Automotive and spaceflight entrepreneur Elon Musk issued a series of tweets on September 4th that downplayed the threat posed by the nuclear ambitions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying that the race to develop more powerful artificial intelligence is more likely to trigger World War III instead.
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An X-9.3 solar flare exploded from sunspot AR 2673 at 1202 UT today, blacking out shortwave over Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean as X-rays and UV radiation ionized Earth’s upper atmosphere. The explosion also generated a coronal mass ejection. It is still being modeled by NOAA to determine whether or not it is Earth-directed. According to SpaceWeather.com, this flare ranks as the #14th strongest since 1976.
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As winds in Hurricane Irma reached and exceeded 185 MPH, the storm left the island of Barbuda 90% destroyed and has caused severe destruction in the Virgin Islands. The storm is expected to strike Puerto Rico as the strongest hurricane to hit the island in a century. Florida governor Rick Scott has warned residents to evacuate the Keys and the southern part of the state. Winds are sustained at 185 MPH and are gusting to 225 MPH. Right now, the storm appears to be ready to make landfall over south Florida, but if it turns more sharply it will cross the Bahamas and make landfall in Georgia. Because of abnormally high ocean temperatures, storms could continue forming into late fall.
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Asteroid 3122 Florence, a 4.5 kilometer (2.8 mile) wide near-Earth object, made a close pass to Earth on September 01, 2017, treating researchers with the closest known approach to Earth of an asteroid of this size. Thankfully, unlike recent close brushes with substantially smaller rocks, Florence’s orbit brought it no closer to us than 7 million kilometers (4,350,000 miles), more than eighteen times farther out than the Moon’s orbit.
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