The average American adult generates enough carbon through their day-to-day activities to melt approximately 50 square meters (538 square feet) of Arctic sea ice per year, researchers from the  Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany claim in a new study.

In fact, as lead author and climate scientist Dr. Dirk Notz and his colleagues reported Thursday in the journal Science, every metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by people is directly responsible for the loss of three square meters (32 square feet) of Arctic sea ice.

The study was designed to demonstrate the direct impact that that individuals are having on the global climate, the Institute explained in a statement, and also demonstrates that driving a motor vehicle just 90 miles causes nearly a square foot of Arctic ice to melt, CBS News added.

Dr. Notz explained that his team used observations, statistics and 30 different computer models to calculate how much sea ice was lost per ton of CO2 emitted, then used mathematical formulas to determine the impact of the average individual’s actions on that sea ice when it is at its lowest point during the month of September, according to CBS and the Los Angeles Times.

Study reveals how individual actions contribute to climate change

“For us, this is really the first time that we do have an intuitive understanding of how our individual actions really contribute to global warming,” Dr. Notz, who authored the new study with Julienne Stroeve from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado and University College London, said in an interview with the Times.

“So far, when we talked about global warming, it was always these very big numbers, like billions of tons of carbon dioxide – or very small numbers, like 0.1 degree of temperature change,” he added. “But now suddenly, with this three-square-meter loss per ton of CO2, it gives a very, very concrete and intuitive understanding of how we all cause Arctic sea ice to melt.”

As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide traps heat in the planet’s atmosphere, causing temperatures to increase. This, in turn, causes ice around the poles to melt and the sea level to rise, resulting in even more pronounced changes to the climate, according to experts in the field. Human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, is responsible for most of the CO2 emitted worldwide, but researchers had never calculated the impact of the average person – until now.

“Climate change has often felt like a rather abstract notion,” Stroeve said in a statement. “Our results allow us to overcome this perception. For example, it is now straight-forward to calculate that the carbon dioxide emissions for each seat on a return flight from, say, London to San Francisco causes about 5 square meters of Arctic sea ice to disappear.”

The study authors also examined the link between CO2 emissions and sea-ice loss. As Dr. Notz explained, “Put simply, for each ton of carbon dioxide emission, the climate warms a little bit. To compensate for this warming, the sea-ice edge moves northward to a region with less incoming solar radiation. This then causes the sea-ice area to shrink. Simple geometric reasons cause these processes to combine to the observed linearity.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Long known to be a good source of iron and other vitamins and minerals, spinach is believed to lead to stronger muscles, improved eyesight, and healthy blood pressure – and in the right hands, it can be used as a bomb detector, according to a new Nature Materials study.

As BBC News and the Daily Mail are reporting, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) implanted tiny tubes into the leaves of spinach plants which enabled them to pick up nitro-aromatics – chemicals which are found in landmines and buried explosives.

Specifically, they embedded nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes into the leaves. As the plants gather groundwater, scientists can tell in real time if it contains any nitro-aromatics. Shining a laser onto the leaves causes the implanted nanotubes to give off near-infrared fluorescent light, which can be detected wirelessly by a special camera outfitted to a handheld device.

That device, which can either be an inexpensive Raspberry Pi computer or a smartphone which has had its infrared filter removed, then generates an email to the user to notify him or her about the chemical levels detected in the groundwater. Study co-author professor Michael Strano said that the work was an important proof-of-concept that could lead to bigger, better things.

‘Plant nanobionics’ can be used to predict drought, detect pollutants

In a statement, he called the new study “a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier,” noting that plants could be altered to warn about drought conditions or pollutants. In fact, as Strano told BBC News, “our paper outlines how one could engineer plants like this to detect virtually anything.”

Previously, the professor’s lab successfully demonstrated how carbon nanotubes could be used as sensors to detect TNT, hydrogen peroxide, and even sarin nerve gas. They do so by changing the way they glow when exposed to a specific target molecule, demonstrating a new approach to engineering which the MIT researchers have dubbed “plant nanobionics.”

