A fire which broke out on Sunday evening at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro has ravaged some of the country’s most important scientific collections. Nearly 20 million items are now irreparably destroyed by what was started by either an electrical short-circuit due to budget cuts or a homemade paper hot-air balloon that may have landed on the roof, said Brazil's Culture Minister Sergio Leitao.

Having been founded before Brazil’s independence from Portugal 200 years ago (1808), the museum housed ancient Egypt, Greek, and Roman artifacts and important paleontology and natural history collections, including one of Latin America’s oldest human fossils: the 11,500-year-old skull called Luzia (shown below). The Luzia skull was colle ...

At roughly 6 billion kilometers from Earth, the image you see to your right is the farthest images ever taken.

The New Horizons spacecraft captured its first images on August 16 of the remote icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule (a traditional name of distant places beyond the known world), confirming that New Horizons is on track for its January 1 flyby around Pluto. With about 160 million kilometers to go — roughly the same distance as Earth is from the sun — the tiny world appears as no more than a faint speck in the probe’s camera.

Officially named 2014 MU69, Ultima Thule is part of the Kuiper Belt, a thick disk-shaped zone containing space debris left over from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago. By sending New Horizons to t ...

The sentences presented here contain words that are spelled identically, but have different pronunciations and meanings (these kinds of words are called homographs). This leads to potentially ambiguous reading of the sentences! However, most readers of English are extremely adept at reading the sentences, probably due to the context in which the words are used.

Your job is to read each sentence aloud and determine whether any errors (stuttering or pausing are errors) occur. Be sure to keep track of how many times you make a mistake.

• The bandage was wound around the wound.
• The farm was used to produce produce
• The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
• We must polish the Polish furniture.
• When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
• I

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