Saturday, May 13, 2017

A 400000-year-old skull fragment found in Portugal points to mystery people and other top stories.

  • A 400000-year-old skull fragment found in Portugal points to mystery people

    A 400000-year-old skull fragment found in Portugal points to mystery people
    A skull fragment from nearly half a million years ago points to the possibility of a previously unknown species of early humans.THE discovery of a skull fragment from nearly half a million years ago points to a previously unknown subspecies of early humans and offers tantalising hints about a possible ancestor of the Neanderthals, scientists say.The 400,000-year-old fossil was unearthed from a cave site in Portugal in 2014 using ancient stone hand axes, and marks the oldest human cranium fossil ..
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  • End of the Great Barrier Reef? More than 90 per cent of Earth's coral reefs 'dead by 2050'

    End of the Great Barrier Reef? More than 90 per cent of Earth's coral reefs 'dead by 2050'
    And the remaining reefs will also vanish unless something is done immediately to protect them. Biologists from across the globe made the stark warning after the worst global 'bleaching' event on record, which peaked between 2015 and last year, but is still going on now. Bleaching occurs when water temperatures rise by only a few degrees, causing the coral to expel the colourful, nourishing algae and leaving it's white skeleton fatally exposed to the elements.Coral is also sensitive to over-fishi..
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  • Welcome to Pan: Saturn's Ravioli-Shaped Moon

    Welcome to Pan: Saturn's Ravioli-Shaped Moon
    Cassini gave us a good look a Saturn's moon Pan last week . . . and what a strange world it is. Cassini's close-up of Saturn's moon Pan. NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute Who ordered that? The universe served up a piece of astro-pareidolia last week, when humanity got its first closeup look at Saturn's tiny moon Pan. Appropriately named after the  half-man, half-goat satyr from Greek mythology, Pan is nestled in the Encke (pronounced EN-key) Gap within Saturn's A ring. NASA's Cassini..
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  • Scientists Need You to Solve This Chess Problem and Find the Key to Human Consciousness

    Scientists Need You to Solve This Chess Problem and Find the Key to Human Consciousness
    Consciousness is the most important quality of a human being, but scientists have struggled for millennia to explain it - where does it come from, and how does it arise? We've seen studies try to pinpoint the physical location of consciousness in the brain, and one physicist has even proposed that it's a new state of matter. And now scientists want the public to solve a chess problem that computers find impossible so we can figure out what separates our minds from machines.  "If you put this pu..
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  • SpaceX scraps launch due to high winds

    SpaceX scraps launch due to high winds
    Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, has delayed the launch of a rocket set to carry a commercial communications satellite into orbit, because of high winds at its Florida launch site.Wind gusts of up to 40km/h at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida forced SpaceX to scrub the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket that was to have put into orbit EchoStar XXIII, a commercial communications satellite for EchoStar Corporation, the privately owned company said on Twitter."Standing down due to high w..
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  • Humans to blame for bulk of Arctic sea ice loss, study finds

    Humans to blame for bulk of Arctic sea ice loss, study finds
    Human activity is overwhelming contributing to the demise of Arctic ice, a new study has found. Picture: Corey WilsonNATURAL changes in the environment are responsible for about 40 per cent of Arctic sea ice loss, while humans are to blame for the rest, a climate study said this week.The paper, based on model simulations of different climate conditions, was a rare attempt to quantify the relative contributions of humans and nature to the dramatic decline and could have a major impact on future r..
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  • Humpback Whales Are Forming Mysterious 'Super-Groups', and No One Can Explain It

    Humpback Whales Are Forming Mysterious 'Super-Groups', and No One Can Explain It
    Humpback whales are known for being the loners of the sea - while they tend to migrate, feed, and mate in groups, they spend much of their existence in solitude, or in small, short-lived groups of up to seven individuals. But something could be brewing in our oceans, because scientists are reporting 22 separate instances of humpback 'super-groups' that defy explanation - never-before-seen groups of 20 to 200 whales all appearing off the southwest coast of South Africa in recent years.  "I've ne..
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  • NASA finds India's missing lunar orbiter with Earth-bound radar

    NASA finds India's missing lunar orbiter with Earth-bound radar
    NASA finds India's missing lunar orbiter with Earth-bound radar Now that we can spot things the size of a fridge 380,000km away, dodging debris or asteroids should be easier Lost and found: ISRO's Chandrayaan-1 has been missing since 2009 In 2009, a lunar orbiter launched by India went quiet and never heard from again. Fast-forward eight years and NASA say it's spotted it using an Earth-based radar. The Indian Space Research Organisation's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter was supposed to spend two year..
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  • 'They died of thirst': Extreme conditions wipe out forest over 1000 kilometres

    'They died of thirst': Extreme conditions wipe out forest over 1000 kilometres
    The death of mangrove forests stretched over 1000 kilometres of Australia's northern coast a year ago has been blamed on extreme conditions including record temperatures.About 7400 hectares of mangroves strung along the Gulf of Carpentaria died in a single month in early 2016 because of the unusual warmth, a prolonged drought and an El Nino that reduced local sea levels by about 20 centimetres, said Norman Duke, head of the Mangrove Research hub at James Cook University. Play Video D..
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  • Dwarf star found orbiting closest to black hole

    Dwarf star found orbiting closest to black hole
    New York, March 14 (IANS) Researchers have found evidence of a white dwarf star orbiting a likely black hole at a distance of only 961,000 km -- just about 2.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.In a tightest orbital dance ever witnessed for a black hole and a companion star, the star whips around the black hole at an astonishing speed -- about two orbits an hour, said the study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."This white dwarf is so clos..
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Queensland storm: 'Very dangerous' weather brings heavy rainfall, flash flooding to south-east .Winx reigns again in the rain .
Scientists Made Something Colder Than Ever Thought Possible .Great Barrier Reef authority warns of 'moderate to severe' bleaching .

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