One flight closer to space tourism Virgin Galactic is one flight closer to becoming a commercial "spaceline." The company's passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, completed its first rocket-powered flight Monday morning above the Mojave Desert in California. More
U.S. plans to drop gray wolves from endangered list The planned ruling would eliminate protection for the top predators, but scientists and conservationists say the proposal is flawed. Federal authorities intend to remove endangered species protections for all gray wolves in the Lower 48 states, carving out an a exception for a small pocket of about 75 Mexican wolves in the wild in Arizona and New Mexico, according to a draft document obtained by The Times. More
New calls to rename Higgs boson One of the scientists who developed the theory of the Higgs boson says the particle should be renamed to acknowledge the contributions of others involved in the work. More
Watch for Halley's Comet meteors streaking through the night sky Every year, from mid-April through the end of May, Earth passes through a stream of ice and dust left behind by the passage of Halley's Comet through the inner solar ... the meteors can hit the ... 05/2/2024 - 2:05 am | View Link
Meteors Produced By History’s Most Famous Comet To Shine Above New York State As we enter an active time of year for annual astronomical events, the next meteor shower comes courtesy of a famous comet everyone learned about back in ... 04/30/2024 - 10:50 am | View Link
Earth Hits Halley’s Comet Trail As Neptune Appears: The Night Sky This Week I pick out North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead (which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere). 04/28/2024 - 11:00 pm | View Link
Sun Blasts Comet, Breaking Off Its Tail As the wave hit, the tail of the comet broke off momentarily and grew back quickly, IFLScience reports, while continuing on its long journey. Astronomers call the moment a comet tail is broken off a ... 04/25/2024 - 2:43 am | View Link
What Caused Our First Interstellar Visitor's Non-Gravitational Acceleration? Our first interstellar visitor brought a mystery. It accelerated beyond what we would expect from gravity alone. 04/24/2024 - 9:32 pm | View Link
WASHINGTON — A top U. N. official said Friday that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in “full-blown famine” after more than six months of war between Israel and Hamas and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.
Cindy McCain, the American director of the U. N. World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine.
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“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview to air Sunday.
Chants of “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest” are reverberating across the globe as student-led protests in support of Palestine have popped up outside the U. S. and in countries like Australia, Mexico, and the U. K. as the Israel-Hamas war enters into its seventh month.
LONDON — Britain’s governing Conservative Party is suffering heavy losses as an array of election results pour in Friday, piling pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of a U. K. general election in which the main opposition Labour Party appears increasingly likely to return to power after 14 years.
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Labour won control of councils in England it hasn’t held for decades and was successful in a special by-election for Parliament that, if repeated in a general election in coming months, would lead to one of the Conservatives′ biggest-ever defeats.
The only negative so far for Labour has been in some areas with large Muslim populations, such as Oldham in northwest England, where the party’s candidates appear to have suffered as a result of leader Keir Starmer ‘s strongly pro-Israel stance in the conflict in Gaza.
Perhaps most important in the context of the looming general election, which has to take place by January but could come as soon as next month, Labour easily won back Blackpool South in the northwest of England that went Conservative in the last general election in 2019, when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a big victory.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and across Asia, communities are responding to an extreme and deadly heat wave, which has battered the region since last month and has left few options for residents and governments to cope, in creative and even superstitious ways.
One city in the Philippines has rolled out free mobile showers, while in Vietnam, municipal authorities reportedly looked into the possibility of enlisting the help of a man who claimed he could pray for precipitation.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met Thursday with his counterparts from Australia, Japan and the Philippines as the U. S. deepens ties with an emerging regional group that Pentagon officials have privately nicknamed, the “Squad.”
The quadrilateral grouping is one of a number of regional partnerships that Washington has used to push back against China’s assertiveness in Asia.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden has called Japan and India “xenophobic” countries that do not welcome immigrants, lumping the two with adversaries China and Russia as he tried to explain their economic circumstances and contrasted the four with the U. S. on immigration.
The remarks, at a campaign fundraising event Wednesday evening, came just three weeks after the White House hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for a lavish official visit, during which the two leaders celebrated what Biden called an “unbreakable alliance,” particularly on global security matters.
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The White House welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi for a state visit last summer.
Japan is a critical U.