“The plants could be used for defense applications, but also to monitor public spaces for terrorism-related activities, since we show both water and airborne detection. Such plants could be used to monitor groundwater seepage from buried munitions or waste that contains nitro-aromatics,” the professor told BBC News.

With their current set-up, his team said that they can detect signals from the plant at a distance of about one meter, but noted that they are working to expand that distance. Furthermore, they think that the approach could also be adapted to engineer other types of sensors, or even to create other types of bionic plants, including those that could change colors or pick up radio signals.

“Plants are very environmentally responsive. They know that there is going to be a drought long before we do. They can detect small changes in the properties of soil and water potential,” Strano explained. “If we tap into those chemical signaling pathways, there is a wealth of information to access.”

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Image credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT

Even the best distant runners and long-distance swimmers on the planet need a break every once in a while, but scientists have found a species of bird which fly during exceptionally long periods of time during its annual migration without needing to stop and catch its breath.

According to NPR and National Geographic, researchers from Lund University in Sweden have monitored the flight patterns of the common swift (Apus apus) and found that the birds can spend nearly their entire 10-month nonbreeding period soaring through the skies without stopping.

Specifically, the husband-and-wife team of Anders Hedenström and Susanne Åkesson fitted 19 swifts with lightweight data loggers in 2013, which they were able to use to identify the position of the birds and which recorded their body position, activity, and acceleration levels to determine if they were flying or resting at any given time.

This bird don’t stop to eat, drink, or maybe even sleep.

As they reported this week in the journal Current Biology, they found that the birds spent at most 0.64% of their migration on the ground, and that some of the birds were almost constantly active during this time. In fact, one of them rested for just four days total between September 2013 and April 2014 and stopped for just two hours during the same time period the following year.

“They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air,” Åkesson explained to Nat Geo on Thursday. “They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground” because their wings are too long and their legs too short to take flight from a flat surface, she added.

Study findings suggest that swifts sleep while in midair

Some of the swifts were forced to take breaks more frequently, Åkesson and Hedenström noted. They believe that this was because their tail and wing feathers had not been completely replaced following their annual molt, compromising their ability to remain airborne. Even so, not one of them spent even 1% of their 10-month nonbreeding period on the ground.

Common swifts are known to fly south from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, NPR said, but they apparently do not land there, as scientists have yet to discover any roosting sites in that region of the world. The rarity of the stops, the authors told Nat Geo, suggests that they typically stop only for bad weather – indicating that the species may not need to land in order to sleep.

In fact, Åkesson and Hedenström wrote that it is unclear “when and to what extent swifts need to sleep,” and they’re not alone in that regard, according to reports. Earlier studies have discovered that alpine swifts (which are twice the size of common swifts) may have flown from Switzerland to Africa without stopping for 200 days. These lengthy nonstop flights indicate that swifts might be able to sleep while flying, much like frigate birds have been proven to do.

The researchers also found that the birds appeared to be less active during the day than they were at nighttime, which they explained was “most likely due to prolonged gliding episodes during the daytime when soaring in thermals.” They also wrote that the results “have important implications for understanding physiological adaptations to endure prolonged periods of flight, including the need to sleep while airborne.”

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Image credit: Stefan Berndtsson

Paleontologists have confirmed the discovery of the first ever fossilized dinosaur brain tissue, a 130-million-year-old specimen that was discovered in the UK and which resembled a tiny brown pebble, according to new research reported Thursday by the Geological Society of London.

According to the Guardian and the New York Times, the brain tissue was originally discovered in East Sussex, England by an amateur fossil hunter named Jamie Hiscocks in 2004. The fossil was a cast of the dinosaur’s brain cavity which appeared to contain mineral tissues, the reports said.

Forensic analysis of the specimen confirmed the presence of blood vessels and capillaries, tissues from the outer cortex, and the tough tissues that surround the brain itself and help keep it in place (meninges). The tissues were said to be similar to those found in modern birds and crocodiles.

“As we can’t see the lobes of the brain itself, we can’t say for sure how big this dinosaur’s brain was,” University of Cambridge paleontologist Dr. David Norman, who co-led the research along with late University of Oxford Professor Martin Brasier before Brasier’s untimely death in 2004, said in a statement.

