TV News LIES

A giant Jurassic-era insect missing from eastern North America for at least half a century has been spotted clinging to the side of a Walmart big box in Arkansas.

The identification of the giant lacewing – Polystoechotes punctata – in an urban area of Fayetteville, Arkansas, sent scientists into raptures. The discovery of a species that was abundant in the age of the dinosaurs but which was thought to disappeared from large swaths of North America has stoked speculation that there may be entire populations tucked away in remote parts of the Ozark mountains

The giant lacewing was found by Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State’s insect identification lab. In a report on the university’s website this week, he explained that he made the discovery in 2012, when he was a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas.

Researchers are trying to figure out a mystery: Why are so many humpback whales, right whales, and other large mammals dying along the U.S. East Coast? One possible explanation is a shift in food habits. And while theories are circulating that blame the growing offshore wind industry, scientists say there's no proof to support that idea.

Since Dec. 1, at least 18 reports have come in about large whales being washed ashore along the Atlantic Coast, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. The losses are hitting populations that were already under watch, due to ongoing rises in unexpected deaths.

"Unfortunately, it's been a period of several years where we have had elevated strandings of large whales, but we are still concerned about this pulse" in deaths that's now been going on for weeks, as Sarah Wilkin, the coordinator for the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, said on a recent call with journalists.

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It's prime time to see the comet known as C/2022 E3, marked by its bright green nucleus and long faint ion tail. The comet has been visible for some time with telescopes and binoculars — but the best chance of seeing it with the naked eye is coming up on Wednesday, Feb. 1.

This marks possibly the first time ever — or at least for thousands of years — that the comet has streaked across our sky.

"If C/2022 E3 has ever passed through the solar system before, it would have last been seen in the sky more than 10,000 years ago," Jon Giorgini, a senior analyst at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NPR.

Astronomers first spotted the brightening outburst in March 2022 at the Zwicky Transient Facility on Palomar Mountain in California. At the time, the comet was inside the orbit of Jupiter.

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Scientists found an unexpected discovery on the surface of Mars: a formation resembling the face of a bear.

A camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a photo of the formation on Dec. 12. The University of Arizona, which operates the camera, shared the image on Wednesday.

Two beady eyes are formed by two craters. A hill with a "V-shaped collapse structure" resembles a snout. A "circular fracture pattern" outlines a head.

"The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater," the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory says. "Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows?"

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Deep in the center of the Earth is the inner core, which spans roughly 746 miles and is composed of primarily pure, solid iron, NASA explains. Though we’ve long believed – and research has shown – that the inner core rotates, a new study suggests it may have “paused” its spin and could even have reversed.

The liquid outer core that surrounds the inner core causes Earth’s magnetic field. According to NASA, as the molten iron and nickel in the outer core move, they create electrical currents that result in a magnetic field. The outer core also allows the inner core to spin on its own, Nature explains.

Though scientists can’t track the core directly, they can analyze seismic waves caused by earthquakes – and Cold War-era nuclear weapon tests – as they reach the core. That’s what study co-authors Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Peking University in Beijing, did for their new research, which was published in the Nature Geoscience journal on Monday.

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National security agencies are studying hundreds of new reports of UFOs, including many that appear to perform maneuvers that are highly advanced, the nation’s top intelligence official reported on Thursday.

In total, 510 “unidentified aerial phenomena” observed in protected airspace or near sensitive facilities have been compiled as of August of last year, according to the report to Congress from the director of national intelligence.

Of those, 366 were gathered since a preliminary assessment was published in 2021 — an increase attributed to a “reduced stigma” around reporting, and a better understanding of the intelligence and safety threats that the phenomena may pose.