Will Trump Scrap NASA's Climate Research Mission? and other top stories.

• Will Trump Scrap NASA's Climate Research Mission?

  

    By Andrew Revkin, ProPublica The wonders of NASA — Mars rovers, astronaut Instagram feeds, audacious missions probing distant galactic mysteries — have long enthralled the American public. And, it turns out, the accomplishments have won the agency the public’s trust: Polls have consistently shown NASA to be the second-most trusted government institution, behind only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The public, however, probably has less appreciation for the work NASA has done o..

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• Shocking video of killer whales goes viral

  

  Astonishing new video footage of two killer whales and their calves tearing apart a shark has the scientific community buzzing.Stunning video taken from a drone has emerged of an extremely rare sight caught on camera: two adult female killer whales and their two calves eating a shark alive in California’s Monterey Bay. This type of kilelr whale, the offshore killer whale, is tough to catch on film, and even tougher to see eating, but drone pilot Slater Moore managed to capture the incredible fo..

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• Seattle Audubon to hold Christmas Bird Count

  

  Seattle Audubon Christmas Bird Count is Dec. 31, and there are two ways to participate. Seattle Audubon’ invites anyone interested in birds to join in the Christmas Bird Count on Dec. 31. It’s part of the National Audubon Society’s annual project to track the state of North American birds. Seattle’s first count was in 1908 with one participant recording nine bird species; more than 120 species are now regularly tallied at the daylong event. This year’s count covers a 15-mile-diameter circle ce..

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• NASA Will Try Find 'Star Wars' Like Planets In Search For Alien Life

  

  There are only eight planets in our solar system, including Earth, but in the 20 years since humans first detected a planet outside our celestial neighborhood, over 3,400 exoplanets have already been discovered. And given the immense and ever-increasing vastness of the Universe, the number of planets that exist in it is likely to be as innumerable as the number of stars.Given the sheer number, it is also entirely possible that some of those planets resemble very closely the depictions of other w..

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• Astronomers spot 'planet-eating' star similar to our sun

  

  December 18, 2016 —As the latest Star Wars installment draws crowds to movie theaters this weekend, scientists are talking about a real Death Star, of sorts, about 300 light-years away.Using a 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, a team of researchers have been studying a star very similar to our sun. But unlike our friendly neighborhood star, however, this one is known to have destroyed some of its own planets, in a possible preview of what the future might hold for some p..

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