A team of researchers from Indonesia and Singapore has found evidence of the continued existence of a bird long thought extinct. In their paper published in the journal BirdingASIA, the team describes the history of the bird, why it was thought to be extinct and how it was found in Borneo.

Back sometime between 1843 and 1848 a bird now called the black-browed babbler was captured by naturalist Carl A.L.M. Schwaner. Records of the find are sketchy, but it appeared the bird had been captured on the island of Java. That finding was the one and only piece of evidence of the bird's existence — it is currently labeled as "data deficient" in ornithology texts. The bird was put into storage, and for the next 170 years, there were no further reports of its existence. Over time, the bird and its history became known as "the biggest enigma in Indonesian ornithology." Most in the field assumed it had gone extinct. Then, last year, a pair of researchers, Muhammad Rizky Fauzan and Muhammad Suranto captured a bird that they could not identify on the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. They took pictures of it and sent them to colleagues, then released the bird.

NASA is warning of the second 'stadium-sized' asteroid headed towards the Earth in as many weeks, shortly after announcing the postponement of its critical planetary defense mission to 2022.

On February 27, the asteroid 2021 DE, with a diameter roughly the same size as the Arc de Triomphe (49m), will buzz the Earth at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers (mn km), followed shortly afterwards on February 28 by the 20-meter 2021 DM at a distance of 4.8 mn km.

Upping the ante significantly the following day, March 1, will be the Statue of Liberty-sized (91m) space rock 2011 DW, which will shoot past at a distance of 5.3 mn km.

Then on March 2 comes the piece de resistance, the second asteroid in two weeks which NASA describes as 'stadium-size': 1999 RM45, with a diameter of 396m - roughly 1.1 times the height of the Empire State building, 1.75 times that of the Golden Gate Bridge, or 0.5 times the size of the Burj Khalifa - will pay the Earth a passing visit at a safe distance of 2.6 mn km.

First came the tree, all 19.5 metres of it, with roots and branches and leaves. Then, weeks later, the discovery of 150 fossilised logs, one on top of the other, a short distance away.

Nikolas Zouros, a professor of geology at the University of the Aegean, couldn't believe his luck. In 25 years of excavating the petrified forest of Lesbos, he had unearthed nothing like it.

"The tree is unique," he said. "To discover it so complete and in such excellent condition is a first. To then discover a treasure trove of so many petrified trunks in a single pit was, well, unbelievable."

In the unfolding extreme winter tragedy in Texas as well as many other regions of the United States not prepared for severe winter weather, a notable point is that much of the vast windmill batteries across the state, supposed to generate 25% of the state electric power grid, have frozen and are largely useless. The recent severe winter weather across not only the continental USA but also large parts of the EU, and even the Middle East, warrants a closer look at a subject that has been too long ignored by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, as well as by a new group of academics known as Climate Scientists. That is, the influence of our sun on global climate.

Cold Climate Change

On February 14 a record Arctic cold front swept from Canada far south to the southernmost parts of Texas on the Mexican border. The immediate impact has been power outages for up to 15 million Texans who as of February 17 remained without heat and electricity, as almost half the wind units were frozen and inoperable from ice storms, many permanently. Texas over the past five years has doubled its share of wind generation to the grid in a rush to adopt a green energy profile. With some 25% of the state electric grid from wind sources, almost half that is out of commission, many permanently, from the storm.

After traveling several billion miles toward the Sun, a wayward young comet-like object orbiting among the giant planets has found a temporary parking place along the way. The object has settled near a family of captured ancient asteroids, called Trojans, that are orbiting the Sun alongside Jupiter. This is the first time a comet-like object has been spotted near the Trojan population.

The unexpected visitor belongs to a class of icy bodies found in space between Jupiter and Neptune. Called "Centaurs," they become active for the first time when heated as they approach the Sun, and dynamically transition into becoming more comet-like.

Visible-light snapshots by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the vagabond object shows signs of comet activity, such as a tail, outgassing in the form of jets, and an enshrouding coma of dust and gas. Earlier observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope gave clues to the composition of the comet-like object and the gasses driving its activity.

