Science
NASA scientist warns Earth is due for ‘extinction-level’ event
A NASA scientist is warning that Earth is due for an “extinction-level” event like a comet or asteroid strike — and claims there won’t be anything we can do to stop it. Joseph Nuth, an award-winning scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told attendees during Monday’s annual...
An acid rainstorm lasting 100,000 years melted snowball Earth to let life emerge
An era of acid rain showering the whole world may have been all it took to push Earth from a giant snowball-like state towards the environment we know today. Intense chemical weathering is the likely cause of the end of a period known as the Marinoan glaciation, which happened form 650 to 635 million years ago, according to a...
Dinosaur tail complete with feathers trapped in amber discovered at Myanmar marketplace
A piece of amber containing a dinosaur tail covered in feathers has been discovered at a marketplace in Myanmar, where it was destined to become a piece of jewellery or a curiosity. The dinosaur is believed to have been a juvenile non-flying dinosaur that lived 99 million years ago. The piece of amber, which is no bigger than...
Ancient astronomers’ records show days are getting LONGER
ASTRONOMICAL records dating back to 750 BC have shown the speed of Earth’s spinning is gradually slowing down… making the length of each day LONGER. The time it takes our world to complete a full rotation has increased every 100 years, due to friction caused by the ocean’s tidal systems and solid mass...
Child mummy sheds light on the ancient history of deadly smallpox
A child mummy from the 17th century has shed a new light on the history of smallpox. Although the disease has been documented in ancient civilisations, scientists now think that this chronology is incorrect and that the virus that causes smallpox diversified more recently than previously thought. Smallpox is the first disease...
Greenland’s ice sheet once did a vanishing trick that lasted 280,000 years
Two studies this week on the history of Greenland's ice sheet, home to the some of the world's fastest-melting glaciers, have found that at least once almost the whole country was laid bare of ice for hundreds of thousands of years. The pair of studies are published together in the journal Nature. The first, led by...
Alien life could be found in the clouds of failed stars, according to scientists
If we're going to one day find life beyond Earth, then we need to know where to look, and scientists have identified another potential habitat where aliens could be lurking. That habitat is the upper atmosphere of cold brown dwarfs — massive stellar objects that are somewhere between planets and stars in size, but...
Dinosaurs may have survived extinction events by having a huge range of body sizes
A single dinosaur species contained a huge amount of diversity in terms of the size that the animals grew to, a new study has found. This sets dinosaurs apart from birds, which lost these broad ranges in size within a species or genus, according to a paper published in the journal PNAS. In the study the authors focused on the...
Lascaux cave paintings still hide secrets more than 70 years after their discovery
Lascaux cave paintings are perhaps the greatest masterpiece of parietal art ever found. They have fascinated generations of people and puzzled prehistorians since their discovery in September 1940, by a group of four local boys and their dog. Beautiful, colourful depictions of animals as well as mysterious symbols and...
Mystery of 20 million years of missing fossils solved with five new species
Researchers have found fossils of five new species that date from a period that previously represented a large gap in the fossil record, filling in crucial details of the first stages of animals that walked on land on four legs. The gap was more than 20 million years, just after a mass extinction event about 358 million years...
Elon Musk’s OpenAI unveils new virtual playground to train computers to use apps like a human would
Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $1bn non-profit OpenAI has unveiled a new virtual world called Universe that trains an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to use computers and applications the way a human would. Announced on Monday (5 December), the tool will include a thousand different environments and will focus on reinforcement...
The Sahara Desert used to be lush and full of vegetation – researchers find clues to what killed it
The Sahara Desert was a vast, rich grassland with plenty of rainfall just 6,000 years ago. Then it suddenly turned into the bleak and arid desert it is today. This transition was due to a shift in the circulation in the tropical atmosphere, researchers say. A new model of how tropical rain belts shift over time shows that a...
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