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Sooner or later, a catastrophe from space will wipe out almost all life on Earth, according to Dr Arnon Dar of the Technion Space Research Institute in Israel. A particular type of exploding star going off anywhere in our region of the Universe would devastate our planet.

Using the latest statistics and calculations, Dar says that a supermassive star collapsing at the end of its lifetime would form a black hole and send out a beam of destructive radiation and particles that would sterilize any planet in its path. The odds are that any planet in our galaxy would be affected about once every one hundred million years. “It is a certainty; the timescales are comparable to mass extinctions seen in Earth’s geological record,” he says.
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The collapse of a giant glacier 10 times the size of Manhattan near Antarctica last week is a natural occurrence and has not been induced by global warming, according to the British Atlantic Survey (BAS). “From the size of it, 41 nautical miles long and four nautical miles wide, it sounds as though it is a normal ‘calving’ event from the ice front,” says BAS glaciologist Chris Doake.

Disintegration of the Ross ice shelf on Thursday in the Ross Sea follows the collapse in March of the Larsen B ice shelf in the Weddell Sea near Chile, also in Antarctica. That ice shelf was the size of a small European country.
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The explosion of a Russian airliner over the Black Sea on Oct. 4, which was not reported in the media here, raises an interesting question relating to the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island five years ago. Both planes exploded from what looked like friendly fire and crashed into the sea. Did the Ukraine, where the October event occurred, use media spin and disinformation to keep the cause of the crash secret?the way the U.S. military did? Reed Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media (AIM), a media watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. To read his provocative Insight piece about another TWA 800-type explosion, click here.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.read more

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Mothers who have complained through the centuries that their sons will be the death of them may be right — a Finnish study shows having boys shortens a woman’s life span. Each son takes an average of 34 weeks off a woman’s life, says evolutionary biologist Samuli Helle. On the other hand, having daughters adds, but only very slightly, to a woman’s life span.

Helle was trying to prove that having large families can cause women to die early. But his study of church records among the Sami people of northern Scandinavia found that family size did not reliably predict that a woman would die young. He says, “We found that maternal longevity was not related to the total number of children born or raised to adulthood?”
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