Month: March 2021

The SwRI-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) orbiting Jupiter aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft has detected new faint aurora features, characterized by ring-like emissions, which expand rapidly over time. SwRI scientists determined that charged particles coming from the edge of Jupiter’s massive magnetosphere triggered these auroral emissions. “We think these newly discovered faint ultraviolet features originate millions of miles away from Jupiter, near the Jovian magnetosphere’s boundary with the solar wind,” said Dr. Vincent Hue, lead author of a paper accepted by the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics. “The solar wind is a supersonic stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. When they reach Jupiter, they interact with its magnetosphere in a way that is still not well understood.”

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An international team including the geologist Michael Meyer provided the oldest proof for modern humans in the Kalahari Desert in Africa. The archaeological finds are more than 100,000 years old, as constrained by Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL)-dating in the Innsbruck laboratory. The study is challenging the idea that modern human behaviour was linked to coastal environments. The origins of modern humans and modern human cognition are thought to lie in southern Africa, as suggested by numerous archaeological findings from the southern tip of the continent. Many of these archaeological sites are located near the coast. This led to the widespread view that the evolution of complex symbolic and technological behaviour of Homo sapiens presupposing cognitive abilities very similar to ours today, were linked to the sea and it´s rich marine resources such as shellfish, fish and and marine mammals. However, new archaeological findings in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa (the…

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Spending very long periods of time in space has something in common with extreme endurance swimming: both can cause the heart to shrink. That’s the conclusion of a study that compared the effects of astronaut Scott Kelly’s year in space with a marathon swim by athlete Benoît Lecomte. Both remove the loads on the heart that are usually applied by gravity, causing the organ to atrophy. Exercise wasn’t enough in either case to counteract the changes to the heart.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken emerging as ‘a humanitarian hero’ from the UN Security Council’s briefing on aid delivery to Syria represents a damning indictment on Western hypocrisy. “How is it possible that we can’t find in our hearts the common humanity to actually take meaningful action?” Blinken said on Monday, calling for the reopening of aid corridors and an increase in aid for war-torn Syria. Whilst the Biden administration’s representative has been praised by Western media as playing the role of a concerned humanitarian, what has been left out of the picture is Blinken’s role in starting the war on Syria 10 years ago. Under the Obama administration, Blinken helped engineer the US plot to aid “Syrian rebels” in order to take down the Assad government. Instead of backing purely “moderate” opposition, the US ended up providing arms and training to armed groups linked with Al-Qaeda. They also backed the claims of extremist groups, helping their war efforts with…

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Twenty-seven organizations, including a number of left-leaning groups, issued a statement on Tuesday urging President Biden to halt the use of “reckless” rhetoric with Russian President Vladimir Putin and instead conduct “constructive bilateral talks.” The organizations wrote in a statement obtained by The Hill: “As national organizations that advocate for diplomacy, arms control, disarmament and peace, we are deeply alarmed by the recent negative exchanges between leaders of the two countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads in their arsenals. As Americans, we urge the Biden administration to stop participating in such reckless rhetorical exchanges and to instead vigorously pursue nuclear-arms negotiations with the Russian government.” Among the groups that signed on to the statement are Justice Democrats, Blue America, Demand Progress, Our Revolution and Progressive Democrats of America, all of which are left-leaning organizations. The groups called on…

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As President Biden’s White House YouTube channel continues to see videos’ “dislikes” massively trump “likes,” the video platform announced it is testing a new design that obscures a public dislike count. The move was announced via Twitter on March 30th, with YouTube explaining “in response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we’re testing a few new designs that don’t show the public dislike count.” As a result, only the accounts publishing videos will be able to see the dislike to like ratio.

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On Saturday, IRNA reports, Iran and China signed a 25-year cooperation agreement. The signatures were affixed in Tehran by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a ceremony on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of modern diplomatic relations between Iran and China. The deal is a slap in the face of the United States, which placed a financial and economic blockade on Iran when Washington abruptly breached the 2015 nuclear deal in May, 2018. The Trump administration threatened third-party sanctions in the billions of dollars on countries that so much as traded with Iran. The Biden administration has kept this invisible blockade in place, though President Biden has at least said he intends to restore the 2015 deal. It may be that China expects Iran to reenter the world economy during the Biden administration, and has put down a marker on its investment in Iranian resources.

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Neolithic people were manufacturing salt in Britain almost 6,000 years ago, before the building of Stonehenge and more than two millennia earlier than was first thought, a new archaeological discovery suggests. Excavations at a site at Street House farm in North Yorkshire have revealed evidence of the earliest salt production site ever found in the UK and one of the first of its kind in western Europe, dating to around 3,800BC. The finds, uncovered at a coastal hilltop site near Loftus, include a trench containing three hearths, broken shards of neolithic pottery, some still containing salt deposits, shaped stone artefacts and a storage pit – all key evidence of salt processing.

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Gov. Tony Evers’ statewide mask mandate, ruling that the Democrat exceeded his authority by issuing the order. The 4-3 ruling from the conservative-controlled court is the latest legal blow to attempts by Evers to control the coronavirus. It comes after Republicans in the Legislature voted to repeal the mask mandate in February, only to see Evers quickly re-issue it.

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Pope Francis has conveyed a personal message to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who remains incarcerated in a British maximum security prison battling possible extradition to the US, the publisher’s partner has said. The “kind, personal message” from the head of the Catholic Church was delivered to Assange’s cell by a prison priest, Stella Moris told her Twitter followers on Sunday. Moris did not disclose the content of the missive, but expressed gratitude to Catholics and other Christians campaigning for Assange’s freedom.

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