News on the Blue Marble

Reuters: Stocks dropped Thursday on a broad based decline in techs from Apple to chip makers and a drop in consumer staples. A warning from TSMC on soft demand and semiconductor growth sparked a tumble...

CNN: "President Donald Trump personally made the decision to abandon plans to impose more sanctions on Russia for supporting Syria's chemical weapons attack on civilians, according to three senior administration officials..."

Reuters: "The federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion by Donald Trump's campaign has targeted-directly or indirectly-a growing group of presidential associates..."

Mens Journal Yahoo: "The night sky isn't what it used to be. The U.S. alone spends $11 billion each year on unnecessary outdoor lighting and in many regions throughout the world stars and other heavenly phenomena have faded from view..."

CNN: In 1977, the twin spacecrafts Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 16 days apart. NASA'S Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first object to leave the solar system, entering interstellar space. The importance of Voyager is the vast amount of knowledge it has provided and the interest in further exploration...

Reuters: Shirley Temple Black who lifted America's spirits as a bright eyed dimpled child movie star during the Great Depression later becoming a US diplomat, died late Monday evening at the age of 85 her family said.

CNN: "In honor of American Archives Month, NASA has released a selection of eight never before seen images from the Candra X-ray Observatory. This image is of galaxy, NGC 4945 that is about 13 million light years away that looks like the Milky Way but ..."

Rolling Stone: Rolling Stone presents a sneak peak at Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin' a feature length PBS American Masters documentary about guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, which includes never before seen footage, home movies, photographs...

CNN: Five decades ago Franklin McCain and three fellow college students made history by sitting down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Greensboro Four drew national attention with their peaceful sit in in the winter of 1960...

Dilbert is a big success for creator Scott Adams who started his corporate career as a bank teller in San Francisco, working his way up became a manager, got an MBA then moved on to Pacific Bell were he met the personalities who would inspire his famous comic strip...

Space: Three NASA space telescopes will give astronomers their best ever views of some of the most distant objects in the Universe. The Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space Telescopes will collectively observe six huge galaxy clusters over the next three years as a part of a project called The Frontier Fields...

Humpbacks could be the super heroes of small sea animals and have been seen defending seals, sea lions, grey whales, sun fish, and whale calves from orcas. Using orca calls to alert them they use their huge bodies to block orcas from their prey.

Reuters: " A sophisticated piece of spyware has been quietly infecting hundreds of government computers across Europe and the United States in one of the most complex cyber espionage programs uncovered to date..."

Reuters: Britain's Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets

Researchers say the sun's magnetic flip won't spark an increase in powerful solar storms or other events that could have a damaging effect on Earth and its inhabitants. The polarity flip is normal solar behavior occurring every 11 years at the peak of it's activity cycle.

Physicists confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva had indeed found a Higgs boson, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science...

CSM: Once considered the Yugo of higher education, online learning is now sweeping through American academia faster than anyone thought conceivable just five years ago

Reuters/Freeland: "One of the most urgent questions in economics today is the connection between inequality and growth. That is because one of the big economic facts of our time is the surge in income disparity..."

Reuters: The rise in sea levels due to climate change is becoming more apparent to island nations and population growth is overwhelming traditional coping mechanisms. Island governments like Kiribati are looking for radical options to feed and house their people...

Reuters: One in five sun like stars in the Milky Way has a planet the size of Earth that is positioned for water, a key ingredient for life a study said. The analysis is based on 3 years of data collected by NASA's now idled Kepler space telescope

AFP: Oceans that grow more acidic through fossil fuel burning emissions can amplify global warming by releasing less of a gas that helps shield Earth from radiation a study said and the authors warned the potentially vast effect they uncovered is not currently factored into climate change projections

CNN: The event was over in a fraction of a second and released a burst of energy that is not particularly impressive. But it is being hailed as a milestone in a decades long search to harness the power of nuclear fusion...

Closer scrutiny of radiation left over from the creation of the universe shows the Big Bang took place 13.8 billion years ago, 100 million years earlier than previous estimates

Yahoo Space: New photos released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) show a distant active galaxy eating huge amounts of matter boosting its super energetic jets of material to extremely high levels...