"Only Hubble could detect active comet-like features this far away at such high detail, and the images clearly show these features, such as a roughly 400,000-mile-long broad tail and high-resolution features near the nucleus due to a coma and jets," said lead Hubble researcher Bryce Bolin of Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Describing the Centaur's capture as a rare event, Bolin added, "The visitor had to have come into the orbit of Jupiter at just the right trajectory to have this kind of configuration that gives it the appearance of sharing its orbit with the planet. We're investigating how it was captured by Jupiter and landed among the Trojans. But we think it could be related to the fact that it had a somewhat close encounter with Jupiter."

The team's paper appears in the February 11, 2021 issue of The Astronomical Journal.

The research team's computer simulations show that the icy object, called P/2019 LD2 (LD2), probably swung close to Jupiter about two years ago. The planet then gravitationally punted the wayward visitor to the Trojan asteroid group's co-orbital location, leading Jupiter by about 437 million miles.

When Josephine Ulrich and colleagues got the chance to work with the iDiv Ecotron, a system of experimental containers in Germany that lets researchers create and manipulate miniature ecosystems, they decided to investigate the effect of declining invertebrate populations on plant communities. Many studies have explored how projected changes in abiotic factors — rising temperatures, for example — influence plants, says Ulrich, a PhD student at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Friedrich Schiller University, but to look at biotic factors such as invertebrate loss is a new approach.

To come into being, galaxies need a steady diet of cold gases to undergo gravitational collapse. The larger the galaxy, the more cold gas it needs to coalesce and to grow.

Massive galaxies found in the early universe needed a lot of cold gas — a store totaling as much as 100 billion times the mass of our sun.

But where did these early, super-sized galaxies get that much cold gas when they were hemmed in by hotter surroundings?

A half-melted hunk of iron-rich rock found in Uppsala, Sweden, is part of a meteorite that fell there in November 2020.

The lumpy meteorite is about the size of a loaf of bread and weighs around 31 pounds (14 kilograms), according to the Swedish Museum of Natural History. It was once part of a larger space rock, probably weighing more than 9 tons (8.1 metric tons), that created a dramatic fireball over Uppsala on Nov. 7.

After that impact, scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History calculated the likely landing site and found some small fragments of iron meteorite near the village of Ådalen, according to a museum statement. The fragments were only about 0.1 inches (3 millimeters) long, but the investigation also turned up a boulder and a tree root that had clearly been hit by something heavy.

Even the mainstream has awoken to the "cataclysmic" threat that is the combo of low solar activity and a weakening magnetic field...

...even the Guardian:

The flipping of the Earth's magnetic poles together with a drop in solar activity 42,000 years ago could have generated an apocalyptic environment that lead to the extinction of megafauna and to the end of the Neanderthals, reports the Guardian, citing a new paper published in the journal Science, co-authored by Prof Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales.

The new paper entitled "a global environmental crisis" discusses the temporary flip of the poles 42,000-or-so years ago, known as the Laschamp excursion, which lasted for about 1,000 years.

The Guardian article continues:

Previous work found little evidence that the event had a profound impact on the planet, possibly because the focus had not been on the period during which the poles were actually shifting. Now scientists say the flip, together with a period of low solar activity, could have been behind a vast array of climatic and environmental phenomena with dramatic ramifications.

"It probably would have seemed like the end of days," said Turney.

Scientists have yet to answer the age-old question of whether or how sound shapes the minds of fetuses in the womb, and expectant mothers often wonder about the benefits of such activities as playing music during pregnancy. Now, in experiments in newborn mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins report that sounds appear to change "wiring" patterns in areas of the brain that process sound earlier than scientists assumed and even before the ear canal opens.

Scientists have yet to answer the age-old question of whether or how sound shapes the minds of fetuses in the womb, and expectant mothers often wonder about the benefits of such activities as playing music during pregnancy. Now, in experiments in newborn mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins report that sounds appear to change "wiring" patterns in areas of the brain that process sound earlier than scientists assumed and even before the ear canal opens.

The current experiments involve newborn mice, which have ear canals that open 11 days after birth. In human fetuses, the ear canal opens prenatally, at about 20 weeks gestation.

The findings, published online Feb. 12 in Science Advances, may eventually help scientists identify ways to detect and intervene in abnormal wiring in the brain that may cause hearing or other sensory problems.