“Of course, it’s entirely possible that dinosaurs had bigger brains than we give them credit for,” he added, “but we can’t tell from this specimen alone. What’s truly remarkable is that conditions were just right in order to allow preservation of the brain tissue – hopefully this is the first of many such discoveries.”

Creature’s brain tissue survived because it was ‘pickled’

The rather ordinary looking, brown, pebble-shaped fossil was discovered by Hiscocks near the seaside town of Bexhill in East Sussex 12 years ago. It is believed to have belonged to a species similar to Iguanodon – a large herbivore which lived during the Early Cretaceous Period.

Researchers were stunned by the discovery because finding any fossilized soft tissue is rare and the odds of discovering preserved brain tissue are “incredibly small,” according to co-author and Cambridge scientist Dr. Alex Liu, a doctoral student of Brasher’s. Dr. Liu added that “the discovery of this specimen is astonishing.”

So exactly how were this creature’s brain tissues preserved. The study authors believe that it had essentially been “pickled” in a bog- or swamp-like body of water that had a high acid content and low amounts of oxygen. This would have allowed the soft brain tissues to have been mineralized before completely decaying, making it so that they could be preserved all this time.

“What we think happened is that this particular dinosaur died in or near a body of water, and its head ended up partially buried in the sediment at the bottom,” Dr. Norman explained. “Since the water had little oxygen and was very acidic, the soft tissues of the brain were likely preserved and cast before the rest of its body was buried in the sediment.”

With the help of colleagues from the University of Western Australia, the UK researchers used scanning electron microscope (SEM) technology to identify the meninges and strands of collagen and blood vessels. They also discovered what they believe could be neural tissues and capillaries, and determined the structural similarities between modern-day dinosaur descendants.

“I have always believed I had something special… but it wasn’t until years later that its true significance came to be realized,” said Hiscocks, who was also a co-author on the newly published paper. “In his initial email to me, Martin asked if I’d ever heard of dinosaur brain cells being preserved in the fossil record. I knew exactly what he was getting at. I was amazed to hear this coming from a world renowned expert like him.”

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Image credit: Cambridge University

Global wildlife populations have decreased by more than half since 1970, and will likely fall by two-thirds that number in some instances before the end of the decade, according to a new report released earlier this week by the WWF and the the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

According to BBC News and New Scientist, the groups’ Living Planet Index assessment found that overall populations of wildlife have fallen 58% over the past 46 years, and that most of those losses have involved species living in lakes, rivers, and wetlands. The primary causes, the WWF and ZSL said, are habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution, and man-made climate change.

The assessment measured population numbers of 14,152 populations of 3,706 species of birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and mammals from all over the world, the media outlets reported. The results show an average decrease in population numbers of 2% per year. Furthermore, by 2020, as much as 67% of the vertebrate species populations may wind up being wiped out in a “mass extinction” event unless the damage caused by human activity is reversed, they added.

“For the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we face a global mass extinction of wildlife,” Mike Barrett, WWF-UK’s science and policy director, said Thursday in a statement. “We ignore the decline of other species at our peril – for they are the barometer that reveals our impact on the world that sustains us.”

“Humanity’s misuse of natural resources is threatening habitats, pushing irreplaceable species to the brink and threatening the stability of our climate,” he added. “We know how to stop this. It requires governments, businesses and citizens to rethink how we produce, consume, measure success and value the natural environment. In the UK, this demands a serious plan to strengthen protection for habitats and species and new measures to fast track low-carbon growth.”

Study’s findings called into question by some experts

The report warned that unsustainable fishing and agriculture are increasingly affecting species, and as New Scientists reported, mining, pollution and climate change are also factors which are leading to the demise en masse of creatures such as African elephants in Tanzania (which have been victims of poaching) and Brazil’s maned (which are losing habitat to farming).

Humans are also being victimized by their own activities, the report said, due to the increasing losses of plants needed for breathable air, as well as sources of drinkable water and food. Some of the news is good, however, as the study found a slight increase in grassland species over the last 12 years, which is being attributed to conservation efforts for some African mammals.

