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 An international team of scientists has discovered a huge spike in radiocarbon levels 14,300 years ago by analyzing ancient tree-rings found in the French Alps.  The radiocarbon spike was caused by a massive solar storm, the biggest ever identified.  The largest, directly-observed, solar storm occurred in 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event.  It caused massive disruption on Earth - destroying telegraph machines and creating a night-time aurora so bright that birds began to sing, believing the sun had begun to rise.  Nine such extreme solar storms -- known as Miyake Events -- have now been identified as having occurred over the last 15,000 years.  The most recent confirmed Miyake Events occurred in 993 AD and 774 AD. This newly-identified 14,300-year-old storm is, however, the largest that has ever been found roughly twice the size of these two.  However, the Miyake Events (including the newly discovered 14,300-yr-old storm) would have been a sta...

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman have been jointly awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of mRNA vax against Covid-19.  They received the honor " for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 ", said the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in a statement.  Their groundbreaking findings have fundamentally changed the understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the Nobel committee said.  Interest in mRNA technology began to pick up, and in 2010, several companies were working on developing the method.  Vaccines against Zika virus and MERS-CoV were pursued; the latter is closely related to SARS-CoV-2.  After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, two base-modified mRNA vaccines encoding the SARS-CoV-2 surface protein were developed at record speed.  Protective effects of around 95 percent were repor...