For centuries, explorers and treasure hunters have searched in vain for the ancient lost White City the legendary home of a long lost Central American civilization. Now American and Honduran researchers think they’ve finally found the pre-Columbian settlement deep in the Honduran rain forest. The ruins of La Ciudad Blanca were first identified in 2012 by an aerial survey that […]
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Juba, South Sudan Army rapes, murders: South Sudanese soldiers have been gang raping young girls and then burning them alive, according to a new United Nations report. The army is trying to terrify the entire civilian population into fleeing rebel-held areas so that the rebels will have no support base. One survivor described how he hid in a river when […]
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Soil frost is a nearly universal process in the Arctic. In a recent dissertation by doctoral student Marina Becher at Umeå University, it is shown that the frequency and extent of Arctic soil frost is important for the release of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from arctic soil. Soil in the Arctic has for thousands of years gathered large quantities […]
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Climate change may have helped to alter the course of history. A period of extreme and unprecedented cooling in the northern hemisphere 1,500 years ago may have reduced the eastern Roman empire, set the stage for a famine and a devastating pandemic that killed millions, and favored the rise of the Islamic forces that created the Arab empire. The so-called Little […]
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Until recently, Pakistan has not used the bulk of its coal reserves – some of the largest in the world – for power generation. Within the past year the government in Islamabad has signed a number of financial and technological agreements with China aimed at exploiting massive coal reserves at the Tharparkar mine in Sindh province, in the south of the […]
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Scientists have concluded for the last decade that more-acidic seas have been harming coral, making it more difficult for coral reefs to grow or regenerate themselves. Conducting an experiment over the course of 22 days, scientists flooded Australia’s Great Barrier Reef with an antacid. They found that by lowering the water’s acidity, it caused the coral to grow. Research has […]
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People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
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There is a deafening and horrific silence in the USA about the problem of gun control, Piers Morgan told the Today program, responding to US radio host Alex Jones’ defence of guns. “The product of this demented attitude is you have the worst gun crime of any of the advanced countries in the world,” said the British journalist. Mr Morgan […]
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Stanford scientists have found that chronically low levels of oxygen throughout the oceans hampered the recovery of life after the Permian-Triassic extinction, the most catastrophic die-off in our planet’s history. Also known as the “Great Dying,” global ecosystems collapsed as some 90 percent of species perished in this extinction event 250 million years ago. The new findings, published this week […]
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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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