A total lunar eclipse will grace the night skies this weekend, providing longer than usual thrills for stargazers across North and South America.  The celestial action unfolds Sunday night into early Monday morning, with the moon bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about one-and-a-half hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade. It will be the first so-called blood moon in a year.  Observers in the eastern half of North America and all of Central and South America will have prime …

Scientists with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Friday that April 2022 tied April 2010 as the fifth warmest April on record.  In a release, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information said the average global temps in April were 0.85 of a degree Celsius above the 20th century average of 13.7 C.  NOAA said the global temperature for the year through April 2022 was 0.87 of a degree C above average, making it the fifth warmest such year through April on record.  They report Asia recorded its warmest …

Over the past three decades Ara Mirzaian has fitted braces for everyone from Paralympians to children with scoliosis. But Msituni was a patient like none other — a newborn giraffe. The calf was born Feb. 1 at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, north of San Diego, with a front leg bending the wrong way. Safari park staff feared she could die if they didn’t immediately correct the condition, which could prevent her from nursing and walking around the habitat. But they had no experience with fitting a …

Top U.S. meatpacking companies drafted the executive order issued by President Donald Trump in 2020 to keep meat plants running and convinced his administration to encourage workers to stay on the job at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released Thursday by a U.S. House panel. The report by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis details the meat industry’s influence on Trump’s White House as it tried to keep production rolling even as employees fell ill. More than 59,000 meatpacking workers at plants …

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered a nationwide lockdown Thursday to try to contain a highly transmissible variant of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which was confirmed in the country this week for the first time. The official Korean Central News Agency said genetic sequencing analysis of samples collected from a group of people on Sunday in Pyongyang had identified the BA.2 strain, also known as the “stealth omicron” for its relative difficulty of detection. At least one person confirmed to have COVID-19 has died, KCNA said Friday, and around …