Researchers in Antarctica have discovered that the frozen continent’s ice shelves produce an audible sound when the wind passes over the surface snow, a haunting song from a landscape that remains alien to the majority of us. The researchers also found that the "song" changes as the surface conditions of the ice changes — meaning that this Antarctica aria might become useful in tracking the effects of climate change on the ice at the bottom of the Earth.
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Clouds of aggressive nickel-sized mosquitoes called gallinippers have descended on 27 counties in North Carolina, the result of untold numbers of the insect’s eggs being activated by the catastrophic flooding caused by hurricane Florence. Unlike most mosquitoes, Gallinippers can lay their eggs in dry conditions, of which can lay dormant for months or years, and hatch when wet conditions develop. The females can be particularly aggressive, mobbing large mammals such as humans or even cattle in order to feed.
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a dire warning that our current efforts at addressing the problem of climate change are not keeping pace with the increase of the rate of global warming, and that we need to act quickly if we are to avoid evoking the more immediate catastrophes that come with allowing the planet’s climate to rise past 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) above the pre-industrial average. This warning comes with the admission that we can indeed meet this seemingly impossible goal, but it comes at a cost: the human community needs to cut its carbon emissions by nearly half in the next 12 years.
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