Terrestrial species have seen a population decrease of 40% since 1970, the study found. Avian populations are also on the decline, but freshwater species have seen an 80% decline during the last four-plus decades. Wetland wildlife species have seen an increase in numbers since 2005, New Scientist said, while marine species have reportedly stabilized since 1988.

“Human behavior continues to drive the decline of wildlife populations globally, with particular impact on freshwater habitats,” ZSL science director Professor Ken Norris said in a press release Thursday. “Importantly, however, these are declines – they are not yet extinctions,” he said, “and this should be a wake-up call to marshal efforts to promote the recovery of these populations.”

However, BBC News pointed out that the study had drawn criticism from some experts in the field, including Duke University conservation ecologist Stuart Pimm, who said that while some of the data was “sensible,” some of the numbers cited by the report were “very, very sketchy… They’re trying to pull this stuff in a blender and spew out a single number… It’s flawed.”

“If you look at where the data comes from… it is massively skewed towards western Europe,” Pimm told the British news outlet. “When you go elsewhere, not only do the data become far fewer, but in practice they become much, much sketchier… there is almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa, there is not much from the tropics, period. Any time you are trying to mix stuff like that, it is is very very hard to know what the numbers mean.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Statistics show that as many as nine out of 10 people are right-handed, and while it is difficult to say exactly when this particular preference first arose in humans, a new discovery by researchers from the University of Kansas reveals that it has been around for at least 1.8 million years.

Evidence to support the claim came in the form of an recently-found upper jawbone belonging to a human ancestor known as Homo habilis, which National Geographic explained lived in eastern and southern Africa between 1.4 and 2.4 million years ago, and which was believed to have been a regular user of stone tools (as suggested by their presence around the fossil discovery site).

Writing last week in the Journal of Human Evolution, KU anthropology professor David Frayer and his colleagues reported that the jawbone still contained its teeth, and that diagonal scratches (or, more formally, labial striations) on these teeth were likely made when the individual nicked them while using a stone tool held in his or her right hand.

“We think that tells us something further about lateralization of the brain,” Frayer, who was the lead author of the recently-published paper, said last Thursday in a statement. “We already know that Homo habilis had brain lateralization and was more like us than like apes,” he added. “This extends it to handedness, which is key,” because as he pointed out to Nat Geo, right-handedness, brain lateralization and language are linked – they “all fit together in a package.”

Findings could provide clues about other areas of human development

Frayer’s team identified the labial striations on the lip side of anterior teeth located in the upper jaw of a fossil known as OH-65, which was found near Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. The deep cut marks were found on the lip face of the upper front teeth, with most veering from the left down to the right, suggesting they were made with a tool held in the individual’s right hand.

More specifically, analysis of the scratches made using a microscope indicated that they were the result of the individual using a tool held in the right hand to cut food being held in the mouth and while he or she was pulling on it with the left hand. The subject (who was possibly female) made the marks by occasionally missing and striking the labial face, Frayer said.

Based on the direction of those marks, he added, it becomes apparent that the Homo habilis was right-handed, making this the oldest known evidence of a pre-Neanderthal with a dominant hand. Since the right hand is controlled by the brain’s left hemisphere, which is the same region of the brain that controls language, the discovery could provide some clues regarding the evolution of language in our ancestors.

“Handedness and language are controlled by different genetic systems, but there is a weak relationship between the two because both functions originate on the left side of the brain,” Frayer explained. “One specimen does not make an incontrovertible case, but as more research is done and more discoveries are made, we predict that right-handedness, cortical reorganization and language capacity will be shown to be important components in the origin of our genus.”

“We think we have the evidence for brain lateralization, handedness and possibly language, so maybe it all fits together in one picture,” he added. Scientists believe that it is likely that brain reorganization, tool use and dominant-handedness all occurred at an early point in our evolution, and the KU researchers may be close to finding the exact point where they occurred.

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Image credit: University of Kansas

Researchers who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking discovery that the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate may have been wrong after all, according to new research published last week in the peer-reviewed online journal Scientific Reports.

Using an analysis of Type Ia supernovae, a type of exploding star that is as heavy as the sun but smaller in size than the Earth, the two separate teams honored by the Nobel Committee reported that weaker-than-expected light detections were evidence that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, and that this acceleration was driven by a substance known as dark energy.

