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These sweeping photos certainly command attention. The stunning shots have been revealed as the winners of an international panoramic photography contest. Both professional and amateur photographers were invited to enter their best landscape shots for the Epson International Pano Awards 2018 in a bid to win more than $50,000 (£38,000) in cash. And this year's competition received 4,937 entries from 1,251 photographers in 74 countries. The overall winner of the contest was Veselin Atanasov from Bulgaria, who impressed with his shot of the sun rising over a tree-lined hill in Tuscany. We were also very taken with the shot of...

Currently, the two most popular methods for producing fusion power are the inertial confinement approach, and the tokamak reactor. In the former case, lasers are used to fuse pellets of deuterium (H², or “heavy hydrogen”) to create a fusion reaction. In the latter, the process involves a torus-shaped confinement chamber that uses magnetic fields and an internal current to confine high-energy plasma. Whereas other tokamak reactors rely on magnetic coils to keep a plasma torus stable, the Chinese EAST reactor relies on the magnetic fields produced by the moving plasma itself to keep the torus in check. This makes it...

Romaine lettuce is unsafe to eat in any form, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday in a broad alert in response to a new outbreak of illnesses caused by a particularly dangerous type of E. coli contamination. The CDC told consumers to throw away any romaine lettuce they may already have purchased. Restaurants should not serve it, stores should not sell it, and people should not buy it, no matter where or when the lettuce was grown. It doesn’t matter if it is chopped, whole head or part of a mix. All romaine should be avoided.

A 2,100-year-old pit discovered in China was found to contain not only chariots and miniature statues of cavalry, horses, watchtowers, infantry, civil officials and musicians, but at its center was a scaled down version of the famous "Terracotta Army." ..Based on "the date, size and location of the pit," archaeologists believe it might been built for Liu Hong, a prince of Qi (a part of China), who was the son of Emperor Wu (reign 141–87 BC)." Based in Linzi, near the pit, Hong died in 110 BC without any heir, archaeologists wrote in their journal article. The scientists also wrote...

Full title: Star spinning so ‘extremely fast’ it risks causing ‘one of the most powerful explosions in the universe’ It's one of a pair of stars that could be involved in one of the universe's biggest explosions, experts suggest. Scientists say the previously unknown star system is wrapped in an "elegant spiral dust cloud", making it look "spectacular".At its heart is a pair of massive Wolf-Rayet stars, according to an international team of researchers who published the findings in the Nature Astronomy journal. Wolf-Rayet stars are special in that they're among the hottest in the universe.They blast out powerful winds...

Galaxy clusters are cosmic structures containing hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. Multi-million-degree gas fills the space in between the individual galaxies. The mass of the hot gas is about six times greater than that of all the galaxies combined.This superheated gas is invisible to optical telescopes, but shines brightly in X-rays, so an X-ray telescope like Chandra is required to study it.By combining X-rays with other types of light, such as radio waves, a more complete picture of these important cosmic objects can be obtained.Using X-ray and radio data, a team of astronomers led by Leiden Observatory’s Dr. Francesco...

University of Oregon scientists have found the first confirmed dinosaur bone in Oregon, Fox 12 Oregon reports. The toe bone belonged to a plant-eating, bipedal dinosaur known as an ornithopod and is estimated to date back 103 million years to a geological period that also gave rise to Tyrannosaurus Rex, the university said. “This bone was sitting out there with all the rocks. It was pretty surprising,” University of Oregon scientist Greg Retallack told the Eugene Register-Guard. “No excavation was needed. It was just sitting among the ammonites and coil fossils.”Retallack found it in eastern Oregon near the tiny town of...

The Battle of Alesia took place in September, 52 BC around the Gallic oppidum of Alesia, a major town centre and hill fort of the Mandubii tribe... To guarantee a perfect blockade, Caesar ordered the construction of an encircling set of fortifications, called a circumvallation, around Alesia. The details are known from Caesar's Commentaries. About 18 kilometres of 4 metre high fortifications were constructed in about three weeks (Wikipedia). This line was followed inwards by two four-and-a-half metre wide ditches, also four-and-a-half metres deep. The farthest from the fortification was filled with water from the surrounding rivers. These fortifications were...

While some of the anatomical regions of these extinct humans are well known, others, such as the vertebral column and the ribs, are less well known because these elements are more fragile and not well preserved in the fossil record. In 1983 a partial Neanderthal skeleton (known officially as Kebara 2, and nicknamed "Moshe") belonging to a young male Neanderthal individual who died some 60,000 years ago was found in the Kebara site (Mount Carmel, Israel). While this skeleton does not preserve the cranium because some time after burial the cranium was removed, probably as a consequence of a funerary...

