Day: May 24, 2019

A SpaceX rocket has launched 60 satellites into orbit, which will be used to provide internet service from space. 

The rocket was launched Thursday night from Cape Canaveral in the southeastern U.S. state of Florida. 

It had been originally scheduled to launch last week, but was postponed because of high winds over the Cape and the need for a software update. 

The Starlink internet service will go into service only after hundreds more satellites are launched into orbit and activated.

SpaceX is the private rocket company of Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk said he saw Thursday’s launch as “a key stepping stone on the way towards establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon.”

 
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Thousands of school students in Australia and New Zealand took to the streets Friday, initiating an international day of protests against the lack of action against climate change.

Organizers expect that more than a million young people in at least 120 counties will participate in protests.

Demonstrators are demanding that politicians and business leaders take swift measures to slow global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, which are damaging planet Earth.

The school protesters in Frankfurt, Germany, marched on the headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) to demand it stop financing the fossil fuel industry.

According to environmental scientists, greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels have caused droughts and heatwaves, the melting of glaciers, rising sea levels and devastating floods.

The worldwide protests are inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish activist who began a single-handed climate protest outside the Swedish parliament in August. Since then, her school strike movement “Fridays for Future” has grown exponentially.

Global carbon emissions reached a record high last year, despite warnings from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October that gas emissions must be curbed over the next 12 years to stabilize the climate.
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Anna, a female green anaconda that has lived most of her life in an all-female enclosure at the New England Aquarium, has given birth.

The anaconda produced 18 snakes in early January. A DNA test has confirmed that the births were a result of a nonsexual reproduction process known as parthenogenesis, or “virgin birth,” according to the aquarium.

Parthenogenesis commonly occurs in the plant world and among animals without a backbone, but is rare among vertebrates. The process has been documented only among lizards, birds, sharks and snakes.

The phenomenon involving Anna is the second known confirmed case of parthenogenesis for a green anaconda. The first was at a British zoo in 2014.

Only two of Anna’s 18 offspring have survived.

Aquarium staff said the young snakes are clones of their mother. Limited genetic sequencing shows complete matches on all the sites tested.
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