Those observations found 50 Type Ia supernovae that appeared to be less luminous than expect, but as part of their new study, Oxford physicist Professor Subir Sarkar and his colleagues looked at 740 such supernovae and found that the evidence supporting the hypothesis that the universe’s expansion is accelerating may not be quite as strong as the authors of the earlier work thought.

As Professor Sarkar explained in a statement, he and his co-authors “found that the evidence for accelerated expansion is, at most, what physicists call ‘3 sigma.’ This is far short of the ‘5 sigma’ standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance.”

“An analogous example… would be the recent suggestion for a new particle weighing 750 GeV based on data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,” he added. “It initially had even higher significance – 3.9 and 3.4 sigma in December last year – and stimulated over 500 theoretical papers. However, it was announced in August that new data shows that the significance has dropped to less than 1 sigma. It was just a statistical fluctuation, and there is no such particle.”

Scientists may have been ‘misled’ by Nobel Prize-winning discovery

While the professor admits that there is other evidence supporting the notion that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, including observations of the cosmic microwave background collected by the Planck satellite, he cautions that this data is “indirect, carried out in the framework of an assumed model, and the cosmic microwave background is not directly affected by dark energy.”

“So it is quite possible that we are being misled, and that the apparent manifestation of dark energy is a consequence of analyzing the data in an oversimplified theoretical model — one that was in fact constructed in the 1930s, long before there was any real data,” Professor Sarkar said. Adopting a new framework which does not assume that the universe is homogeneous and that its contents behave like ideal gases could explain all of these observations without the need for dark energy, he added.

“Naturally, a lot of work will be necessary to convince the physics community of this, but our work serves to demonstrate that a key pillar of the standard cosmological model is rather shaky,” the Oxford physicist concluded. “Hopefully this will motivate better analyses of cosmological data, as well as inspiring theorists to investigate more nuanced cosmological models.”

So is the universe’s expansion accelerating or not? The definitive answer may have to wait until 2024, when construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) observatory is expected to be completed. Located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the ultrasensitive E-ELT will use a “laser comb” and adaptive optics to directly measure the expansion rate of the universe over a 10- to 15-year period, according to the research team.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

The discovery of two sets of long-necked dinosaur fossils is shedding new light on how these massive creatures originally made their way to Australia approximately 100 million years ago, according to new research published online this week in the journal Scientific Reports.

Based on the remains, which were found in Queensland, the new species were classified as both sauropods (large plant eaters with long necks and tiny heads) and titanosaurs (making them some of the biggest dinosaurs ever to roam the Earth), BBC News and the Los Angeles Times said.

One of the two creatures, Savannasaurus elliottorum, is a previously undiscovered species that was named after the Elliott family, who discovered its fossils on their property while they were herding sheep. The creature’s skeleton was assembled from 17 pallets worth of bones encased in rock, and according to BBC News, the process took more than a decade to complete.

The other creature, Diamantinasaurus matildae, is the first Australian sauropod for which skull fragments had been discovered, the Times reported. Lead researcher Dr. Stephen Poropot of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum and his colleagues said that the specimen’s discovery has allowed them to learn more about the creature’s skeletal anatomy.

Unique species key to plotting sauropods’ migratory path

Thanks to the discovery of these new fossils, Dr. Poropot’s team was able to determine exactly when and how titanosaurs and other sauropods made their way to Australia. As it turns out, they only arrived approximately 100 million years ago – far later than other dinosaurs arrived there – and they most likely traveled from South America, by land, across Antarctica.

According to National Geographic, the researchers determined that these sauropods place on the family tree “strongly suggests” that they were descended from South American ancestors. If that were true, they would have traveled to their new home by land, and the only path available at the time would have been Antarctica, which thanks to global warming, would have been ice-free.

Dr. Poropat with the dinosaur’s vertebrae.

“By plotting the evolution of these sauropods against changes in the positions of the continents, we’ve possibly been able to constrain when these titanosaurs migrated,” Dr. Poropat explained to Nat Geo. However, he added that more analysis was required to fully understand these dinosaurs and that they now plan to comprehensively describe the specimens and confirm their species.

