Lifeboat Foundation

Health officials have confirmed a case of plague at South Lake Tahoe — the first in California in five years.

El Dorado County officials said Monday that the California Department of Public Health had notified them of the positive test of a resident who is under medical care while recovering at home.

Plague bacteria are most often transmitted by fleas that have acquired it from infected squirrels, chipmunks and other wild rodents. Dogs and cats may also carry plague-infected fleas.

Two Chinese air force J-20 stealth fighters have appeared at an air base in China’s far west as the mountain stand-off between India and Chine enters its fourth month.

The twin-engine J-20s are visible in commercial satellite imagery of Hotan air base, in the Uighur autonomous region of Xinjiang. Chinese social-media users first spotted the planes.

The J-20 deployment, however temporary, signals Beijing’s resolve as China wrestles with India for influence over a disputed region of the Himalayas. But a pair of warplanes, no matter how sophisticated, don’t represent much actual combat power.

The universe may never end if we refuel it.

Tick-Tock. The universe’s perpetual clock keeps on clicking off the seconds, even in peculiar times such as these, when work weeks seem to fly past like hours and months are a silent blur.

But just to put things into proper perspective for how insignificant our strictly-defined daily blocks of time truly are, one inquisitive scientist has devised a formula to predict just when cosmic existence will finally come to a screeching halt and the final supernova erupts.

Continue reading “Physicist predicts the ‘mindboggling’ number of years before the universe ends” »

The weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field, the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), is splitting into two and getting wider, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Think you don’t need to worry about COVID-19 while using a public restroom? A group of researchers from Yangzhou University in China recently reported that flushing public restroom toilets can release clouds of virus-laden aerosols for you to potentially inhale.

If that’s not cringeworthy enough, after running additional computer simulations, they’ve concluded that flushing urinals does likewise. In Physics of Fluids, the group shares its work simulating and tracking virus-laden particle movements when urinals are flushed.

The researchers’ work clearly shows public restrooms can be dangerous places for potentially becoming infected from a virus, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other work has shown that both feces- and urine-based virus transmission is possible.

Paging Dr. Strange.

NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers. The space agency’s satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

Continue reading “NASA Is Tracking a Vast, Growing Anomaly in Earth’s Magnetic Field” »

Lift-off from the site in the US state of Florida is scheduled for 1431GMT.

Source: SpaceX/AP

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Continue reading “SpaceX launches its Falcon 9 rocket for its 11th Starlink mission, which will include 58 Starlink satellites and three of Planet’s SkySats” »

A theory of quantum gravity that describes the universe as beginning in a “Big Bounce” r

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