Sixty-three percent. That's the proportion of mammal species that vanished from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 30 million years ago, after Earth's climate shifted from swampy to icy. But we are only finding out about it now.

Compiling decades of work, a new study published this week in the journal Communications Biology reports on a previously undocumented extinction event that followed the transition between the geological periods called the Eocene and Oligocene.

That time period was marked by dramatic climate change. In a reverse image of what is happening today, the Earth grew cooler, ice sheets expanded, sea levels dropped, forests started changing to grasslands, and carbon dioxide became scarce. Nearly two-thirds of the species known in Europe and Asia at that time went extinct.

Sets of identical twins famously have much in common with one another. In a Dutch study published September 28 in Nature Communications, scientists find that they also have something in common with other identical twins the world over: a set of matching marks on their DNA. The researchers studied around 6,000 pairs of twins of varying ages from around the world, analyzing hundreds of thousands of sites on their genomes. Their finding of 834 sites in the genome with marks distinct to identical, but not fraternal, twins could provide clues to how identical twins come about, researchers say.

Scientists from Wuhan and the US were planning to create new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic codes of other viruses, proposals show.

Documents of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), leaked last month, reveal that the international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data of closely related strains and grow completely new viruses.

A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.

So far the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-CoV-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was reported from Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome. Yet scientists expect a direct ancestor to be around a 99.98 per cent match - and none has been found so far.

International research team led by University of Göttingen finds atomically-thin carbon generates its own magnetic field.
Usually, the electrical resistance of a material depends very much on its physical dimensions and fundamental properties. Under special circumstances, however, this resistance can adopt a fixed value that is independent of the basic material properties and "quantised" (meaning that it changes in discrete steps rather than continuously). This quantisation of electrical resistance normally occurs within strong magnetic fields and at very low temperatures when electrons move in a two-dimensional fashion. Now, a research team led by the University of Göttingen has succeeded in demonstrating this effect at low temperatures in the almost complete absence of a magnetic field in naturally occurring double-layer graphene, which is just two atoms thick. The results of the study have been published in Nature.

The team from the University of Göttingen, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Texas (Dallas) used two-layer graphene in its natural form. The delicate graphene flakes are contacted using standard microfabrication techniques and the flake is positioned so that it is hangs freely like a bridge, held at the edges by two metal contacts. The extremely clean double-layers of graphene show a quantisation of electrical resistance at low temperatures and almost undetectable magnetic fields. In addition, the electrical current flows without any loss of energy. The reason for this is a form of magnetism that is not generated in the usual way as seen in conventional magnets (ie by the alignment of the intrinsic magnetic moments of electrons), but by the motion of the charged particles in the graphene double layer itself. "In other words, the particles generate their own intrinsic magnetic field, which leads to the quantisation of the electrical resistance," says Professor Thomas Weitz from the University of Göttingen.

What did the Early Bronze Age men and women of the Argaric culture in the southeastern Iberian Peninsula look like? Researchers at the UAB have analysed the facial features of these individuals based on the digital and biological study of the skulls recovered at the sites of La Almoloya and La Bastida (Murcia), and have obtained images of 40 of their inhabitants. The study, the first to apply this method to such a large group of individuals from the same prehistoric site, is part of a more ambitious project being conducted by the research group on the Argaric society ASOME-UAB, which focuses on kinship relationships in prehistoric times.

Our faces contain information about our family history and lifestyle. For example, certain facial traits can be passed down from parents to children for generations. Is it therefore possible that the physical resemblances among a group of individuals can provide clues about common blood ties?

This is one of the main objectives of a research being carried out by the group of Social and Mediterranean Archaeoecology (ASOME) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) on the Argaric society, which expanded throughout the southeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula some 4,000 years ago and was one of the first urban societies in Western Europe. And the first step has been the work of Joana Bruno, researcher at ASOME-UAB, archaeologist and master in science illustration, who was in charge of the facial reconstruction of 38 individuals from El Argar, selected after a detailed osteological study of more than 250 skeletons recovered from well-preserved tombs of La Almoloya and La Bastida.

A NEW METEOR SHOWER

For thousands of years, Comet 15P/Finlay has been dive-bombing Earth's orbit, leaving trails of dust on our planet's doorstep, yet, strangely, there has never been a meteor shower. Until now. On Sept. 27th, Earth hit a stream of debris from Comet Finlay, and a meteor shower was born.

"It is called the Arid meteor shower, because the meteors radiate from the far-southern constellation Ara, the Altar," explains Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute, whose meteor cameras in New Zealand and Chile detected the mini-outburst of 13 Arids.