Savannasaurus has garnered the most interest, partially due to the fact that it is the new species, and partially due to the fact that it is rather unique among sauropods. As the authors explained, it was roughly 20 feet tall and weighed between 15-20 tons, but unlike other sauropods, it had very wide hips that probably gave it more stability. Furthermore, the creature’s bones were extremely thin in parts of its pelvis, and it likely had a sizable belly and complex digestive system.

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Image credit: Reconstruction by Travis R. Tischler / © Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History

By the narrowest of margins, last month was the hottest September in recorded history, NASA data has revealed, meaning that 11 of the last 12 months have seen record-breaking heat and all but assuring that 2016 will go down in the books as the warmest year since at least 1880.

According to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists with the US space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, September 2016 edged out September 2014 by just 0.004 degrees Celsius, placing the two months in a statistical tie. However, the past four week period was 0.91 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean from 1951-1980.

Since October 2015, 11 of the past 12 months have shattered monthly high-temperature records, with the lone exception being June 2016, according to GISS. While previous reports had claimed that June 2016 was the warmest such month in the 136-year history of modern record keeping, it was actually just the third hottest behind 2015 and 1998, based on updated climate data.

“Monthly rankings are sensitive to updates in the record, and our latest update to mid-winter readings from the South Pole has changed the ranking for June,” GISS director Gavin Schmidt explained in a statement. “We continue to stress that while monthly rankings are newsworthy, they are not nearly as important as long-term trends.”

Disagreement in monthly data, but annual record still likely to fall

However, as reported by the Huffington Post, Schmidt also tweeted that the data for September suggests that 2016 will almost certainly be the hottest ever recorded, as it has been approximately 1.25 degrees Celsius above the late 19th century mean through the year’s first nine months.

Should that happen – and barring a much-colder-than-average fourth quarter of the year, it will – it will be the third consecutive year that the record for hottest annual temperature was shattered, according to CNN.com reports. Average temperatures for 2015 were 0.90 degrees Celsius higher than the 20th-century average and 20% higher than the benchmark set the previous year.

Provided 2016 set the record, it would mean that 16 of the 17 hottest years ever recorded would have come since 2000, with 1998 being the lone exception. The last time that the planet shattered the record for the coldest year on record was 1911, the website noted. A thirdconsecutive record year would “confirm the longer term trends of climate change,” The Guardian said.

However, not all climate-recording agencies are in agreement. In fact, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is reporting that September 2016 was not the hottest month of its kind in recorded history. They claim that it was actually 0.04 degrees Celsius cooler than the previous September, which snapped a string of 16 straight record-setting months based on their data. Nonetheless, they say that 2016 is likely to be the hottest year ever.

“If each month from October through December matches the 1998 monthly values… 2016 would become the second warmest year on record, behind 2015 by 0.03°C (0.05°F),” NOAA wrote. But if those months matched “the 21st century monthly average,” they explained, “[then] 2016 would become the warmest year on record, surpassing 2015 by 0.01°C (0.02°F).”

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Image credit: NASA/NOAA

Using multiple different types of scanning technology, a group of researchers may (or may not) have discovered cavities in two separate areas of the Great Pyramid of Giza – presenting at least the possibility that previously undiscovered chambers exist in the ancient structure.

According to CNET and ScienceAlert, officials with the  Scan Pyramids project, a multinational effort to study the Great Pyramid (also known as the Khufu Pyramid) involving scientists from a variety of different universities and institutions, used infrared thermography, 3D simulation, and muon radiography imaging (a scan similar to an X-ray) to analyze the monument.

They discovered anomalies at two separate locations in the Pyramid: one located behind a gate in its north face and the other roughly 345 feet (105 meters) above the ground in the northeast edge of the structure. Both purported cavities are located far from the tombs and the main pathways in the structure, and there is no evidence that they are linked in any way, the reports said.

In a press release issued this past weekend, researchers said that they were able to “confirm the existence” of a “void” behind the north face of the Pyramid, and that they were still investigating to determine its exact size, shape, and position. Likewise, they said that they were able to confirm that there was “an unknown cavity” along the monument’s northeast edge.

