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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In science’s quest to develop less polluting sources of energy, hydrogen gas has often been used as an example as a potential replacement for fossil fuels: aside from being the most abundant substance in the universe, it is also the most combustible natural substance known, and only produces pure water when burned with oxygen. Unfortunately, the chemical instability of its gaseous form means that storing it is inherently hazardous, and the extraction of the gas from hydrogen’s more stable forms, such as water or petroleum products, can be highly energy inefficient, or produce a disproportionate amount of waste pollutants.
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A $17 million expedition aimed at studying the effects of climate change in Canada’s Hudson Bay has been postponed due to complications brought about by climate change itself. An unusually heavy southward flow of surface ice from the Arctic has blocked the safe passage of the Canadian Research Icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, on the first leg of her mission to ferry 40 scientists participating in the Hudson Bay System Study (BaySys).
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Adding to a recent string of discoveries that are rewriting the narrative of human evolution, fossils of a number of ancient human individuals that were unearthed in Morocco have been dated to more than 300,000 years ago. this find pushes evidence for the age of Homo sapiens back by roughly 100,000 years, and also shows that our ancient ancestors were much better traveled than previously assumed.
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