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“An exclamation point on global warming”: Climate scientists warn 2024 was marked by broken records

The year 2024 is on track to be the hottest in recorded history, as humanity has officially exceeded the 1.5º C threshold established by the 2015 Paris climate accord. Despite this milestone, President-elect Donald Trump is pushing environmental scientists out of the government. According to Dr. Mark Serreze and many other climate scientists who spoke with Salon, the new reality created in 2024 by unprecedented rising temperatures is the biggest news story today, despite relative lack of coverage....

Originally posted on salon.com

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Facing more delays, NASA astronauts to remain in space until at least March 2025

A long trip to space is about to get even longer. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were originally supposed to spend only about a week aboard the International Space Station, but due to issues with their spaceship, have remained stuck for months. Originally slated to return in February, the two astronauts are now going to remain onboard on the ISS until “no earlier” than late March 2025, according to a recent report....

Originally posted on salon.com

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Memory problems? Here’s why poor sleep may be the cause — and how to fix it

Researchers have long wished to understand the connection between sleep and memory, especially how the brain encodes long-term memories during slow-wave sleep (while discarding others), or the deep sleep that occurs during the initial hours of one’s rest. Recent research sheds fascinating new light on the issue, but to understand how this works, scientists had to literally take brain samples from living people....

Originally posted on salon.com

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Death seems “kind of arbitrary”: Scientists want to upload the brain so we can live forever

Humans have yearned for immortality for as long as we‘ve understood our fragile permanence. But while dodging the Grim Reaper was once relegated to the realm of religious myth, now technology is attempting to find the cure for death. Most popular is the idea of cryopreservation — that is, any process which preserves biological tissues by storing them at extremely cold temperatures — which can be traced back to a 1931 science fiction novel, “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R....

Originally posted on salon.com

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RFK Jr.’s lawyer petitions the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine

Aaron Siri, the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — President-elect Donald Trump’s presumptive nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services — petitioned the federal government on Friday to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

Siri, a prominent conspiracy theorist like Kennedy, has already filed a petition to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines, including those that protect against hepatitis B and COVID-19....

Originally posted on salon.com

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Americans spend more years sick than the rest of the world, study finds — and women have it worse

Americans spend more time on average living with diseases compared to people in other countries, according to a recent study from the American Medical Association. Published in the journal JAMA Network Open,  the retrospective study found that Americans live with diseases on average for 12.4 years. The main diseases with which individuals live long-term in the United States are mental illness, substance use disorder and musculoskeletal conditions....

Originally posted on salon.com

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As Trump escalates war on facts, scientists warn “we are going to get screwed”

On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”...

Originally posted on salon.com

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