Posted on May 1, 2022 in Alien Life, Astrobiology, Biology, Climate Change, Evolution, Extraterrestrial Life, Mass Extinction, Origin of Life, Physics, Planet Earth, Science News, Technology
Today’s stories range from What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago to What Ancient Mass Extinctions Tell Us about the Future to Frank Drake on What Intelligent Aliens Would Mean, and much more. The Planet Earth Report provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
Astrophysicists May be on the Verge of a Massive Alien Breakthrough –“That’s the conclusion of a new paper penned by a team of researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright and his colleagues argue that technological clues could be both common and easier to detect in space than biological signatures.”
Lady Sapiens –Prehistoric women were hunters and artists as well as mothers, book reveals. French book and documentary coming to the UK in September seeks to ‘debunk the simplistic division’ of gender roles, reports The Guardian. “The historians and film-makers behind Lady Sapiens: the Woman in Prehistory, a French book and documentary to be published in the UK in September, say they are now seeking to debunk the simplistic division of roles by highlighting advances in the study of bones, graves, art and ethnography often ignored in the public sphere.”
Our Efforts to Find Alien Life Have Gone Nowhere. This New Strategy Could Change That, reports The Daily Beast
Blasting out Earth’s location with the hope of reaching aliens is a controversial idea – two teams of scientists are doing it anyway, reports The Conversation.
What Ancient DNA Reveals About Life in Africa 20,000 Years Ago –Newly sequenced African aDNA shows dynamic ancient migratory patterns and interactions around the Later Stone Age that shaped human history.
Record-Breaking Jumping Robot Can Leap a 10-Story Building –To propel itself higher than any known engineered jumper or animal can, it had to ignore the limits of biology, reports Scientific American.
What is Earth Day? Everything to know about the holiday, its history and this year’s theme, reports USA Today –“Friday marks Earth’s very own holiday, and this year’s theme is “Invest In Our Planet.” Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day’s global organizer EarthDay.org, wants this year’s message to give people around the world hope.
Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements–The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will be the first to produce and analyze hundreds of isotopes crucial to physics, reports Nature.
Started Out as a Fish. How Did It End Up Like This? –A meme about the transitional fossil Tiktaalik argues that although we did come out of the sea, we aren’t doing just fine, reports The New York Times. “Tiktaalik roseae, the extinct limbed fish that flopped its way onto land one day 375 million years ago. We’ve been flopping ever since.”
Scientists Warn of Looming Mass Ocean Extinction –If greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed, temperature spikes could bring the first such mass extinction in 250 million year, reports Scientific American. “
What Ancient Mass Extinctions Tell Us about the Future, reports Peter Brannen for Scientific American. “Carbon dioxide has done plenty of damage before.
Seven ocean mysteries scientists haven’t solved yet, reports Vox.xom–“The ocean is like an alien world within our own. Many of its creatures are still unknown to us — both in kind and number. Their behaviors and adaptations remain inexplicable. Even the very contours of this world are still unmapped: We probably know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the ocean floor.”
The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives Ancient humans may have evolved to slumber efficiently — and in a crowd “On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone,” reports Knowable.com
An Experiment That Could Confirm the Fifth State of Matter in the Universe – And Change Physics As We Know It-reports SciTechDaily –“Dr. Melvin Vopson, a physicist, has already published findings indicating that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the universe’s smallest known building blocks, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. Now he has designed an experiment — which if proved correct — means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.
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