(BBC News) Nepalis are observing a day of mourning for victims of the country's worst air disaster in decades.
At least 68 people died when a flight from Kathmandu to the tourist town of Pokhara crashed and caught fire on Sunday morning.
Mobile phone footage showed the Yeti Airlines flight rolling sharply as it approached the airport.
It is unclear what caused the crash, but Nepal has a history of fatal airline accidents.
A search and rescue operation...
(Sarah Hayford and Karen Benjamin Guzzo, The Conversation) Birth rates are falling in the U.S. After the highs of the Baby Boom in the mid-20th century and the lows of the Baby Bust in the 1970s, birth rates were relatively stable for nearly 50 years. But during the Great Recession, from 2007–2009, birth rates declined sharply – and they have kept falling.
In 2007, average birth rates were around 2 children per woman. By 2021, levels had...
(Astronomy & Astrophysics) In the eROSITA all-sky survey, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have found an interesting repeating event. In an otherwise quiescent galaxy, an X-ray flare repeats every 220 days, indicating that a star orbiting the central black hole "feeds" the gravity monster on subsequent orbits. Such events could be effective tools to explore the accretion process and the gravity field around supermassive black holes in other galaxies.
The findings...
(Carnegie Institution for Science) The Martian meteorite Tissint contains a huge diversity of organic compounds, found an international team of researchers led by Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Munich's Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin and including Carnegie's Andrew Steele. Their work is published in Science Advances.
Tissint, which crash landed in Morocco more than 11 years ago, is one of only five Martian meteorites that have been observed as they fell to Earth. Pieces of it were found...
(BBC News) Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has called for Congress to investigate U.S. President Joe Biden following the discovery of two batches of classified documents – one of which was found at Biden's home.
McCarthy accused Biden of hypocrisy, pointing to the Justice Department's probe of former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified files.
McCarthy also accused Democrats of trying to "have different standards for their own beliefs," citing the fact that the first...
(California Institute of Technology) Astronomers have used an intense burst of radio waves originating from a nearby galaxy to inspect the halo of gas cocooning our Milky Way galaxy. The scientists studied the way that the light of the so-called fast radio burst, or FRB, was dispersed as it travelled from deep space into our galaxy as a means to estimate how much matter resides in the galaxy's halo. This is a bit like...
(BBC News) Less than a week into 2023, the United States reckoned with yet another school shooting.
This time, a six-year-old student allegedly shot his teacher with a handgun at a Virginia elementary school, in what police described as an "intentional" shooting.
The alleged perpetrator's young age has added a gut-punch twist to an already tragic scenario. The case has forced local leaders, police, and gun violence experts to confront a horrific question: What happens when a...
(BBC News) Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has vowed to punish supporters of the country's ex-leader, Jair Bolsonaro, after they stormed Congress.
Supporters of the ousted far-right leader also stormed the Supreme Court and surrounded the presidential palace.
But police regained control of the buildings in the capital Brasilia on Sunday evening after hours of clashes.
Arriving in the city, Lula toured the Supreme Court building to assess the damage.
Justice Minister Flavio Dino told local...
(AFP) An international project in nuclear fusion may face "years" of delays, its boss has told AFP, weeks after scientists in the United States announced a breakthrough in their quest for the coveted goal.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project seeks to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. Installed at a site in southern France, the decades-old initiative has a long history of technical challenges and cost...
(BBC News) Ana Montes, among the best-known Cold War spies caught by the U.S., has been released from prison after more than 20 years in custody.
The 65-year-old spent almost two decades spying for Cuba while employed as an analyst at the Defence Intelligence Agency.
After her arrest in 2001, officials said she had almost entirely exposed U.S. intelligence operations on the island.
One official said she was among "the most damaging spies" caught by the U.S.
Michelle...
