WX

Official Tumblr account for the Wikipedia Xpress.

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Forests regulate the climate, absorb carbon from the atmosphere, and provide habitat for:

🐸 80% of all amphibians

🦜 75% of all birds

🐨 68% of all mammal species

They contribute to precipitation, regulate streamflow and foster groundwater recharge, providing drinking water to one-third of the world’s largest cities. Moreover, food, shelter, energy, medicines and around 86 million associated jobs come from forest products.

📷: FAO/Thomas Nicolon

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The protostar L1527, shown in this image from the James Webb, is embedded within a cloud of material that is feeding its growth. Material ejected from the star has cleared out cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared image. The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar ‘burps,’ or sporadic ejections. Webb also detects filaments made of molecular hydrogen that has been shocked by past stellar ejections. Intriguingly, the edges of the cavities at upper left and lower right appear straight, while the boundaries at upper right and lower left are curved. The region at lower right appears blue, as there’s less dust between it and Webb than the orange regions above it.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI)

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The difference between 1.5°C, 2°C or 3°C average global warming can sound marginal. But these temperature rises represent vastly different scenarios for the future. Our survival on this planet hinges on these few degrees 🌡️

📸: United Nations Climate Change

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This is hexagonal storm at the North Pole of Saturn that's about 29,000 km across and more than twice the diameter of Earth 🌎

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Kevin M. Gill

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At left is J122051+491255, a "Green Pea Galaxy" about 170 million light-years away that’s about 4,000 light-years across, a typical size. At right is an early pea known as 04590, whose light has taken 13.1 billion years to reach us. Compensating for the cluster’s gravitational lensing effect and the galaxy’s greater distance to us, 04590 is even more compact, comparable to the smallest nearby green peas. Peas are quite compact, typically only about 5,000 light-years across or about 5% the size of our Milky Way galaxy, but their star-formation activity is unusually intense for their size, so they produce bright ultraviolet light.

Credit: SDSS and NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

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A trio of faint objects "Green Peas" (circled) captured in the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. We view these early peas as they existed when the universe was about 5% its current age of 13.8 billion years. The farthest pea, at left, contains just 2% the oxygen abundance of a galaxy like our own and might be the most chemically primitive galaxy yet identified.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

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Do you know the names of some of the brightest stars? It's likely that you do, even though some bright stars have names so old they date back to near the beginning of written language. Many world cultures have their own names for the brightest stars, and it is culturally and historically important to remember them. In the interest of clear global communication, however, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has begun to designate standardized star names. Featured here in true color are the 25 brightest stars in the night sky, currently as seen by humans, coupled with their IAU-recognized names. Some star names have interesting meanings, including Sirius ("the scorcher" in Latin), Vega ("falling" in Arabic), and Antares ("rival to Mars" in Greek). You are likely even familiar with the name of at least one star too dim to make this list: Polaris.

📸: Tragoolchitr Jittasaiyapan

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Incredible Aliens - Snakes 🐍👽

Snakes are one of the most misunderstood creatures on the Earth. Snakes came before Homo sapiens, around 140 million years ago and Humans have developed a love hate relationship with snakes for over thousands of years. Some worship them as Gods and some fear, hate and kill them.

In reality Snakes are benevolent keepers of ecological balance in nature. They help maintain balance in the ecosystem, by consuming a varied range of animals. Without snakes, the rodent population will go out of proportion.

1. Siamese Peninsula Pit Viper (Trimeresurus fucatus)

2. Mountain Slug Snake (Asthenodipsas vertebralis)

3. Long-nosed vine snake (Ahaetulla oxyrhyncha)

4. Kopstein's Bronzeback (Dendrelaphis kopsteini)

5. Temple Pit Viper (Tropidolaemus wagleri )

📸: @_aliens.of.earth_ via UN Biodiversity

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There, that dot on the right, that's the largest rock known in our Solar System. It is larger than every known asteroid, moon, and comet nucleus. It is larger than any other local rocky planet. This rock is so large its gravity makes it into a large ball that holds heavy gases near its surface. (It used to be the largest known rock of any type until the recent discoveries of large dense planets orbiting other stars.) The Voyager 1 spacecraft took the featured picture -- famously called Pale Blue Dot -- of this giant space rock in 1990 from the outer Solar System. Today, this rock starts another orbit around its parent star, for roughly the 5 billionth time, spinning over 350 times during each trip. Happy Gregorian Calendar New Year to all inhabitants of this rock we call Earth.

