Month: August 2020

The U.S. space agency, NASA says that says it believes it has discovered salty water beneath the surface of the dwarf planet, Ceres, in orbit around the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.The space agency’s Dawn spacecraft gathered up-close views of the dwarf planet – smaller than the earth’s moon – before ending its mission in October 2018.  At one point, Dawn dipped down to just 35 kilometers above Ceres’s surface.  Those up-close views revealed “mysterious bright regions”, which scientists later concluded to be deposits of sodium carbonate from liquid that likely filtered up to the surface and evaporated, leaving behind a reflective salty crust.In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, NASA Scientists said, after studying the images and data sent back from the probe, they concluded the liquid came from a deep reservoir of salt-enriched water, about 40 kilometers deep and hundreds of kilometers wide.The Dawn spacecraft was launched in September 2007 with a mission to shed light on the early solar system.It explored the two largest bodies. After studying giant asteroid “Vesta”, Dawn arrived at dwarf planet “Ceres” in 2015. The scientists’ research focused on the 92-kilometer-wide “Occator Crater”.In October 2018, NASA called time on the Dawn mission, after the spacecraft ran out of its key fuel, hydrazine. NASA says it will remain in orbit of Ceres for decades.Dawn remains the only spacecraft to ever orbit two extraterrestrial destinations. …

Annie Griffiths, One of National Geographic’s first female photographers, has traveled to more than 150 countries taking pictures. During her 45 year career, she has been to every continent documenting nature, and collecting the stories of women she has met along the way. Maxim Moskalkov has the story.VIDEOGRAPHER: Sergey Sokolov   …

North Korea continues to see historic levels of rainfall, further threatening an economy already battered by a coronavirus-related lockdown.  Torrential rains have flooded hundreds of North Korean homes and wiped out vast swaths of rice fields in the country’s agricultural heartland, according to state media, intensifying worries about a poor harvest and food supply shortage. The Korean Peninsula has seen a much longer than usual monsoon seasons this year. The rains are expected to continue for much of the week.  South Korea has seen 49 consecutive days of rain — the longest streak on record. The downpours have caused landslides and floods in the South that have killed at least 42 people.  In the North, the extent of the damage is not precisely known. State media said Friday that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited a flood-hit village in North Hwanghae province, where 600 hectares of rice fields and more than 900 homes were inundated or destroyed. Hwanghae is the North’s most important rice-producing province. North Korean officials appearing on state TV have warned that rivers in both Hwanghae and the nearby province of Gangwon could overflow, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. The rains are already more intense than in 2007, when North Korea saw some of its worst floods, according to a briefing by South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean relations.A part of a park near the Han River are flooded due to heavy rain in Seoul, South Korea, Aug. 9, 2020. The safety ministry said the Seoul area and the southern region are expected to receive more heavy rain on Sunday.“Their agricultural system is fragile, but they have …

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is considering a measure to block U.S. citizens and permanent residents from returning home if they are suspected of being infected with the new coronavirus, a senior U.S. official confirmed to Reuters.The official said a draft regulation, which has not been finalized and could change, would give the government authorization to block individuals who could “reasonably” be believed to have contracted COVID-19 or other diseases.Trump has instituted a series of sweeping immigration restrictions since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, suspending some legal immigration and allowing U.S. border authorities to rapidly deport migrants caught at the border without standard legal processes.Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants’ rights project, said in a written statement that barring U.S. citizens from entering the country would be unconstitutional and “another grave error in a year that has already seen far too many.”Reuters reported in May that U.S. government officials were concerned that dual U.S.-Mexico citizens might flee to the United States if the coronavirus outbreak in Mexico worsened, putting more stress on U.S. hospitals.The draft regulation, which was first reported by The New York Times on Monday, would be issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has played a lead role in the pandemic response, the senior official told Reuters.A Trump pandemic task force was not expected to act on the proposal this week, although that timeline could change, the official said.The United States leads the world in …

A rare storm packing 100 mph winds and with power similar to an inland hurricane swept across the Midwest on Monday, blowing over trees, flipping vehicles, causing widespread property damage and leaving hundreds of thousands without power as it turned toward Chicago. The storm known as a derecho lasted several hours as it tore across eastern Nebraska, Iowa and parts of Wisconsin, had the wind speed of a major hurricane, and likely caused more widespread damage than a normal tornado, said Patrick Marsh, science support chief at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. It’s not quite a hurricane. It has no eye and its winds come across in a line. But the damage it is likely to spread over such a large area is more like an inland hurricane than a quick more powerful tornado, Marsh said. He compared it to a devastating super derecho of 2009, which was one of the strongest on record and traveled more than 1,000 miles in 24 hours, causing $500 million in damage and widespread power outages and killing a handful of people. “This is our version of a hurricane,” Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini said in an interview from his home about 15 minutes before the storm was about to hit. Minutes later he headed to his basement for safety as the storm took aim at Chicago, starting with its suburbs. Gensini said this derecho will go down as one of the strongest in recent history and be one of the …

Wild horses, bison and other big-hoofed animals once roamed freely in much of Europe. Now they are transforming a former military base outside the Czech capital in an ambitious project to improve biodiversity. Where occupying Soviet troops once held exercises, massive bovines called tauros and other heavy beasts now munch on the invasive plants that took over the base years ago. The animals are turning the former Milovice military base 35 kilometers (22 miles) northeast of Prague into a miniature version of the steppe that once rolled across the European continent.  With some species wiped out in the wild, the animals now have the chance to live together again in relative freedom. Conservationists deployed them at Milovice five years ago. Now they hope to enlarge the sanctuary by one third to 360 hectares (890 acres) this year. The animals’ task is to improve biodiversity among local plants by eating invasive ones while saving endangered species, said Dalibor Dostal, the director of European Wildlife, an organization behind the project. “It’s a miraculous change,” Dostal said. “Nobody expected that the whole process would go ahead so fast and the area would change so much in just a few years.” He said the large animals are as key to preserving the ecosystem “as trees are for forests.” David Storch, an environment professor at Prague’s Charles University who was not involved in the project, agreed. He said the project is “absolutely unique” because it shows that nature can be preserved not only by protecting it from human activities but also by actively shaping it with big-hoofed animals.Wild …