Kylie Griffin

19/09/2022

Oesia

A type of acorn worm, about 53mm long, and rarely more than 10mm wide
The worm had U-shaped gills running down most of the length of its body, to enable filter feeding
The fossil record suggests that at some point acorn worms left their tubes and lived under the sea bed.

13/09/2022

It comes amid fresh warnings from scientists last week that four climate “tipping points” will likely be triggered if that temperature threshold — set in the 2015 Paris climate accord — is passed.

Many governments are already trying to address the threat of more severe weather due to climate change, and data show that deaths from natural disasters are down in recent years. Yet the economic cost of climate-induced catastrophes is projected to rise sharply.

The U.N. report says such “losses and damages” can be limited by timely action to prevent further warming and adapt to the temperature increases that are now inevitable. Questions around compensation for the damage that poor nations suffer as a result of emissions produced by rich countries will play a major role at the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Egypt this fall.

05/09/2022

Hackers created a fake news website to harvest data from Australian government officials, journalists and others, according to a top US security company.

The targets received emails claiming to be from Australian news outlets, which linked them to a malicious website.

The website, populated with articles stolen from BBC News, would then install malicious code on their device.

Proofpoint said it had "high confidence" the hackers were aligned with the Chinese government.

"We take attribution very seriously," Proofpoint threat research and detection vice-president Sherrod DeGrippo said.

24/08/2022

A council spokesman said: "Whilst we closely monitor all our water courses, there is nothing we can do but wait for rainfall and for it [the lake] to naturally fill again.

"Taking water from elsewhere to fill it up would be highly irresponsible given the current situation."

Addressing the issue of silting at the lake, the spokesman said the council was considering how best to remove it.

"Dredging requires technical expertise to ensure the clay bottom layer, which is essential to maintain water in the lake, is not damaged," he added.

15/08/2022

NASA's Perseverance rover has captured a mysterious, stringlike material on the surface of Mars. Turns out – it was likely just trash discarded there by the rover itself.

In a blog post last week by the space agency, scientists said that when the rover originally landed on Mars in February 2021, hardware known as Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) was discarded onto the planet's surface.

Now, NASA is seeing that debris from imagery in the Hogwallow Flats region of the Red Planet. Scientists suspect the tangled object, and most of the other material pictured, is likely pieces of shredded Dacron netting from the Perseverance.

05/08/2022

Imagine you’ve just completed a tough upper-body workout. Your muscles feel a bit tired, but all in all you’re able to go about the rest of your day just fine.

The next morning, you wake up and realize the back of your shoulder blade feels stiff. When you rub your shoulder muscles, it feels like you’re prodding a little gumball under your skin. Every time you try to move it around, the area feels tight, with slight pangs of pain.

Over the course of the next few days, your back slowly loosens up and eventually your shoulder returns to feeling normal. It’s probably something you’d like to avoid or minimize in the future if possible, though. So what was going on with that muscle knot?

29/07/2022

The landowner, Adam Knight, had no idea his English longhorn cattle were grazing on top of a rich fossil seam, recalling a time, 183 million years ago, when his farm would have been lying under warm tropical ocean waters.

Mr Knight gave permission to Neville and Sally, and a team led from the University of Manchester, to investigate the bank further.

A digger was brought in to extract hundreds more of the nodules, which were carefully cracked open to see what they held inside.

27/07/2022

A former murder hornet, now known as the northern giant hornet, wears a tracking device near Blaine, Washington. (Photo: Karla Salp/Washington Dept. of Agriculture via Associated Press, File)

The murder hornet is breaking up with its killer name.

The Entomological Society of America said it plans to rebrand the species as the northern giant hornet, dropping all references to the pest previously known as the murder hornet or Asian giant hornet. The Washington State Department of Agriculture will adopt the change.

Northern giant hornets can grow to more than 2 inches long and can kill a human with multiple stings. The state’s endorsement of the name change adds to the insect’s shift away from violence, as its first North American sighting was in Washington in 2019.

25/07/2022

Normally, rockets are programmed to push themselves into the atmosphere after launch, controlling their fall back to Earth so that they land in remote ocean areas like the South Pacific — a process called "controlled reentry."

"Rockets get launched all the time, and very seldom is there concern about reentry," John Logsdon, the founder of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, previously told Insider as the world waited for the rocket body to fall in early May 2021. "So yeah, I'm a little confused as to why this is happening."

"Is it just willful disregard of the international guidelines? Or because it's a new vehicle, it wasn't properly designed so it could do a controlled reentry? Whatever," Logsdon added. "It's unfortunate that it puts a lot of people at risk."

22/07/2022

22/07/2022

22/07/2022

Children should be taught climate change in more depth and in all subjects, experts and students themselves have told BBC News.

Current teaching is leaving children unprepared to live in a warming world, they warn.

The extreme heat and wildfires in the UK this week could be normal in the coming decades, scientists say.

Children currently study climate change in-depth in GCSE geography and science.

But teenage campaigners say that because climate change is affecting all parts of our lives, it should be taught in all subjects.