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New extremely distant Solar System object found during hunt for Planet X

Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, was announced …

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Hurricane Florence -Currently moving across the Atlantic Ocean and toward the east coast of the United States

Hurricane Florence is currently a powerful Category 4 hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean, threatening the Southeastern United States and the U.S. Mid-Atlantic states. The sixth named storm, third hurricane and the first major hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, Florence originated from a strong tropical wave that emerged off the west coast of Africa …

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Brazil’s National Museum Engulfed by a massive Fire !

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum, Brazil’s National Museum has been consumed by a massive fire destroying much of its 20 million archived artifacts – losses were too great to be calculated The museum, which is located in Rio de Janeiro, is a former a royal palace that was converted to a museum 200 …

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Visitors to the Museum’s Spitzer Hall of Human Origins can see how modern humans differ from early humans and primate relatives, including in our ability to walk upright. D. Finnin/© AMNH

When Did Human Feet Become “Made for Walking”?

How and when did early humans start walking upright? For clues, researchers have been looking at feet—and, more specifically, at toes. Bipedalism was a critical step in human evolution, and one that affected so many subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage, from social behavior to the development of material culture, says Sergio Almécija, a senior research …

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228 Million years old Fossil Turtle didn’t have a shell yet, but had the first Toothless Turtle Beak !

There are a couple of key features that make a turtle a turtle: its shell, for one, but also its toothless beak. A newly-discovered fossil turtle that lived 228 million years ago is shedding light on how modern turtles developed these traits. It had a beak, but while its body was Frisbee-shaped, its wide ribs …

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Geologists uncover new clues about largest Mass Extinction ever

A new study could help explain the driving force behind the largest mass extinction in the history of earth, known as the End-Permian Extinction. The event, also known as the Great Dying, occurred around 250 million years ago when a massive volcanic eruption in what is today the Russian province of Siberia sent nearly 90 …

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A timescale for the origin and evolution of all of life on Earth

A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has used a combination of genomic and fossil data to explain the history of life on Earth, from its origin to the present day. Palaeontologists have long sought to understand ancient life and the shared evolutionary history of life as a whole. However, the …

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Old Species Learn New Tricks Very Slowly

A quick look at the fossil record shows that no species lasts forever. On average, most species exist for around a million years, although some species persist for much longer. A new study published in Scientific Reports from paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama shows that young species can take advantage of new opportunities …

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