A major new digital mapping project could help safeguard some of the world's most important and well-known heritage sites from rising seas, flooding and coastal erosion. Researchers led by scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA), Durham University and the University of Cape Town have created the Global Coastal Heritage (Glo-CoH) dataset, the first comprehensive digital map of UNESCO World Heritage sites located along coastlines less than 20 meters (66 feet) above sea level.
Luggage-clad residents and tourists fled a French peninsula by boat, and the smell of smoke drifted into parts of Madrid on Friday as wildfires swept through parts of Western Europe, triggering states of emergency and calls for EU help.
An international team of researchers has identified a previously unknown fossil ape that lived about 17 to 18 million years ago during the Early Miocene. The species, named Masripithecus moghraensis, was described in a study published in Science by scientists from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (Egypt) and the University of Southern California (USA).
In the late 1990s, scientists working in the Ajimu area of Oita prefecture, Japan, uncovered three fossilized vertebrae from a giant salamander in the Cryptobranchidae family. The bones were preserved in the Tsubusugawa Formation, a layer of ancient lake sediments from the Pliocene dating to about 3.5 million years ago.
One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather than slowing down came as a huge shock to the field. Something had to be driving that acceleration, and dark energy was proposed as the cause. What began as a seismic shock in cosmology eventually led to a Nobel prize.
Scientists say the next 30 to 50 years could offer a crucial opportunity to forecast Antarctic ice loss and prepare for the sea level rise it may cause.
A new study published in Nature, led by Monash University researcher Dr. Felicity McCormack of Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future (SAEF), examines how reliably scientists can predict future ice loss from Antarctica and how those predictions could improve sea level planning.
D. Estraviz-López with an ancient brown bear skeleton. Credit: D. Estraviz-López
About 22,000 years ago, a giant brown bear lumbered across what is now Portugal. The creature weighed around 385 kg (about 850 pounds), making it one of the largest of its kind ever found, towering over the Iberian brown bears that live there today.
