Badlands National Park in South Dakota is getting closer to getting the International Dark Sky Park certification.
The park is in the final stages of that certification process, a park ranger said Monday.
According to the Badlands National Park Conservancy, more than 7,500 stars are visible on any given night in the Badlands.
Ranger Lydia Jones told South Dakota Public Media there are “a lot of people that are becoming increasingly interested in astronomy and in dark skies, and are seeking out these places like Badlands that have dark skies.”
The Badlands National Park Conservancy is overseeing that proposal before the Dark Sky Association
Around 80 percent of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way, and nearly half of the U.S. has light-polluted night skies.
Becoming an International Dark Sky Park is a multi-step process. One of the criteria is that visitors can see the Milky Way with the unaided eye on an average night.
Jones added that nearly every wildlife species in the park benefits from less light pollution.
**A University of Nebraska research team has received a $4 million grant to develop a vaccine that can protect against multiple strains of bird flu
That five-year project is being pursued because health officials say bird flu could trigger the next pandemic.
The National Institutes of Health awarded funding to the director of the Nebraska Center for Virology, Dr. Eric Weaver, to continue research on a vaccine that may last decades. Weaver and his team's approach includes a comprehensive study of the flu virus' evolution from 1930 to 2021 – which is a key difference from traditional vaccine development.
The vaccine's delivery method also sets it apart. Rather than injecting the vaccine directly, Weaver's team loads it into a weakened common cold virus.
That approach is key to activating both sides of the immune system: with antibodies, which attack invaders in the bloodstream, and also T-cells, which hunt down infected cells directly.
