News on the Blue Marble

CNN : "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned fellow Democrats in an exclusive CNN interview that the party 'must be unfied' to defeat President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential race, while noting that any of the candidates running to face him 'would be a better president.'I can't even envision a situation where he would be reelected. But we are not, we don't take anything for granted. As I say, we have to have our own vision for the future. But everybody knows that we must be unified in making sure that he does not have a second term...'..."

CNN: "The novel coronavirus is now a 'public health emergency of international concern' killing more than 1,600 people and infecting more than 69,000 worldwide. Even worse: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects this virus to keep spreading beyond this year...There are many kinds of coronaviruses, including some that cause the common cold. But this deadly strain is called a 'novel' coronavirus because it has not previously been identified in humans. It's unusual for several reasons:..."

CNN:"President Donald Trump made 31 false claims last week and 55 the week before, including 22 at a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, in late January and 13 in an official speech at a community college in Charlotte, North Carolina, in early February. Trump sread the dishonesty around a variety of subjects. Over this period stretching from January 27 to February 9, he made 17 false claims about health care, 15about the economy, 15 about Democrats, and five or more about each of six additional topics..."

hubble legacy field crop

Hubblesite.org: "This Hubble Space Telescope image represents a portion of the Hubble Legacy Field, one of the widest views of the universe ever made. The image is a combination of thousands of snapshots represents 16 years' worth of observations...This cropped image mosaic contains roughly 200,000 galaxies..."

CNN:"Scientists have discovered a 'monster black hole' so massive that, in theory, it shouldn't exist. It's a stellar black hole—the type that forms after stars die, collapse, and explode. Researchers had previously believed that the size limit was no more than 20 times the mass of our sun...This theory has now been toppled by LP-1... "

The Queen and Trump

CNN: "The streaks of light in NASA's latest image look like air traffic routes, but it's a different way of looking at the entire sky. The arcs are actually tracing X-rays, recorded by the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, known as NICER. NICER acts as a detector of cosmic sources from the International Space Station..."

CNN: "About 30 million light-years from Earth, two galaxies came together in an epic collision, and the beautiful fallout was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The collision was more like an accidental hit and run between two neighboring galaxies..."

Tim Berners Lee

CNN Business: "Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has warned of a 'digital dystopia' if the world fails to tackle threats such as disinformation and invasion of privacy. Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist...has reiterated his call for a Contract for the Web..."

Alan Naiman

CNN:"Nearly 25 years ago, when Gary Larson retired from drawing his iconic single-panel cartoon that ran daily in newspapers from 1980 to 1995, he didn't think much about what the budding internet might have to do with his work..."

Shakespeare

CNN:"When you see a big discovery about William Shakespeare hit the press before fellow scholars have had a chance to ask questions, take a breath and be very, very skeptical..."

CNN:"Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star that acts as the shoulder of Orion in his constellation, is having a moment. Normally one of the brightest stars in the constellation, it's been dimming..."

Reuters:"...Welcome to the longest U.S. economic expansion in history, one perhaps characterized by the excesses of extreme wealth and an ever-widening chasm between the unfathomably rich and everyone else..."