Officials overseeing the project calling for additional analysis

Their scans, they explained, revealed “significant excess of muons” in the direction of the north face anomaly, and that further analysis determined that the “excess of muons, which could be interpreted as a void, was not statistical fluctuation or noise.” They added that the readings were in “the shape of a straight line,” which “strongly suggests… one or several voids.”

Similar techniques were used to detect the apparent cavity in the northeast edge of the Pyramid, which is also said to be of currently undetermined size and shape. While some might be tempted to suggest that the discovery is conclusive proof of that the monument contains secret chambers, some experts are skeptical of the team’s findings, according to Live Science.

The results, the website reported on Monday, “are more ambiguous,” and even the man in charge of overseeing the project, Egyptian antiquities minister Zahi Hawass, is apparently not yet totally convinced that the team has discovered actual cavities behind the monument’s walls. In actuality, he and his colleagues on the Scan Pyramids oversight team are urging caution, releasing a second press release to emphasize that additional work needs to be done to confirm the finding.

In that statement, they recommended extending the project by an additional year, and took care to refer to the discoveries “anomalies” instead of “cavities” or “voids,” Live Science explained. Hawass went on to explain to them that the results could actually be triggered by different sized stones used to build the monument, and does not necessarily indicate the existence of a hidden, room-sized chamber in either location.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Literary giant Mark Twain once said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and according to scientists, the same is true when it comes to the 1,400-mile-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia – despite the recent publication of its obituary by Outside Online.

In that piece, author Rowan Jacobsen mourns the loss of the 25-million-year old community of coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean, which he referred to as “one of the most spectacular features on the planet,” to the effects of climate change and ocean acidification following “a long illness.”

“For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space,” Jacobsen wrote in the piece. “In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined… [and] among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.”

Despite being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, he added, it experienced mass bleaching events regularly, and by the turn of the century, the waters surrounding it had become so acidic that they began to dissolve the reef itself. Ultimately, Jacobsen noted, it succumbed to these events – only, according to other scientists, the Reef isn’t quite dead yet.

‘Not too late’ to save the Reef, despite recent bleaching events

“It’s not too late for the Great Barrier Reef, and people who think that have a really profound misconception about what we know and don’t know about coral resilience,” Dr. Kim Cobb from the Georgia Tech School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences told the Los Angeles Times Friday.

“We just had a massive bleaching event, but we know from past research that corals are able to recover from the brink of death,” she said. Coral, the professor explained, is an animal that lives in a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae. When the water becomes too warm, that algae becomes “chemically destructive” to the coral.

This causes the coral to spit out the algae in order to protect itself, causing the transparent coral to lose all of its color in the process. “So you are not necessarily seeing dead coral, you’re really just seeing clear coral without its algae,” Dr. Cobb said. However, she warned that bleaching is still harmful to the coral, as losing its food source could cause it to “starve to death.” Preventing that requires the water temperature to cool down, and to do so relatively quickly.

Russell Brainard, the head of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at the NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center , told the Huffington Post that he believed that the article was written so that it would drive home the urgent danger facing the Reef, but that there was the risk that some people would “take it at face value that the Great Barrier Reef is dead.”

Earlier this year, researchers from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies reported that a recent bleaching event had caused serious damage to 93% of the Reef, and on Thursday, scientists found that more than one-fifth of the coral died as a result of that incident. While Brainard said that the bleaching event was a “severe blow” to the Reef’s health, he added that “we’re very far from an obituary” for the Heritage site.

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Image credit: Public Domain

For the first time, researchers have discovered the bird-like vocal organ of a fossil dinosaur related to modern-day ducks and geese, and the discovery suggests that its nonavian cousins lacked the ability to produce noises similar to the bird calls we hear today.

Formally known as a syrinx, the voice box in question was discovered in an Antarctic fossil belonging to a Vegavis iaai specimen that lived in the Cretaceos era roughly 66 million years ago. This bird-like creature was discovered on Antarctica’s Vega Island in 1992 and identified more than a decade later, but its vocal organ was not discovered until 2013.

“This finding helps explain why no such organ has been preserved in a non-bird dinosaur or crocodile relative,” Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences and the person who made the discovery, said in a statement.