It's long overdue. Every 6 years, Finlay passes only 0.01 au from Earth's orbit. Somehow, we've dodged the debris. "This is the first time we've ever seen meteors from the comet," says Jenniskens.

Energy from the solar wind interacting with the magnetospheric 'bubble' around Earth creates waves of energy that appear to stand still.

This new finding, from research led by Imperial scientists, improves our understanding of the conditions around Earth that contribute to 'space weather', which can impact our technology from communications satellites in orbit to power lines on the ground.

The Sun releases a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. On the Earth's surface, we are protected from this barrage by the magnetosphere - a bubble created by the Earth's magnetic field.

When the solar wind hits the magnetosphere, waves of energy are transferred along the boundary between the two. Scientists thought the waves should ripple in the direction of the solar wind, but the new study, published today in Nature Communications, reveals some waves do just the opposite.

Scientists have identified a rare solar system object with traits of both an asteroid and a comet.

The object, dubbed 2005 QN173, orbits like any other asteroid, but most such objects are rocks that don't change much as they loop through the solar system. Not so for 2005 QN173, which was first spotted in 2005 (hence the name), according to new research. Instead, it looks like a comet, shedding dust as it travels and sporting a long, thin tail, which suggests that it's covered with icy material vaporizing away into space — even though comets usually follow elliptical paths that regularly approach and retreat from the sun.

A sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years shows the usual rules of body size evolution change during mass extinctions and their recoveries. The discovery is an early step toward predicting how evolution will play out on the other side of the current extinction crisis.
Scientists at Stanford University have discovered a surprising pattern in how life reemerges from cataclysm. Research published Oct. 6 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows the usual rules of body size evolution change not only during mass extinction, but also during subsequent recovery.

Since the 1980s, evolutionary biologists have debated whether mass extinctions and the recoveries that follow them intensify the selection criteria of normal times - or fundamentally shift the set of traits that mark groups of species for destruction. The new study finds evidence for the latter in a sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years.

Whether and how evolutionary dynamics shift in the wake of global annihilation has "profound implications not only for understanding the origins of the modern biosphere but also for predicting the consequences of the current biodiversity crisis," the authors write.

"Ultimately, we want to be able to look at the fossil record and use it to predict what will go extinct, and more importantly, what comes back," said lead author Pedro Monarrez, a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "When we look closely at 485 million years of extinctions and recoveries in the world's oceans, there does appear to be a pattern in what comes back based on body size in some groups."

Below is Dr. Roger Higgs' newest ResearchGate contribution — comprised of 4 simple slides proving beyond doubt that the Sun governs climate. Dr. Higgs writes:

"The slides reveal the breathtaking scale of NASA-HadCRUT temperature-fixing fraud. You will be shocked. To see the monumental scale of the deception laid bare as I assembled this new contribution over the last few days made my jaw drop. I am disgusted. How dare these unscrupulous people commit this appalling crime against humanity, i.e. manipulating the global thermometer data to 'justify' a drastic restructuring of world society (The Great Reset) and the denial of life-prolonging reliable energy to billions of impoverished citizens of developing nations?"

SLIDE 1 — CONCLUSIONS:

1) Our star, the Sun, controls global (& regional) warming & cooling, with 150-year delay due to ocean thermal inertia. (IPCC failed to notice this lag & dismissed solar fluctuations as too small to cause climate change.)

2) 'Modern Warming' since 1910 (recovery from Little Ice Age) is greatly exaggerated by NASA-HadCRUT improper 'corrections' to the thermometer record, e.g. failure to compensate fully for urbanization. This solves the tree-ring Divergence Problem: "A temperature trend extracted from tree rings alone would not show any substantial warming since the 1950s".

3) The 1930's (Dust Bowl) was probably the warmest decade of the last 1,000 years; it corresponds to the climax of the Sun's 1700-1780 strongest multi-decade surge of the 2nd Millennium (effect delayed 150 years).

4) The joint rise in both CO2 (since 1850, start of Industrial Revolution) & temperature (since 1910, with downturns lacked by CO2, and without CO2's acceleration) was purely coincidental.

5) Following the 2016 temperature peak, relative coolness will now persist for about 50 years.

6) CO2 is irrelevant to climate. (We need more CO2 for agriculture & forestry).

7) CO2's theoretical greenhouse effect must be either conceptually flawed or is cancelled by negative feedbacks overlooked or ignored by IPCC.