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April 3, 2015 Liam Mathews

If you get up early tomorrow/stay up really late tonight, you can catch the shortest total lunar eclipse of the century. The Earth’s shadow will create the “blood moon” effect, where atmospheric distortion causes the moon to appear red and eerie. The total eclipse will last only four minutes and forty-three seconds and won’t be […]

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March 20, 2015 Prachi Gupta

On Friday, people in the Arctic’s Faroe Islands and Svalbard witnessed the special celestial event known as a total solar eclipse, in which the moon completely blocked out the sun for a few hours in the middle of the day. Large parts of Europe, northern Africa and northern Asia also enjoyed a partial eclipse, providing […]

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January 30, 2015 Rhett Jones

Eco Experts wants you to go green, so the organization’s fine staff made an infographic to keep you informed about how likely you are to be destroyed by climate change. Using data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation (ND-Gain) Index, this helpful map explains the likelihood of surviving climate change for every country in the world. How does the […]

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January 26, 2015 Prachi Gupta

While the East Coast hunkers down for a “historic” snowstorm, the rest of the world will have the opportunity to see an asteroid pass by Earth — the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2007. Asteroid 2004 BL86 is “roughly a third of a mile across,” writes Space & Telescope, but not to fear: […]

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August 15, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Scientists have known for a long time that the first several billion years of Earth’s existence was a harsh and turbulent time for our planet. Now, Stanford University’s Donald Lowe has released research showing that bad times lasted longer than we previously realized: Lowe and his colleagues have spent 40 years studying a patch of ancient […]

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July 25, 2014 Marina Galperina

According to a new, international study from Stanford University, the planet’s current biodiversity has reached it’s peak and tipping point. Well, we’ve had a good run — “3.5 billion years of evolutionary trial and error.” Welcome to “the early days of the planet’s sixth mass biological extinction event.” Since 1500, we have lost more than 320 […]

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July 21, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Japanese artist Azuma Makoto has strapped six GoPro cameras to balloons carrying plants — like a a fifty-year-old bonsai tree — and launched them into space for his project Exobiotica. The resulting documentation is stunning and surreal, with photos of earthly organisms suspended above our atmosphere. The artist, who works in interweaving biological and human design, encountered a few technical difficulties […]

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July 10, 2014 Sophie Weiner

The Earth’s magnetic field is weakening at ten times the speed scientists predicted, Wired UK reports. Fuckin’ magnetic fields, how do they work? Our magnetic field, created by the rotation of our molten metal core, is what protects life on Earth from harmful radiation spit out by the sun that would otherwise kill us all. It’s pretty […]

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June 11, 2014 Sophie Weiner

According to a new study by the European Association of Geochemistry, the earth is 60 million years older than scientists have last estimated, give or take 20 million years. What does that mean for Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Cosmic Calendar? Science Daily explains: Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty analysed xenon gas found in South African and Australian quartz, which had […]

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February 7, 2014 Andy Cush

Yesterday, we saw a truly beautiful panorama of shots taken by the Mars Curiosity rover showing the vast, foreign landscape that is the Red Planet’s surface. Today, the curiosity offered a distinctly different view, sending home its first-ever photo of Earth taken from Mars. The view is breathtaking. Witness our planet in all its tiny, speck-like […]

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