In the entirety of the animal kingdom, humanity has never held a monopoly on intelligence: considering that the concept of intelligence boils down to the ability to gather and usefully process information, this means that virtually all creatures possess at least some degree of intelligence. Humans tend to stand apart in this regard, due to the degree that our capacities have developed to, but even then many of these cognitive traits are shared with some of our non-human brethren: great apes such as chimpanzees are adept tool-users, prairie dogs have a sophisticated vocabulary, and octopuses have excellent problem solving skills.
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A congressional committee has proposed that a new branch of the military be formed, called the United States Space Corps. As proposed in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018, this would be the first new branch added since the formation of the United States Air Force in 1947. The USSC would be subordinate to the Department of the Air Force, much in the way the United States Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy.
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A Delaware-sized portion of Antarctica’s forth-largest ice shelf calved off, sometime between July 10th and 12th, following the rapid propagation of a 127 kilometer (79 mile) long crack running through the sheet. The resulting iceberg is over 200 meters (656 feet) thick, and covers roughly 6,000 square kilometers (Delaware itself is only 5,130 square kilometers (1,982 square miles). This will likely place it as the third-largest known iceberg in modern history.
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