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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

The Female Architect Behind Buenos Aires's Underground...

During a recent spring afternoon in Buenos Aires, some 70 people crowded into a narrow, subterranean corridor straining to hear an actor in a blue dress. “This place doesn’t exist in the annals of Argentinian architecture,” the actor informed them in Spanish, motioning to two columbariums stacked 14 niches tall. “And the architect’s signature isn’t hidden in any of this monument’s walls.” The group was gathered in the Sixth Pantheon, a two-level labyrinth of crypts, tunnels, and sunken gardens……

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Study: Smoke particles from wildfires can erode...

A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. The study, which appears today in Nature, focuses on the smoke from the “Black Summer” megafire in eastern Australia, which burned from December 2019 into January 2020. The fires — the……

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Women’s Day events highlight gaps in gender...

MADRID (AP) — Demonstrations, conferences and artistic events around the world Wednesday marked International Women’s Day, an annual observance established to recognize women and to demand equality for half of the planet’s population. While activists in some parts of the planet noted advances, repression in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran — and the large numbers of women and girls who experience sexual assaults and domestic violence worldwide — highlighted the ongoing struggle to secure women’s rights. United Nations…

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Wall Street steadies itself after painful drop...

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks are steadying on Wall Street Wednesday, a day after sinking to one of their worst days of the year. The S&P 500 was 0.1% higher in morning trading The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 62 points, or 0.2%, at 32,793, as of 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% higher. Stocks are coming off a sharp drop the prior day after the head of the Federal Reserve warned it could…

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Podcast: The Dedan Kimathi Post Office Tree

Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit a tree in a Kenyan national park that served as an informal “post office” during the nation’s struggle for independence. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their……

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8 Unexpected Stories That Go Behind the...

Each year the Academy Awards ceremony celebrates talents on the silver screen—but Atlas Obscura likes it behind the scenes, where movie magic is made from unexpected ingredients (think celery and whipped cream) and in unusual places (an abandoned Paris subway platform and one particular Los Angeles alley). Here are some of our favorite Atlas Obscura stories that reveal a different side of Tinseltown. The Forgotten ‘China Girls’ Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films by Sarah Laskow Few people……

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Bucks beat Magic 134-123 for 18th win...

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Brook Lopez scored 26 points, Kris Middleton and Jevon Carter each added 24 points and the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Orlando Magic 134-123 on Tuesday night for their 18th win in 19 games. Bobby Portis Jr. had 16 points and 11 rebounds and Jae Crowder added 15 points for the Bucks, who shot 59% and ran their winning streak against the Magic to 14 games. The Bucks played without All-Stars Giannis Antetokounmpo (non-COVID-19 illness) and…

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Fox chair Murdoch says 2020 election was...

NEW YORK (AP) — Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath that he believes the 2020 presidential election was free, fair and not stolen, according to court filings released Tuesday in a lawsuit over Fox News’ coverage of former President Donald Trump’s unfounded election fraud claims. In sworn questioning in January by lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems, Murdoch was asked, “Do you believe that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair?” “Yes,” he replied, according to a…

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MIT Cheney Room reopens with fresh and...

The Margaret Cheney Room celebrated its reopening last month after significant updates and remodeling over the last several months. The celebration was led by Lauryn McNair, assistant dean of LBGTQ+ Women and Gender Services, and attended by MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Cynthia Barnhart, and numerous students, staff, and alumni. In 1884, MIT founded the Margaret Cheney Reading Room as a space for women on campus to gather. The room was named after Margaret Swan Cheney, a member of……

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Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and...

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that are important for growth. The novel nanosensors are nondestructive, unlike conventional collection methods, and have been successfully tested in living plants. Applied in the……

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Inside Greenland's Misunderstood Winter Delicacy

For many in northwest Greenland, the iconic flavor of winter is that of fermented meat, perhaps most iconically kiviaq, a dish made by packing 300 to 500 whole dovekies—beaks, feathers, and all—into the hollowed-out carcass of a seal, snitching it up and sealing it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months to ferment. Once it’s dug up and opened, people skin and eat the birds one at a time. Plates of these small fermented seabirds……

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By Air, Land, or Sea, Tiny Microbes...

Excerpted and adapted with permission from Slime: A Natural History, by Susanne Wedlich. Published February 2023 by Melville House. All rights reserved. A haboob is a dust storm. It’s an Arabic word for a phenomenon that struck the American Midwest like a plague of biblical proportions just under a century ago. This storm was not the work of God’s chastising hand, though; it was the worst man-made environmental catastrophe the United States has ever seen. East of the Rocky……

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Latest astronaut from UAE getting used to...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — The second astronaut from the United Arab Emirates is still adjusting to life off the planet, after rocketing to the International Space Station last week. “I’m still coping. I’m still learning,” Sultan al-Neyadi said Tuesday, but added that he hopes to improve in the coming days. He’s the second UAE astronaut to fly in space and the first from the Arab world to be assigned to a long spaceflight — the others stayed for…

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A Cougar Swam Puget Sound, Making a...

On January 26, 2020, biologists with the Olympic Cougar Project slipped a collar around the thick, tawny neck of a tranquilized adolescent cougar in an evergreen forest outside of Shelton, Washington. M161 was about a year and a half old, roughly 100 pounds, and still traveling with his mother, who was also caught and collared. For the next four months, the scientists tracked mother and offspring as they rambled around the woods together. By May 2020, it was time……

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Podcast: Ouija Board 7-Eleven

Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we examine the history of the Ouija Board, from a tool for communicating with the dead to a sleepover party game, with a pit stop at the Ouija 7-Eleven. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll……

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