Shrinking glaciers are 'categorical evidence' of climate change, study says - eco and other top stories.

• Shrinking glaciers are 'categorical evidence' of climate change, study says - eco

  

  Using records of glacier length that go back over 400 years, researchers show that shrinking of mountain glaciers in five continents could almost certainly not have happened if the Earth wasn’t warming up. The findings suggest that future reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should have stronger conclusions around how human-caused climate change is affecting the world’s glaciers, the researchers say. Attribution The study, just published in Nature Geoscience, is the..

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• NASA's Curiosity rover finds more evidence that Mars was once habitable

  

  As NASA's Curiosity rover makes its way up a layered mountain on Mars, the little bot is finding even more signs that the Red Planet was once a habitable place — potentially capable of hosting microbial life billions of years ago. The rover has been ...

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• Why I'm trying to preserve US federal climate data before Trump takes office

  

  When it comes to climate science, President-elect Donald Trump has been a purveyor of conspiracy theories for years. He's called human-caused climate change a Chinese hoax and refused to acknowledge the existence of the California drought, promising farmers there that, as president, he would "open up the water". He's vowed to eliminate the EPA and the Energy Department and "cancel" the Paris Agreement on climate change.Since the election, Trump has been relentlessly converting those anti-scienc..

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• Huge black hole may have turned star into 'spaghetti'

  

  A spinning, supermassive black hole may have sucked in a star and “spaghettified” it, creating an incredibly bright light in a far-off galaxy, astronomers announced on Monday. The light was so bright that astronomers first thought that it was the explosion of the brightest supernova in recorded history. It was 20 times brighter, at its peak, than the amount of light put out by all of the Milky Way, according to the European Southern Observatory. But now, they have a stronger theory. If a spinni..

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• Planet In The Making? Rings Around Young Distant Star Hint At Planetary Formation In Progress

  

  Rice University astronomers expressed that planet formation is taking place at a distant star after spotting dark rings around the star and mapping them for gases. It was further reinforced by the fact that the rings around HD 163296 were bereft of dust. The target star, away by nearly 400 light-years from Earth, has a large disk of dust and gas, as evidenced in the Atacama Large Millimeter and Submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope images. The team believes that the upcoming planets might be gas..

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• Starfish swirls, stretchy protozoa dazzle in video competition

  

  Every year science and art collide in the Nikon Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition in which brief videos shot through a microscope battle it out to see which will rise to the top. This year's top three winners include hypnotic water patterns made by an eight-week-old starfish larva, a predatory ciliate stretching its rubbery neck to gobble up prey, and a blooming fungus. This is the fifth year the competition is running. It is a spinoff of Nikon's Small World Photography competit..

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Perth bus crash: Nine passengers, driver taken to hospital after ... .	One dead, one critical, after separate Perth beach rescues .
Perth start-up develops 'Bloomberg terminal' for lawyers .	No new funding or climate commitments in Great Barrier Reef update .