The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the days’ headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“Consider this fact of modern life: Nearly all of the technological products that we buy and use are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. They are built specifically to fail after a relatively short period — one year, two, maybe five. If you doubt that, think about how often you have to replace your smartphone. Gadgets are designed to die.”
January 5, 2018. Links to today's headline stories from around the world on the threats, opportunities, and dangers facing our fragile planet –along with an occasional dash of humor, popular culture, and an intriguing conspiracy theory or two. Today's coverage includes Human Hibernation Could Get Us to Mars, Six Scientific Mysteries We Still Haven’t Solved, Hidden Human Workforce Powering AI, Joe Rogan Podcast on AI Conspiracy Theories.
As the "Land Down Under," Australia is an island continent, so ancient visitors would have to arrived by sea, a long way from where humans first evolved in Africa. Migration to Australia would have required some remarkable ingenuity. Archaeologists have uncovered new evidence that could push the date of human habitation in Australia possibly as far as 80,000 years ago. The findings, that involve ancient tools and artifacts unearthed from Kakadu National Park in Australia's Northern Territory, suggest people crossed over from south Asia at a time that was cooler and wetter, with lower sea levels allowing easier sea crossings.
The two merging galaxy clusters individually consist of hundreds of galaxies, each as large or larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, said Burns of CU Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. Individual galaxy clusters, which can include thousands of galaxies, are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe. “Energetically speaking, galaxy cluster merging events are the biggest bangs in the universe since the Big Bang,” said Burns. “These are massive, very dynamic systems that continue to evolve to this day.”
