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The article reports that the International Astronomical Union's definition of a planet, adopted controversially demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet. It mentions that interlopers forced into the solar system by an interaction with a passing star. It states that planet Nine wouldn't have completed an orbit since woolly mammoths roamed Earth.

The article reports on the views expressed by the scientists on the reports that animals exercise and are able to escape predators and manage feats of endurance and mentions that Barnacle geese develop strongerhearts, bigger flight muscles just by sitting around. The impact of seasonal changes on the animals are also discussed.

The article focuses on the idea of sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2) in biomass approach to lessen the effect of global warming. It highlights the proposal of atmospheric scientist Ning Zeng on the potential of burying half of the wood that grows each year to alleviate the amount of carbon from the atmosphere. However, critics of Zeng's proposal point out that the carbon locked up in forests will only be kept out of the atmosphere for as long as the tree is alive.

The article discusses some of the misconceptions people have about the importance of eating breakfast and the effect that glucose has on the brain. The author explains that although glucose is important for brain function, the process is complex and requires the completion of certain steps before the brain can fully benefit from the glucose derived from carbohydrates.

This article focuses on the health aspects of aspartame. Aspartame, also known in Europe as E951, is the artificial sweetener people love to hate. Since it was approved for food use 25 years ago it has been linked to pretty much every health scare going, from brain tumours to insomnia and mood swings. In 2005 a group of scientists at the European Ramazzini Foundation in Bentivoglio, near Bologna in Italy, published some new findings. When the foundation's researchers added aspartame to the diet of 1500 rats, they saw an increase in the incidence of leukaemias and lymphomas, cancers of the blood and lymphatic systems, particularly among females. Notably, cancer incidence rose even in rats fed the equivalent of half the World Health Organization's acceptable daily intake of 40 milligrams of aspartame per kilogram of body weight.

The article discusses consumption and harmful effects of caffeine. Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance on earth, prized by almost every human culture for its ability to perk people up and keep them awake. In North America, around 90 per cent of adults report using caffeine every day. Caffeine bashing started in earnest in the mid-1970s when several major studies linked it with heart disease and bladder cancer. Perhaps the most notorious study came in 1980 when Thomas Collins of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) linked caffeine to birth defects in rats. The study sent shock waves through the drinks industry and led the FDA to warn pregnant women to cut down on coffee and tea. INSET: Caffeine cheats?.

The article discusses issues related to the freezing of the crater of Mount Saint Helens, Washington. Adventurer Charlie Anderson has been in the crater of Mount St Helens more times than anyone else. He was one of the few people who weren't surprised when geologists announced that in the time since its 1980 eruption, North America's most famous volcano has grown a full-fledged glacier in its crater. Anderson predicted in 1982, that a glacier would grow beneath those shady slopes. But in its early years, the crater was rocked by eruptions that gradually created a 270-metre-high lava dome in its centre.

The article presents interviews with American volunteers Chris Sanford, Robert Shaler, and Bretwood Higman, who have worked in the immediate aftermath of the most catastrophic events of recent years. Sanford, a doctor at the University of Washington Travel Clinic in Seattle, Washington, volunteered to help in New Orleans, Louisiana, after hurricane Katrina struck last year. Shaler is a forensics expert responsible for identifying victims of the 9/11 attack on New York City. Higman is a geologist who witnessed the destruction wrought by the Asian tsunami.

The article discusses research by geologist J. Harlen Bretz on the geology of so-called scablands in Washington state attributable to a flood generated from Lake Missoula in Montana. The concept of uniformitarianism in geology is noted and its tenet that geologists should not attempt to explain the past through catastrophic events.

The article discusses the recently-discovered cause of a devastating tsunami in Newfoundland that was triggered by an earthquake in Halifax, Nova Scotia in November 1929. Geologists found that the tsunami was caused by underwater landslides. The article suggests the potential of similar tsunamis to increase due to global warming.

