Feed aggregator

People in the US have filmed a Chinese rocket body streaking across the sky over Utah and California.

Plans to build the first new UK nuclear plant in 20 years suffer an unexpected delay after the government postpones a final decision until the early autumn.

A living coucal from South Africa, whose huge prehistoric relatives lived on the Nullarbor. Pascal Bernadin, CC BY-NC-ND

Western Australia’s Nullarbor Plain may be a vast treeless expanse today, but hundreds of thousands of years ago it was home to an array of weird and wonderful species, including two newly discovered extinct “giant cuckoos”.

The two species belonged to a group of birds called coucals, which are part of the cuckoo family. The larger of the extinct species would have stood more than half a metre tall and, judging by its bones, probably couldn’t fly.

The discovery, which we made during a 2014 dig at the Thylacoleo Caves, is not the first bizarre species found beneath the Nullarbor. Over the past decade, excavations of these caves have revealed thousands of exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Some are the remains of living species, others are of extinct species already known to science, while others have been totally new discoveries.

One surprise was finding two new species of tree-kangaroo. It takes a leap of imagination to envision today’s flat, treeless Nullarbor Plain covered in trees with large marsupials clambering about overhead. Clearly the region’s climate and conditions have undergone huge shifts – a fact underlined by the latest fossil finds.

The Nullarbor Plain today: not a tree or giant cuckoo in sight. Elen Shute Fossils found, species lost

Of the two new bird species we discovered, the smaller, Centropus bairdi, was similar in size to the largest living coucals from Melanesia, which weigh 700g or more. However, its exceptionally weak wing muscles imply that Centropus bairdi was flightless. We excavated its bones from cave sediments that are more than than 780,000 years old.

The larger species, Centropus maximus, is the largest cuckoo known anywhere in the world. It had long, powerful legs, and probably weighed well over 1kg, perhaps even topping 2kg.

Cavers first found one femur shallowly buried in a rock pile. Returning for more bones the following day, they uncovered two coucal skeletons side by side, where they presumably had lain undisturbed since the birds fell into the cave together hundreds of thousands of years before.

Thunder thighs: The femur of a modern Pheasant Coucal (left) looks puny next to the bones of the extinct Nullarbor species Centropus bairdi (middle) and Centropus maximus (right). Elen Shute

The two new species join another known extinct coucal, Centropus colossus, which was discovered in a South Australian cave 30 years ago, and was just a little smaller than Centropus maximus.

In their day, these two largest coucals would have been among Australia’s heaviest land-hunting birds. Today, the only living bird predators that can match them are the Wedge-tailed Eagle, Black-breasted Buzzard, White-bellied Sea-eagle and Powerful Owl.

All three coucals lived during the Pleistocene epoch, 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago. This was a time of ecological upheaval around the world. Successive ice ages caused sea levels to rise and fall, and temperatures and rainfall to fluctuate.

Many Pleistocene animals worldwide, particularly the large ones, went extinct as a result of climatic fluctuations, human impacts, or a combination of both.

We don’t know when these coucals went extinct, or what killed them, but this is one group where we can probably discount human hunting, as today’s coucals are reported to taste and smell appalling. It seems more likely that they died out when their habitat changed.

Birds of paradox

Living coucals are predatory, primarily ground-dwelling, and are known for their weak and graceless flight. They eat large invertebrates and small vertebrates, especially frogs. Perhaps the extinct ones tucked into the frogs that we now know lived on the Nullarbor too.

Coucals aren’t what we think of as typical cuckoos, which are best known for sneaking their eggs into the nests of other birds. Coucals (and many other members of the cuckoo family) build nests and raise their own young.

Even more unusually, female coucals are larger than males, and males do most or all of the work to raise the brood, a trait they share with only 5% of the world’s bird species.

The 26 living species of coucal span Africa, Madagascar, Asia, New Guinea, and northern Australia. For birds that have trouble staying airborne, they have managed to get around remarkably well.

Australia’s only living species, the Pheasant Coucal, is found only in the continent’s north and east. Without the fossil discoveries, we would never have guessed that their relatives once lived thousands of kilometres further south.

The Pheasant Coucal, Australia’s only living coucal species. Geoff Whalan Rare as hen’s teeth

Few extinct birds are known from Australia, and only ten Pleistocene species have previously been described.

This is meagre compared to the 80 Pleistocene mammal species known to have been lost from Australia. This could mean one of two things: either birds cruised through the Pleistocene largely unscathed, or we have underestimated their rates of extinction.

The best-known extinct Pleistocene bird from Australia is the “thunderbird”, Genyornis newtoni, which stood 2m tall and weighed more than 200kg. The other nine Pleistocene species include flamingos from Lake Eyre, large megapodes related to the malleefowl from eastern and southern Australia, logrunners and a pardalote from Victoria, dwarf emus from King Island and Kangaroo Island, and the previously discovered giant coucal from South Australia.

Given such modest numbers, the two new Nullarbor coucals increase the number of known Pleistocene bird extinctions in Australia by 20%. Their disappearance is another piece in a complex ecological puzzle that covers just one corner of a vast continent.

