A new study has found that light pollution is making the night sky brighter and the stars dimmer.
”We are losing, year by year, the possibility to see the stars,” said Fabio Falchi. He is a physicist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He was not involved in the study. As cities expand and put up more lights, a “skyglow” is created in the sky. Skyglow is a term scientists use to describe light that becomes more intense.
Christopher Kyba is a physicist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. He was a co-writer of the study. He told The Associated Press that the 10 percent change was “a lot bigger” than he had expected. The research team gave an example to explain the result. If a child is born where 250 stars can be seen on a clear night, by the time that child turns 18, only 100 stars will be seen.
Past studies involving artificial lighting used satellite images of the Earth at night. They had estimated the yearly increase in sky brightness to be about 2 percent a year. But the satellites used are not able to identify light with wavelengths toward the blue end of the spectrum – including light given off by energy-effective LED bulbs. The researchers noted that more than half the new outdoor lights put in across the United States during the past 10 years have been LED lights.
Skyglow affects human circadian rhythms as well as other forms of life, said Georgetown University biologist Emily Williams. She was not part of the study.
“Migratory songbirds normally use starlight to orient where they are in the sky at night,” Williams said. “And when sea turtle babies hatch, they use light to orient toward the ocean – light pollution is a huge deal for them.”
Falchi, the physicist at the University of Santiago de Compostela, said part of what is being lost is a universal human experience. “The night sky has been, for all the generations before ours, a source of inspiration for art, science, literature," he added.

Saul Bellow was born in a suburb of Montreal, Quebec, on June 10th, 1915. His parents had emigrated from Russia to Canada in 1913 and they moved to Chicago in 1924.
In 1933, Bellow entered the University of Chicago, but transferred to Northwestern University, where he studied anthropology and sociology. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1937. The chairman of the English department had told Bellow to forget his plans to study the language: "No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature".
Bellow became a teacher, holding various posts at the Universities of Minnesota, New York, Princeton and Puerto Rico.
It took years before Bellow published his first book, "The Dangling Man", in 1944. From 1960 to 1962, Bellow was co-editor of the literary magazine "The Noble Savage", and in 1962, he was appointed professor on the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Besides novels, Bellow has also published short stories and plays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976.
Saul Bellow died on April 6, 2005.

Scientists and doctors can’t make their minds up about coffee. One study says it’s really bad for us and the next report says it’s good for us. I’ve even read that 10 cups a day is good for our brain. I like a cup of coffee at certain times of the day. I must have a coffee first thing in the morning. I can’t survive without my morning coffee. I have another cup or two when I get to work. And that’s it. I never drink coffee after lunchtime. If I do, I can’t sleep at night. The only time I drink coffee in the evening is if I go to a nice restaurant. Coffee seems a lot more complicated these days. When I was younger it was just coffee. Now it’s latte, frappucino and all kinds of other strange words. Activities about the text

Joyce Carol Oates was born near Lockport, N.Y. on June 16, 1938. From an early age Oates had a love for writing, and as a young child she would illustrate stories with drawings and paintings. During high school she wrote a number of short stories although none was published.
While studying for her master's degree in English at the University of Wisconsin, Oates met her husband. The couple settled in Detroit in 1962 and the city served as the setting for several of her short stories and novels.
Between 1968 and 1978 Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada. In 1978 she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she continues to teach in the creative writing program.
In a book review Oates wrote: "Telling stories, I discovered at the age of three or four, is a way of being told stories. One picture yields another; one set of words another set of words. Like our dreams the stories we tell are also the stories we are told."
Joyce Carol Oates has published over 30 novels and novellas, including a series of experimental suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith.
When a reporter called her a "workaholic," she replied, "I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word."

Children all over the world are increasingly at risk from a lack of critical social protection, leaving them vulnerable to under-age marriage, illegal labour practices and other lifechanging hardship, UN agencies UNICEF and ILO said on Wednesday.
The warning from the UN Children’s Fund and the International Labour Organization outlines the devastating impacts on youngsters’ health, education and nutrition, when welfare safety nets are not in place.
The agencies cited new data showing that between 2016 and 2020, an additional 50 million children missed out on child benefits, driving up the total number to 1.46 billion, globally.
Factors that have contributed to growing insecurity for children in recent years include the COVID-19 emergency, the global cost-of-living crisis, conflict, displacement and climate change.
And according to the joint ILO and UNICEF report, every region in the world saw child and family benefits fall or stagnate between 2016 and 2020.
This has created the very real risk that no country is on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal of achieving substantial social protection coverage by 2030, the UN agencies said.

Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 20, 1905. During most of her childhood she spent half of each year in New Orleans, in a boarding home run by her aunts, and half in New York City.
Hellman studied at New York University and Columbia University without completing a degree . In 1925 she began her writing career by reviewing books for the New York Herald Tribune. Her short stories were published in the magazine The Paris Comet.
As a playwright, Hellman first gained success with The Children's Hour, a story in which a spoiled child attacks her teachers through destructive gossip.
In 1936-37 Hellman traveled in Europe. She met Ernest Hemingway and other American writers living in Paris, visited Spain, where she witnessed the horrors of the civil war, and traveled in the Soviet Union.
In 1952 Hellman was called to appear before House of Un-American Activities. She refused to reveal the names of associates and friends in the theater who might have Communist associations, but she wasn't charged with contempt of Congress.
Hellman was blacklisted from the late 1940s to the 1960s. When her income virtually disappeared, she had to sell her home.
Hellman died on June 30, 1984.

Ambrose Bierce was born on June 24, 1842, in Meigs County, Ohio.
He was raised in poverty on a farm in Indiana, and grew to hate farm life. He found his way through his teenage years by reading books. When he was old enough, he left home to live with his uncle, and later attended a military academy for a year, and then dropped out. After that he worked odd jobs here and there.
In 1861 the Civil War broke out and Bierce enlisted in the Union Army. He was a great help in the war, rose through the ranks, and won many honors. Bierce was deeply shocked by what he saw during the war, and afterwards wrote several short stories based on this experience. Due to a severe injury to his head, he had to return home.
Later he moved to San Francisco, and in 1867 decided to get into journalism and started contributing to papers. He wrote many short stories, as well as articles and editorials.
In 1871 he married and lived with his family in England for four years.
Back in California Bierce wrote for the "San Francisco Examiner." He was the local satirist, and was prominent among the writers of California's "Literary Frontier." He established himself as a kind of literary dictator of the West Coast and was so respected and feared as a critic that his judgement could "make or break" a young author's reputation.
After his divorce in 1905, and the deaths of two of his sons, Bierce decided to go to Mexico in 1913 to leave behind his American life. He was never heard from again. There were many rumors of his death. Some believed he committed suicide, and some believed he was killed. The estimated date of his death is sometime in January of 1914, but his death will forever remain a mystery.