As Earth Day approaches and the Wonder Theory newsletter celebrates three years of arriving in your inboxes, I look to the future with hope.
When Jane Goodall was a little girl, her mother nurtured the celebrated primatologist’s love of the living world.
Now 90, Goodall nurtures that same appreciation through her Roots & Shoots program, which empowers young people to create change within their communities around the globe.
Even as the world shifts in reaction to the climate crisis, Goodall remains hopeful that humanity can save the planet.
“Don’t forget that you as an individual make an impact on the environment every single day,” Goodall told CNN recently.
And when it came to sheer size, the marine reptile likely rivaled the blue whale, currently the largest living animal.
Meanwhile in India, paleontologists at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee unearthed evidence of a different massive reptile: a prehistoric snake that was longer than a school bus.
The Gaia space telescope has detected the most massive known stellar black hole, or a black hole formed from the collapse of a giant star, in our galaxy.
All of us have a beginning. We develop through support and the quest for knowledge. The renowned primatologist Jane Goodall’s love of the natural world was fostered by her mother when she was a small child.
At ninety years old, Goodall fosters this same appreciation through her Roots and Shoots program, which gives young people the tools they need to effect change in their local communities anywhere in the world.
Goodall is optimistic that humanity can save the planet despite the changes occurring in the world as a result of the climate crisis.
Remarkably, Goodall told CNN recently, “Remember that you personally have an influence on the environment every day.”. And the choice of the kind of impact you make is yours. “.
Ocean’s hidden mysteries.
When 11-year-old Ruby Reynolds and her father Justin were looking for fossils on a beach in Somerset, England, in May 2020, Ruby noticed something out of the ordinary.
Ruby discovered fossils that, when put back together with the assistance of specialists, showed the jawbone of a massive ichthyosaur that lived 202 million years ago in the ocean. To put it another way, the marine reptile was probably bigger than the blue whale, which is the biggest animal on the planet right now.
“Finding a piece of this massive ichthyosaur was so exciting. Being a part of such an important scientific discovery makes me very proud,” she remarked.
However, evidence of another massive reptile—a prehistoric snake longer than a school bus—was discovered in India by paleontologists at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.
long time in the past.
After discovering burned remains inside a prehistoric Maya pyramid in Guatemala, archaeologists have been able to piece together the story of a dramatic dynasty collapse.
When the researchers found four adult scorched bones in a room beneath a temple along with opulent jewelry and weapons, they concluded the people belonged to a royal family.
The researchers concluded that the burning of the bones was an indication of deliberate desecration and that a new kind of Maya leader emerged during this period of political and social change.
Separately, two 5,500-year-old skeletons were found at an archaeological site in southwest France. They belonged to women who were probably tortured in a manner akin to that of the Italian Mafia and buried alive as part of a sacrificial rite.
Other dimensions.
For the first time, scientists have discovered a glory—a rainbow-like phenomenon—on a planet outside of our solar system.
On WASP-76b, researchers using the Cheops space telescope observed an unexpected glow inside the atmosphere. The phenomenon, which is represented in an artist’s illustration as bright, concentric rings of light, has only ever been seen on Earth and Venus.
Melting iron rains from the clouds of this hot exoplanet, which is 637 light-years away. Another fascinating feature of the exoplanet is that one side of it faces a star that resembles the sun constantly.
Researchers have discovered in another study that Pluto’s characteristic bright, white heart was formed during a long ago, catastrophic collision with another planet.
throughout the cosmos.
Astronomers discovered a celestial “sleeping giant” in the Milky Way after noticing an odd wobble in a star.
The largest known stellar black hole in our galaxy, which was created when a massive star collapsed, has been found by the Gaia space telescope.
The star, known as Gaia BH3, is merely 1,926 light-years away and has a mass that is almost 33 times greater than that of our sun.
Amazing animals.
The remarkable discovery that queen common eastern bumblebees can survive underwater for up to a week was made by scientists when they unintentionally submerged a particular type of hibernating bumblebee in water.
It’s probable that the queens, who hibernate through the winter months by themselves following the deaths of the male and worker bees, go into a diapause, a state of suspended growth, to aid in their survival.
Scientists anticipate that a zombifying fungus will manipulate some of the billions of cicadas that are expected to emerge this spring after more than ten years underground.
According to Dr. Matt Kasson, an associate professor at West Virginia University, the pathogen turns the cicadas into “saltshakers of death”.
Investigations.
Examine these astounding accounts in more detail:.
Budget cuts could jeopardize the effort to recover rare samples that the Perseverance rover collected from Mars. NASA is currently looking for inventive ways to get them back to Earth.
Three new species of giant kangaroos that lived millions of years ago have been found during excavations in southern Australia; one of them was roughly twice as large as the largest kangaroos that exist today.
The trash that NASA ejected from the International Space Station was supposed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but one piece of debris made it through the fiery reentry process and crashed into a Naples, Florida, home.
Humans can learn from camels’ transformation. Although camels once roamed across what is now Canada, they completely readapted to live in the desert 17,000 years ago after crossing the Bering Land Bridge.