On this day in 1883, railroad companies create the first time zones. Yes, you heard that right. Private individuals saw a problem and solved it without involving the federal government. What a wonderfully American “do it yourself” mindset! Such determination and perseverance is what made our country great. Before time zones, Americans generally relied upon the local time in their communities. That local time was based upon the movement of the sun in the sky, so the time could vary from city to city. Cities would usually designate one clock in the area—perhaps at a certain church or business—as the...

The mystery of Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever spotted in our solar system, has taken a new, unexpected twist and it's from someone you might not expect – NASA. ..." Because of the varying degrees of brightness emanating from Oumuamua's surface, NASA suggests it is "highly elongated and probably less than half a mile (2,600 feet, or 800 meters) in its longest dimension."The intrigue of what Oumuamua is or isn't has picked up a considerably over the past few weeks, especially as some researchers have theorized that it could be an object from an extraterrestrial civilization.A study from the Harvard...

Democrats have gone completely off the rails when it comes to climate change. Even if some of us believe the climate is changing (it’s been changing for millions of years in various directions) that’s not enough for the left. Democrats are only content if you support destroying entire industries, bankrupting companies, raising taxes, wasting taxpayer money, and putting climate change deniers in jail. That’s a position that’s far too radical for most people especially when you consider the fact that there is plenty of evidence suggesting the data we’ve been force fed by the left isn’t all accurate. Here’s the...

California Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell is calling for government confiscation of all semi-automatic rifles. In other words, every rifle in America.

NASA has accepted delivery of a key European part needed to power the world’s next-generation moonship. U.S. and European leaders gathered at Kennedy Space Center on Friday to mark the occasion. The newly arrived powerhouse, or service module, will propel NASA’s Orion capsule to the moon during a test flight without passengers planned for 2020. A mega rocket under development by NASA, known as SLS for Space Launch System, will launch the combo. […] Orion and the attached service module are meant to fly near the moon, but not land. Future missions will carry astronauts, with the goal of building...

About 66 million years after two dinosaurs died apparently locked in battle on the plains of modern-day Montana, an unusual fight over who owns the entangled fossils has become a multimillion-dollar issue that hinges on the legal definition of “mineral.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that the “Dueling Dinosaurs” located on private land are minerals both scientifically and under mineral rights laws. The fossils belong both to the owners of the property where they were found and two brothers who kept two-thirds of the mineral rights to the land once owned by their father, a...

Move over Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus. There’s a new health-promoting gut bacterium in town, and it’s called Akkermansia muciniphila. You will not find its benefits at the bottom of a yogurt cup. But a new study has identified more than one way to nurture its growth in the gut, and offered evidence that it may maintain — and even restore — health as we age. Published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the new research found that in mice and monkeys whose metabolisms had grown cranky with age, taking steps to boost A. muciniphila in the gut reduced the...

#CampFire video on Skyway this morning.

A lot of scientists think that major quantum effects like entanglement, in which particles separated by vast distances mysteriously link up their states, shouldn't work for living things. But a new paper argues that it already has — that scientists in 2016 have already created a sort of Schrödinger's cat — only with quantum-entangled bacteria. Usually, we describe quantum physics as a set of rules that governs the behavior of extremely tiny things: light particles, atoms and other infinitesimally small objects. The larger world, at the bacterial scale (which is also our scale — the chaotic realm of life) isn't...

‘Oumuamua was first detected by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, in October 2017 while the telescope was surveying for near-Earth asteroids.Subsequent detailed observations conducted by multiple ground-based telescopes and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope detected the sunlight reflected off ‘Oumuamua’s surface.Large variations in the object’s brightness suggested that ‘Oumuamua is highly elongated and probably less than 2,600 feet (800 m) in its longest dimension.But NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope tracks asteroids and comets using the infrared energy, or heat, that they radiate, which can provide more specific information about an object’s size than optical observations of...

Rising global sea levels may actually be beneficial to the long-term future of coral reef islands, such as the Maldives, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters. Low-lying coral reef islands are typically less than three metres above sea level, making them highly vulnerable to rising sea levels associated with climate change. However, research has found new evidence that the Maldives - the world's lowest country - formed when sea levels were higher than they are today... They found that large waves caused by distant storms off the coast of South Africa led to the formation of the...