She added that the find was “another important step to figuring out what dinosaurs sounded like as well as giving us insight into the evolution of birds.” Clarke and her colleagues reported their breakthrough in this week’s edition of the international, peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Analysis of the organ could provide new insight into vocalizations

The discovery of the syrinx, coupled with its absence of nonavian dinosaurs which lived during the same era, suggests that it might have originally developed late in the evolution of birds, and that other dinosaurs may have been unable to produce bird-like calls, the researchers noted.

Made from stiff, cartilage rings, the syrinx supports the soft tissues that vibrate to produce each of the sounds used to create complex modern bird calls and songs. While cartilage typically does not fossilize as well as bone or other hard tissues, its high mineral content sometimes allows it to be preserved, which was the case in this particular set of Vegavis iaai remains.

Credit: J. Clarke/UT Austin.

Clarke, who was the first scientist to describe the species 11 years ago, first discovered this so-called “squawk box” in 2013 and spent much of the next two years combing the dinosaur record for evidence of other, similar discoveries. To date, none have been found. They also scanned the syrinxes of a dozen living birds, as well as the next-oldest fossilized syrnix, to compare with the Vegavis iaai organ, hoping to learn more about what early bird calls sounded like.

“Here, we begin to outline how fossilizable characteristics of the syrinx may inform us about sound features, but we need a lot more data on living birds,” study co-author Franz Goller, a physiologist from the University of Utah, explained. “Remarkably, prior to this work, there is almost no discussion of these important questions.”

Combined with previous research led by Clarke, which found that some dinosaurs likely made closed-mouth vocalizations that did not require a syrinx, the research provides new insights into the evolution of sound production throughout the lifespan of the dinosaurs. The development of vocal organs could also provide new insight into the development of features, including larger brains, she added.

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Image credit: Nicole Fuller/Sayo Art for UT Austin.

A six-year investigation into a large collection of marine reptile fossils has paid off in a big way for a group of British and American paleontologists, who this week announced the discovery of two previously unknown species of Jurassic Era sea-dwellers known as ichthyosaurs.

With their discovery, the total number of species of these so-called “sea dragons,” which lived approximately 200 million years ago and grew to lengths of up to 15 meters (over 49 feet), has now reached six, BBC News science reporter Helen Briggs wrote in a Thursday article.

Manchester University paleontologist Dean Lomax and his colleague Judy Massare at the New York-based College at Brockport spent six years examining several hundred ichthyosaur fossils in both Europe and North America, including some which had not been seen in decades.

One of the new species was identified using fossils that had been on display at the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences for many years, while the other was part of a fossil collection that was sent to the US and later donated to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

As Lomax, who along with Massare detailed the findings in the journal Papers in Paleontology, explained earlier this week in a statement , “It is our hope that other similar fossils will be found in uninspected collections and brought to the attention of paleontologists… Who knows what else is waiting to be (re)discovered?”

Newfound specimens were essentially hiding in plain sight

Both sets of fossils used to describe the new species originated from Somerset in southwestern England, the researchers told BBC News. The first has been on display at Bristol University, in direct view of countless students and faculty members for several decades, and has been named Ichthyosaurus larkini in honor of UK  paleontologist Nigel Larkin.

The second specimen is believed to have been collected from a quarry in Glastonbury, Somerset, in the 1840s by a researcher named Edward Wilson. Wilson likely sent the fossils to Delaware so that his brother, Dr. Thomas Wilson, could study them. In 1847, Thomas donated the remains to the Academy of Natural Sciences, where it quietly remained in storage for decades.

The researchers decided to name the Philadelphia species Ichthyosaurus somersetensis in honor of Somerset country, which Lomax explained has been the site of many “sea dragon” fossil finds over the years. Lomax went on to call this particular specimen “in my opinion… the best example of Ichthyosaurus collected to date.” Long kept in storage, it will now be put on display.

“’These are two new species – brand new species to science,” Lomax told Briggs. “They show that during the early Jurassic – around 200 million years ago – the ichthyosaur, and specifically this particular type, was a lot more diverse than previously thought.”

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons