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A swarm of ladybugs moving through San Diego County was so large it registered on the National Weather Service’s (NWS) weather radar Tuesday night, CBS Los Angeles reports. The NWS office in San Diego tweeted out a video of the radar that looked to be showing precipitation but was in fact what they called a ladybug “bloom.”

“The large echo showing up on SoCal radar this evening is not precipitation, but actually a cloud of ladybugs termed a ‘bloom,’” the tweet read.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — A huge blob that appeared on the National Weather Service’s radar wasn’t a rain cloud, but a massive swarm of ladybugs over Southern California.

Meteorologist Joe Dandrea says the array of bugs appeared to be about 80 miles (129 kilometers) wide as it flew over San Diego Tuesday.

But Dandrea tells the Los Angeles Times that the ladybugs are actually spread throughout the sky, flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet (1,525 and 2,745 meters), with the most concentrated group about 10 miles (16 kilometers) wide.

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That’s why more than 100 repositories, communities, societies, institutions, infrastructures, individuals and publishers (including Springer Nature, the publishers of Nature) have signed up since last November to the Enabling FAIR Data Project’s Commitment Statement in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences for depositing and sharing data (see http://). The principles state that research data should be ‘findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable’ (FAIR)2. The idea is not new, but aligning this broad community around common data guidelines is a radical step.


All disciplines should follow the geosciences and demand best practice for publishing and sharing data, argue Shelley Stall and colleagues.

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By Mayukh Saha / Truth Theory

According to Gerd Gigerenzer, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, true intuitiveness is having the necessary instinct to understand what knowledge we need to focus on and what we can afford to forget.

In his work ‘Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious’, Gerd explains how intuition and rationality can go hand in hand by using himself as an example. While immersed in his research, he often gets a hunch which he usually takes forward because he just knows that it will give him the answer. But he also double checks using scientific formulae to actually figure out the reasons behind his hunches. But when it comes to personal matters, he goes solely by what his intuition tells him.

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Editors’ note: This is the first installment in a new series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write op-eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years in the future. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.


DNA tweaks won’t fix our problems.

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It has long been known that humans are very intelligent, often thought of as the most intelligent. However, could there be something far more intelligent that blows us humans out of the water? Quite a lot of people think the answer to that question is yes. What is it though?

A study from last year (2018) suggests that Dolphins are highly intelligent creatures, so much so that they may surpass human intelligence in some respects. One of those ways being self-awareness. The study used was a mirror-self recognition (MSR) test which basically consists of presenting a mirror to the test subject and seeing how long it takes them or it to recognize themselves.

When presented with a mirror, human infants aren’t usually able to recognize themselves until they are around 12 months old. Bottlenose dolphins, on the other hand, are able to recognize themselves at just seven months old. The experiment was done on both male and female dolphins to get a range of results.

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