News has surfaced that the Environmental Protection Agency is planning on cutting more than 1,200 jobs from the agency by September of this year, keeping in line with President Donald J. Trump’s campaign pledge to dismantle the EPA. This news follows a proposed 31 percent cut to the agency’s budget, and a government-wide hiring freeze affecting potential new employees.
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What goes on in the brain of a psychic medium? According to the results of a study conducted in Brazil in 2012, the answer is ‘not much’ — although that’s a good sign in this case. The study focused on practitioners of psychography, or what is more commonly known as spirit writing as a method of communication with spirits. Interestingly, the study found a difference in brain activity between novice and experienced mediums, and also produced results during their trance state that they just could not explain.
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As researchers learn more and more about the planet Mars, the likelihood of life having developed on the Red Planet increases. Two separate discoveries, one involving the discovery of what may be planet Earth’s oldest fossils, and another that shows that Mars may have had more water on its surface than anticipated, reinforce the idea of life having once thrived on the Martian surface.
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An experiment that was conducted aboard — or rather outside of — the International Space Station, proves that biological organisms can survive the harsh environment of space for extended periods of time. The experiment was designed investigate how human expeditions to Mars could one day sustain themselves, and how the biology of extremophiles — organisms that thrive in conditions that would be deadly to other creatures here on Earth — would fare in the harshness of space. The success of the experiment not only provided surprisingly positive results, it also offers new evidence that life on Earth may have originated from elsewhere in the cosmos.
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