According to the Torah — for gentiles, the first five books of the so-called Hebrew Bible — Jews celebrate the holiday Yom Kippur to honor the anniversary of when God forgave them. The story begins after the great exodus from Egypt, one which Biblical legend says occurred after the Jews had been enslaved there for generations....
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There is a tiny species of carpenter bees known as the spurred ceratina (Ceratina calcarata) that behaves unlike any other known species of bee. With their elongated and shiny bluish-black bodies, the spurred ceratina is perhaps best known as a pollinator of delicious gourds like cucumbers and watermelons. At around 6.5 millimeters long, it’s about half the length of an aspirin....
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Democrats and Republicans once worked together to solve an environmental crisis. That sentence, admittedly, reads a bit like the start of a fairy tale. Long gone are the days when Republicans seemed to produce quasi-environmentalist presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. At the time of this writing, every single frontrunner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination denies that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which significantly contributes to global heating....
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When climatologist Dr. Twila Moon described a future of climate change-caused horrors as “baked in,” she may not have intended to create a darkly apt pun for global warming. Certainly the future she laid out for sea level rise, a term for an increase in the level of the world’s oceans, is a very grim one....
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An ancient creature known as Hupehsuchus nanchangensis was not a tiny whale, but a person watching it feed could be forgiven if they mistook it for one. This three-foot long reptile was shaped like a chubby miniature whale, but with an elongated trunk, webbed feet and a long, narrow snout. There were no teeth on the inside of that snout, however — instead one would find rows of long strip-like keratin plates....
Originally posted on salon.com