A $17 billion budget package that Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs negotiated with leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature is drawing criticism from Democrats for failing to put limits on an expansion of a school voucher program that they say is a drain on the state’s coffers

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Equitrans Midstream Corp. asked the US Supreme Court to allow it to resume construction on its controversial Mountain

Airbnb on Thursday sued New York City over its restrictions on short-term housing rentals, in a legal dispute that pits the company's concerns about its ability to operate in a key market against the city's efforts to address an affordable housing crisis.

The European Union has raised concerns with China about the detailed product information that cosmetics companies like L’Oreal

A number of huge tunnels that were discovered in South America at the turn of the century may have been made by giant sloths. At the turn of the century, professor of geology, Heinrich Frank, spotted a strange hole on a highway in Brazil, and crawled inside. There, he realised the tunnel was 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. He also found a collection of giant claw marks on the ceiling. “There’s no geological process in the world that produces long tunnels with a circular or elliptical cross-section, which branch and rise and fall, with claw marks on the walls,” Frank told Discover, adding he's "seen dozens of caves that have inorganic origins, and in these cases, it’s very clear that digging animals had no role in their creation.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The tunnel, along with many others that he and others discovered in Brazil and Argentina, are thought to be made by extinct giant sloths 8-10,000 years ago that were around the size of an African elephant. In the Rio Grande do Sul area, Frank and his team found over 1,500 tunnels made by these sloths beasts, with the longest stretching for 609 meters (2,000 feet) and standing at 1.8 meters (6 feet) tall. Goodness. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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For the past two decades, New York City school teacher Sari Beth Rosenberg has guided

Try as you might, the moon is famously difficult to photograph. Smartphone images inevitably turn out blurred, or with the light all wrong. With Monday’s full moon set to be a supermoon, then, how can people try to ensure that they actually get a decent shot of it? A supermoon is an occasional coincidence that happens when the moon is at its closest point to the Earth in its orbit. When this happens, the Moon is usually brighter and appears larger in the sky than at other times. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The best time to catch it is just after sunset, when the Moon is just on the rise. The colour of the sky, and sometimes the clouds, should make it easier to get the right exposure, because the difference between the sky and the Moon’s colour is not so extreme. If you have a newer smartphone, you may also have settings which let you alter the focal length, exposure, ISO (the sensitivity of the camera) and shutter speed. “Make sure not to use flash, and switch on HDR (high dynamic range), if your phone has it. HDR, simply put, means that there will be a high contrast between the darkest and lightest parts of an image,” Mark Lord, founder and owner of Mark Lord Photography, told IFLScience. “This typically makes images more striking. Many modern smartphones feature HDR. Using flash, meanwhile, has ruined many a night sky capture.” Meanwhile, think about the focus too. Tempting as it may be to zoom in on the moon and try to get as much of it as you can is usually not going to work. “Even newer smartphones lack the capacity for zoom. Trying to zoom in on an object, particularly one as far away as the moon, may compromise the resolution and quality of an image” Lord added. “Instead, I recommend creating a more interesting shot by taking a landscape-style photo, adding depth and variety by making use of objects and landmarks in the foreground. A full moon captured through tree branches, for example, can make for a very spooky and atmospheric image.” So it’s time to get ready, and get snapping. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

President Emmanuel Macron met billionaire businessman Elon Musk on Monday to discuss future investment projects, as the French leader hosts a conference aimed at persuading business leaders...

Minuscule traces of metal from space junk that's designed to be disposable are invisibly polluting the Earth's atmosphere, a new study has found. In recent times, spacecrafts launched into space have been designed so that they fall out of orbit and fall back down to Earth after their intended use. So instead of the materials crashing on land, they can burn up in the upper atmosphere. Although the debris of rockets and satellites burn up when re-entering the planet's atmosphere, the consequences of metal vapour being left behind currently remain unknown. But given the amount of space exploration taking place, the amount of metal vapour is expected to rise in the years to come. Physicist Daniel Murphy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has led a team of researchers to investigate what effects this metal vapour could have as well as its impact over time and this study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as per Science Alert. He listed "iron, silicon, and magnesium from the natural meteoric source" as the current refractory material in stratospheric particular. Murphy has warned how this composition could be affected by the metal vapour from space junk. "However, the amount of material from the reentry of upper-stage rockets and satellites is projected to increase dramatically in the next 10 to 30 years," he wrote. "As a result, the amount of aluminum in stratospheric sulfuric acid particles is expected to become comparable to or even exceed the amount of meteoric iron, with unknown consequences for inclusions and ice nucleation." To find out if metal vapour remained, Murphy and his team took and analyzed 500,000 stratospheric aerosol droplet samples to see if they had traces of spacecraft metals. Aerosols contain sulfuric acid droplets made from the oxidation of the carbonyl sulfide gas and in the atmosphere, this can appear naturally or as a pollutant. Metal and silicon traces can be found in these droplets too, acquired from meteors which vaporize upon atmospheric entry. Around 20 metals were discovered from this research, and while some metals had similar ratios to the vaporizing meteors, other metals such as lithium, aluminium, copper, and lead exceeded the anticipated amounts. Particles from vaporized spacecraft were found in 10 per cent of stratospheric aerosols over a certain size while other common spacecraft metals such as niobium and hafnium were also present. Consequently, these traces of spacecraft particles could affect how water freezes into ice in the stratosphere, and stratospheric aerosol particles could change in size. Due to more space exploration planned in an "era of rapid growth" for the industry, the researchers predict "the percentage of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles that contain aluminum and other metals from satellite reentry will be comparable to the roughly 50 per cent that now contain meteoric metals." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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