📸: NASA, Voyager-1 Spacecraft 🚀

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Incredible Aliens - Lizards 🦎👽

All reptiles, birds and mammals including humans, descended from a single reptilian ancestor approximately 320 million years ago. Reptiles are our early ancestors.

Humans have this deep 320 million years old heritage. Even the most revered and feared reptilian alien on Earth, the snakes have evolved from lizards.

1. Indian chameleon (Chamaeleo zeylanicus)

2. Earless Agamid (Aphaniotis fusca)

3. Marbled Bent-toed Gecko (Cyrtodactylus quadrivirgatus)

4. Green Crested Lizard (Bronchocela cristatella)

5. Changeable Lizard (Calotes versicolor)

📸: UN Biodiversity via Instagram

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All of the little dots in this picture are distant galaxies. This region of the sky known as 'Lockman Hole' located in the constellation of Ursa Major, surveyed in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory of European Space Agency (ESA).

📸: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/HerMES

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At this time, about 9 countries of the world have approximately 9000 nuclear weapons. Russia is on the top with 4477, and America on second with 3708 numbers of nuclear weapons.

📸: Wikimedia Commons / Vitaly V. Kuzmin

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Known for its bright orange colors and its incredible annual migration, the migratory monarch butterfly is now classified as “Endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). A tiny, delicate creature that can travel nearly 3000 miles from the northern US and southern Canada to its overwintering destination in Mexico. There, at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, monarchs congregate by the millions in the oyamel trees. By the start of spring, monarchs are ready to mate and migrate back to the U.S. They fly another 1,000 miles to lay their eggs only on milkweed plants, which will eventually serve as a food source for the caterpillars.

📸: Astrid Frisch/Natural Habitat Adventures

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Can a gas cloud eat a galaxy? It's not even close. The "claw" of this odd looking "creature" in the featured photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails. These features cause cometary globules to have visual similarities to comets, but in reality they are very much different. Globules are frequently the birthplaces of stars, and many show very young stars in their heads. The reason for the rupture in the head of this object is not yet known. The galaxy to the left of the globule is huge, very far in the distance, and only placed near CG4 by chance superposition.

📸: Mike Selby & Mark Hanson

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How could that city be upside-down? The city, Chicago, was actually perfectly right-side up. The long shadows it projected onto nearby Lake Michigan near sunset, however, when seen in reflection, made the buildings appear inverted. This fascinating, puzzling, yet beautiful image was captured by a photographer in 2014 on an airplane on approach to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. The Sun can be seen both above and below the cloud deck, with the latter reflected in the calm lake. As a bonus, if you look really closely -- and this is quite a challenge - you can find another airplane in the image, likely also on approach to the same airport.

📸: Mark Hersch

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Researchers estimate there are between 50B and 430B birds on Earth 🐦

📸: Sara Wolman/UNEP

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More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2015, with 6 million settling in other Latin American countries. The region’s largest migration episode in history is driven by the collapse of the country’s economy, which has left Venezuelans struggling to meet their basic needs.

Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s gross domestic product is estimated to have declined by more than 75 percent, the most for a country not at war in the last 50 years. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the country’s economic and humanitarian crisis, and in 2020 more than 95 percent of Venezuelans were living below the poverty line.

The arrival of Venezuelans seeking better lives has strained the economies—and societies—of Latin American host countries that are already balancing tight budgets, especially since the pandemic.

Colombia, which has received the most Venezuelan migrants, estimated spending about $600 per migrant in 2019. This covered humanitarian aid, healthcare, childcare, education, housing, and job-search support. With more than 2 million arrivals, this translates into $1.3 billion in assistance. In 2019, this cost peaked at 0.5 percent of Colombia’s GDP.

In the long term, however, this investment has the potential to increase GDP in host countries by up to 4.5 percentage points by 2030, as we find in our latest research on the spillovers from Venezuela’s migration.

To reap the benefits from migration, host countries need to integrate the new arrivals into the formal labor force—and society—by promptly offering them work permits and access to education and healthcare.

📸: UNHCR/Fabio Cuttica