Time will tell if these birds were local oddities, or the tip of an extinction iceberg that affected birds Australia-wide and has so far slipped under the radar.

elen.shute@gmail.com received funding from BirdLife Australia for this project

gavin.prideaux@flinders.edu.au receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Trevor Worthy receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

An Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, was the first to achieve it but just recently nuclear fission’s popularity has been decreasing

It began in 1789 when a German chemist named Martin Klaproth discovered uranium but it was not until 1934 that nuclear fission was first achieved following a series of experiments by Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist.

Related: Hinkley Point C to go ahead after EDF board approves project

Continue reading...

Ecologists discover a food web beneath the waves of French Polynesia that is both unusual and spectacular.

Nuclear reactor project has seen several developments since being announced in 2005

• EDF board approves Hinkley Point C project
  

UK energy policy review launched by Tony Blair

Continue reading...

Huge, expensive and difficult to build, Hinkley is a throwback to the last century, just as the world is embracing the smart energy systems of the future

The new nuclear reactors now given the go-ahead at Hinkley Point have failed every test bar the one that finally mattered - political expediency.

The plant, to be paid for by UK energy customers, could cost them £37bn and is a leading contender for the most expensive object ever built on the face of the Earth. A former Conservative energy secretary calls it “one of the worst deals ever” for Britain.

Continue reading...

Businesses and education providers on the Somerset coast see opportunities but residents remain concerned over safety and waste

The EDF Energy visitor centre at the Angel Place shopping centre in Bridgwater was doing brisk business.

A group of pensioners waited for a coach to take them for a tour of Hinkley Point B nuclear power station 10 miles away on the Somerset coast while children played with displays explaining how electricity is created. Teenagers dropped in to jump on to a static bike and power up their mobile phones.

Continue reading...

Official figures show low-carbon sources accounted for almost half of national electricity supply last year - outstripping coal for the first time

Almost half the UK’s electricity came from clean energy sources such as wind and nuclear power last year, official figures have revealed.

Renewables accounted for a quarter of the country’s power supplies in 2015, outstripping coal power for the first time, the data published by the government revealed.

Continue reading...

UK government would need to increase funding to match common agricultural policy levels, Holyrood committee hears

Scottish farmers face losing hundreds of millions of pounds in subsidy after Brexit unless the UK government increases funding for Holyrood, a Scottish parliament committee has been told.

A senior economist and the National Farmers Union Scotland (NFUS) said the EU referendum vote raised significant doubts over the future of £452m in common agriculture programme spending in Scotland, because of the current Treasury deal to fund Holyrood.

Continue reading...

The earliest evidence of cancer in the human fossil record has been discovered in South Africa, say researchers.

The hi-tech illuminated costumes worn by media artist Kasia Molga reveal changes in urban air pollution and bring together art and science

Heads turn when media artist Kasia Molga and her performers walk the streets of Manchester. When they near buses belching diesel fumes, their futuristic capes and masks turn a bright red. Near a park they go green. Depending on the traffic pollution levels in the northern industrial city, their clothing pulses, flashes and changes colour from purple through to white.

Molga calls herself a “human sensor”. She has linked with atmospheric scientists at King’s College London to develop clothing that reacts to the minute particles (PM2.5s) emitted mainly by diesel engines.

Continue reading...

The Prime Minister has said that she wants to ensure a positive outcome for science in negotiations to leave the European Union.

Amateur video shot on Tuesday shows floods in Butwal, a village in the the Rupandehi district of Nepal, after flash floods and landslides swept through villages, killing at least 58 people over two days. In Butwal, local residents run away as torrential floodwaters overflow the riverbank and break a flood defence wall

Continue reading...

The rapid growth in the illegal killing of African elephants seen since 2006 seems to have stabilised and may be decreasing.

Scientists show for the first time that there are 15% more individual plants and animals and 11% more species inside terrestrial conservation zones

Biodiversity is greater inside the world’s protected areas, scientists have been able to show for the first time.

There are 15% more individual plants and animals and 11% more species inside than outside protected areas, according to the largest analysis of biodiversity in terrestrial globally protected areas to date.

Continue reading...

Warren, a rhinoceros calf, responds to being called while on a walk with his carers at the Meyersdal Nature Estate in South Africa on Monday. Warren comes running back after being called by name and also accompanies some dogs on a trip around the sanctuary. The Meyersdal Nature Estate is run by Working with Rhinos, a charity dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating rhinoceros and indigenous wildlife from the area

• Watch the full video on Working with Rhinos’ YouTube channel
  

Continue reading...

Sandy, Bedfordshire What are they tasting, and what makes them dab their egg on one particular leaf above all others?

Day by day, summer has been eating its way through the nasturtium at the back door. Over the past fortnight, I have conducted my own leafwatch. Victorian naturalists used systematic, meticulous, studies to gain insights: I’m looking in my lunch break. Even so, during these half-hour snatches, I’ve discovered a tiny something that contradicts an authoritative textbook.

We call them cabbage whites, the butterflies with a taste for brassicas, but these insects have a fondness for nasturtiums too. One flits over the fence and breaks its zigzag course through the garden to home in. It circles and lands on leaf after leaf, wings whipped into a frenzy at the point of exact touchdown.

Continue reading...

ABC Science journalist Bernie Hobbs takes us through the latest stories - in this case how fire that brought warmth and comfort to early humans may also have triggered the emergence of deadly tuberculosis and how Jupiter's Great Red 'Hot Spot' may explain atmospheric mystery.

National eNews - Do we need emergency action on climate?