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21 articles from Yahoo!

Colleges reopenings in-person likely added 3,000 U.S. COVID-19 cases per day: study

The findings call into question the practicality of face-to-face classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are important as colleges and universities plan their spring 2020 semesters, said researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Indiana University, the University of Washington and Davidson College. To track COVID-19 cases and study their association with students...

Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.

America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today -- drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or...

Blue Origin gets ready to test its suborbital spaceship with COVID-19 safety in mind

After a nine-month gap, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture is planning to send its New Shepard suborbital spaceship on an uncrewed flight to space and back on Thursday, to test a precision landing system for NASA. And that's not the only new experiment for Blue Origin's five-year-old New Shepard flight test program: This 13th test flight will be the first to be flown...

Buzzworthy AI: Microsoft expands its Premonition mosquito-tracking outbreak prediction system

Five years after launching an experiment to see if advanced sensors and artificial intelligence could spot the signs of a disease outbreak before it happens, Microsoft says it's ramping up Project Premonition to create an honest-to-goodness biothreat protection network. The network will involve setting up about 100 sensor stations in Texas' Harris County, to track swarms of mosquitoes that...

Dutch 'living coffin' aims to provide source for life after death

A Dutch start-up has created a biodegradable "living coffin" made of a fungus, instead of wood, which it says can convert a decomposing human body into key nutrients for plants. The company, Loop, says its casket is made of mycelium, the underground root structure of mushrooms, and filled with a bed of moss to stimulate decomposition. "Mycelium is nature's biggest recycler", Bob Hendrikx, the...

In the World's Hottest Desert, Shrimp

In springtime, when the rain gathers into pools in the Dasht-e Lut, a desert in Iran, the sand comes alive.Tiny, desiccated eggs, buried among the ginger-colored granules, drink in the water and begin to hatch. Some may have been laid in the dunes decades ago. But when rains come, the eggs unfurl into small, feathery crustaceans called fairy shrimp, the freshwater cousins of brine shrimp. For a...

Beyond public view, scholars unravel mystery of writing in ancient Mexican city

Among the many mysteries surrounding the ancient Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, one has been especially hard to crack: how did its residents use the many signs and symbols found on its murals and ritual sculptures? The discovery in the 1990s of the puzzling red glyphs, most laid out in neat columns, has led a growing number of scholars to question the long-held view that writing was absent...

Beyond public view, scholars unravel mystery of writing in ancient Mexican city

Among the many mysteries surrounding the ancient Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, one has been especially hard to crack: how did its residents use the many signs and symbols found on its murals and ritual sculptures? The discovery in the 1990s of the puzzling red glyphs, most laid out in neat columns, has led a growing number of scholars to question the long-held view that writing was absent...

Beyond public view, scholars unravel mystery of writing in ancient Mexican city

Among the many mysteries surrounding the ancient Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, one has been especially hard to crack: how did its residents use the many signs and symbols found on its murals and ritual sculptures? The discovery in the 1990s of the puzzling red glyphs, most laid out in neat columns, has led a growing number of scholars to question the long-held view that writing was absent...

Over 330 elephants suddenly collapsed and died. Scientists now have an explanation

The mystery surrounding hundreds of sudden elephant deaths in Botswana seems to have been solved and the findings bring an end to months of speculation on why at least 330 elephants were found dead in the northwestern region of the Southern African country earlier this year. Now, however, the country has pointed to toxic blooms of cyanobacteria, a naturally occurring neurotoxin and biological...

Australian rescuers save 25 of 270 stranded whales so far

Around one third of an estimated 270 pilot whales that became stranded on Australia’s island state of Tasmania have died, with rescuers managing to return 25 to the sea in an ongoing operation, officials said Tuesday. “We’ve rescued about 25 at the present time and escorted them out the channel and out to sea and crews are continuing to work, so that number will increase before we get to...

Singapore central bank 'closely studying' reports on suspicious bank transfers

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said on Tuesday that it was 'closely studying' media reports that Singapore banks had informed U.S. regulators of suspicious transactions. The move came as global banks faced a fresh scandal about dirty money on Monday as they sought to limit the fallout from a cache of leaked documents showing they transferred more than $2 trillion in suspect funds over...

Some see irony in virus' impact on Mayflower commemoration

Dozens of events — from art exhibits and festivals to lectures and a maritime regatta featuring the Mayflower II, a full-scale replica refitted over the past three years at a cost of more than $11 million — were planned to mark the 400th anniversary of the religious separatists’ arrival at what we now know as Plymouth, Massachusetts. “The irony obviously runs quite deep,” says Fenn, a...

Fierce, frequent, climate-fueled wildfires may decimate forests worldwide

Wildfires among ponderosa pines and Douglas firs of the U.S. West have long been part of nature's cycle of renewal, as much as the changing of the seasons. Scientists worry the hottest blazes could end up obliterating swathes of some forests forever. "When you get these large areas burned there are no surviving trees to reseed these areas," said Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S....