The article presents information on the history of hydraulic mining. In February 1852, a Connecticut Yankee called Edward Matteson was working his gold claim at a place called American Hill in the Sierra Nevada foothills. There was plenty of gold in the compacted gravel of his claim, but it was widely dispersed and would take months to dig out with a pick and shovel. In 1880, California's state engineer had estimated that 6000 square kilometres of farmland had been buried by mining debris. Sand bars had sprung up in rivers all the way to the coast. It took years to force out miners who flouted the ruling, but the court's decision effectively killed off hydraulic mining in the California goldfields. Hydraulicking itself has never died: it has been used elsewhere to mine everything from coal to rubies and even aluminium.

This article reports that college student Gregg Hill volunteered to investigate how astronauts would respond to space flight. Hill and his fellows had volunteered for what is now known as the Dallas Bed Rest and Training Study. The goals were twofold: to simulate the effects of weightlessness on astronauts and to determine how quickly the body recovered when normal life resumed. As an aside, the scientists who were monitoring the effects of such slothfulness hoped to find out why hospital patients feel as weak as kittens after lengthy stays in bed. Maximal oxygen uptake is the standard test which monitors one's oxygen consumption while running on a treadmill, with a technician gradually turning up the grade. The tests were in part inspired by the findings of Archibald Hill, the British pioneer of biophysics. The tests that frightened off the swimmer were designed to measure the amount of blood pumped by each beat of the heart and the fraction of oxygen removed from it by the leg muscles.

The article informs that geologist Bruce Molnia wants unambiguous proof that the world's climate is changing, and he's willing to get it the hard way--crashing through brush and scrambling over boulders in some of the most rugged parts of coastal Alaska. His goal is to identify the precise spots where 19th-century photographers first captured the splendours of the U.S.'s northernmost territory, particularly its glaciers. In his office at the national headquarters of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, Molnia has accumulated more than 1600 photos of Alaskan glaciers taken before 1920.

The article reports on the experiences of scaling the North America's highest peak Denali also known as "The Great One." No one knows when Hudson Stuck first set eyes on Mount McKinley. Undoubtedly it was sometime in 1904, when he came to Alaska as the Episcopalian church's Archdeacon of the Yukon and Tanana Valleys and the Arctic Regions to the North of the Same--a title nearly as expansive as the region it described. A transplanted Englishman, Stuck was first and foremost a man of the cloth. But always he thought of the mountain whose native name, Denali, he championed long and hard to restore.

The article presents information about soldier, explorer and map-maker John C. Fremont. He gave his name to towns, cities, mountains, rivers and canyons all over the American west. But Fremont, the pathfinder of the American west, was a pioneer in another way. He was the first to try river-running in a rubber raft. Fremont's primary duty was to survey the country. In 1842, and again in 1843, he and a grouchy German cartographer called Charles Preuss made thousands of meticulous measurements that yielded the first mass-produced maps of the American west.

On September 1, 1859, researcher Richard Carrington had just completed his morning observation of the sun when he saw a pair of bright crescent shapes forming near a large group of sunspots. He had never seen anything like that before. Excitedly, he dashed through his observatory trying to find someone to witness his discovery. But the building was deserted and when he hurried back to his telescope he was horrified to find that the vision was already fading. Carrington had seen a solar flare, making him the first person as far as one knows to witness such an event. But his flare was not only the first on record, it was also spectacularly large. Today, new evidence suggests that Carrington had witnessed the onset of what would prove to be the perfect solar storm.

On April 22, 1805, Captain Meriwether Lewis was hiking the bluffs of the Missouri river near present-day Williston, North Dakota. Elsewhere in their journals, Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark correctly inferred that muddy tributaries of the Missouri had their sources on the Great Plains, while clear water sprang from the mountains. In the early 19th century, geology was barely a science. But in 1803, when President Thomas Jefferson ordered an expedition to explore the vast Louisiana territory that the U.S. had just bought from France, he could not have picked better geologists to lead it than Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

The article discusses the study regarding the stability of Earth's climate. Earth is the only water-world in the solar system that managed to maintain its oceans unlike Mars and Venus due to the interplay between plate tectonics, carbon dioxide and the oceans. It mentions that the moon also plays an additional role in keeping the climate habitable by damping wobbles that would cause the Earth's axis to tilt wildly.

The article reviews the film "Flatland," starring Martin Sheen and Michael York, on DVD format.