on, days will start getting longer again, taking us out of the darkness as we slowly head towards spring.  The winter solstice marks the moment in Earth‘s orbit around … Read more