natural sciences
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Wannabe Assassin Gets 12 Years on Chemical Weapon Charges for Trying to Buy Dimethylmercury
A U.S. federal court has sentenced a Missouri man who tried to buy the deadly poison dimethylmercury, a notoriously toxic substance that can kill in just a few drops on the skin, on the dark web to 12 years in prison.
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Physicists Laser-Cool Antimatter to Near Absolute Zero
For a little more than a week in July 2018, a team of physicists at CERN tried a new technique to slow down antimatter particles zipping around at breakneck speeds. Those 10 days of observation were the culmination of 10 years of development in an international collaboration called ALPHA, which oversaw the design and construction…
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See a Black Hole’s Magnetic Fields in New Image From the Event Horizon Telescope
In April 2019, the world was spellbound, if only for a moment, by an ominous void encircled by a half-halo of light. It was the first direct image of a black hole; more specifically, a supermassive gravitational abyss at the core of Messier 87, a galaxy in the constellation Virgo some 54 million light-years from…
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Shocking Findings Show the Amazon May Already Be a Greenhouse Gas Emitter
Historically, the Amazon rainforest has been one of the planet’s most important sources of carbon sequestration, caching billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year. For decades, scientists have cautioned us not to take this crucial service for granted, warning that in just 15 years, the Amazon could meet the fate of other…