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DEEP CONNECTION: New excavations of a rock shelter near Kakadu National Park indicate humans reached Australia at least 65,000 years ago - up to 18,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously thought.

Global solar power solutions provider Photon Energy NV has mandated financial and strategic advisory firm Pottinger Co Pty Limited, to advise on a capital raising for a solar PV project pipeline with a total generation capacity of over 1 GW in Australia.

Network operator Transgrid says 100 per cent renewable energy is both feasible and affordable, and says only incremental increases in renewable energy will not achieve potential falls in the cost of electricity.

Being friendly is in dogs' nature and could be key to how they were domesticated from wolves.

Lawyer and ABC director Steven Skala named chair of $10 billion CEFC, three women appointed to board.

Launched in Paris during the COP21 summit, the International Solar Alliance, spearheaded by India and France, has this week welcomed Australia to the fold.

A beached hoodwinker sunfish, the new species described by researchers from Murdoch University. Murdoch University

Sunfish are famous for looking odd. They are the largest bony fish in the world, can grow to over 3 metres in length and weigh up to 2 tonnes, and look a little bit like a suitcase with wings.

But when I began my PhD doing population studies on sunfish off Bali in Indonesia, I didn’t expect to discover an entirely new species. What began as something of a side project turned into a four-year treasure hunt, flying thousands of kilometres to track down evidence with the help of dozens of people.

As part of my PhD research, I analysed more than 150 samples of sunfish DNA. Genetic sequencing turned up four distinct species: Masturus lanceolatus, Mola mola, Mola ramsayi and a fourth that didn’t fit with any known species.

A new species had been hiding in plain sight for centuries, which is why we ended up calling it Mola tecta: the hoodwinker sunfish. But back then, in 2013, we didn’t even know what they looked like; all we had were skin samples containing the mysterious DNA.

The hoodwinker sunfish grows to at least 2.4 metres long, with a distinctive ‘backfold’ of smooth skin separating the back fin into two. Illustration by Michelle Freeborn, Wellington Museum Te Papa Tongarewa. Going on the hunt

The next step was trying to figure out what these fish might look like. Superficially, all sunfish look the same (that is, slightly strange). Their bodies are flat and rigid, except for their fins; they don’t have a tail; and as they grow bigger they usually develop odd bumps on their head, chin and nose.

So I started looking at pictures of sunfish, especially on social media, searching for something different. I also spent a long time establishing a network of people across Australia and New Zealand who could alert me whenever a sunfish was found.

I finally got a break in 2014. Observers from New Zealand and Australian fisheries were sending me pictures of sunfish they found out at sea, usually just a fin in the water. But on one occasion they hauled a tiny fish on board to free it from a fishing line, and got a brilliant photo of the whole thing along with a genetic sample.

This fish had a little structure on its back fin that I’d never seen on a sunfish before. Just as I was wondering if this was a characteristic of the species, I hit the jackpot when four fish were stranded in one go on the same beach in New Zealand.

I flew down to Christchurch, landed at night and drove out on to the beach. I saw my first hoodwinker sunfish in the headlights of the car – it was incredibly exciting. This changed everything, because now we knew what we were looking for.

A hoodwinker sunfish off the coast of Chile. César Villarroel, ExploraSub What is the hoodwinker?

Unravelling this mystery has been a huge puzzle. Sunfish are huge, largely solitary and fairly elusive, so you can’t just go out and sample a heap of them to study. You have to fly thousands of kilometres when there’s a stranding and hope it’s the right puzzle piece you’re looking for.

However, by looking at stranded specimens, photos and museum collections, and by verifying specimens genetically, we have been able to describe this species very accurately.

We found enough fish to describe this species on a size spectrum of 50cm to nearly 2.5m. Unlike the other species, they don’t develop lumps and bumps as they grow; instead their body dimensions stay pretty much the same between juveniles and adults. Their back fin is separated into an upper and lower part, with a small flexible piece of skin, which we have termed the “back-fold”, connecting the halves.

We don’t know exactly what their range is, but it seems to be the colder parts of the Southern Hemisphere. We’ve found them all around New Zealand (mostly around the South Island), off Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales (Australia), South Africa and southern Chile.

Sunfish aren’t particularly rare, but it’s tricky to study them as they simply live in parts of the ocean most humans don’t go. They dive hundreds of metres to feed, and then rise to the surface to bask in the sun on their sides (hence their name).

This habit of diving and rising throughout the day means they can be caught by a range of fishing gear, including tuna longlines or in drift gillnets and midwater trawls. Fishers have been turning them up for centuries. When we looked back through the literature to see if this species had been described before, we found sunfish in books that included mermen and unicorns, and one of the first written mentions comes from Pliny the Elder.

This Chilean video identifies the fish as the common sunfish (Mola mola), but they have the separated back fin of the hoodwinker sunfish (Mola tecta). A sunny community

Of course, this discovery didn’t happen in isolation. A group of researchers from Japan first identified the possibility of a new species from a single skin sample about 10 years ago. We were able to work with two sunfish experts from the University of Tokyo and the University of Hiroshima to describe the hoodwinker, and to compare it in detail with the other two Mola species.

We also collaborated with geneticists from the Gemmell Lab at the University of Otago and expert taxonomists from the Wellington Museum Te Papa Tongarewa, who prepared and now house the “holotype”, which is the name-bearing specimen and official representative of Mola tecta.

Fisheries observers from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industries have sent me around 120 samples from sunfish they sampled while on patrols, which was the basis for the initial study.

Finally, we’ve had invaluable support from the public. On one occasion, a gentleman and his young daughter even drove out on a quad bike to a remote beach just to gather samples. (I do believe sunfish bring out the best in people.)

After four years of work – and the help of many people – it’s great to be able to finally share the hoodwinker sunfish with the world!

Marianne Nyegaard has received funding from the following bodies for her PhD research: The Systematics Research Fund (Linnean Society of London and the Systematics Association), Graduate Women (WA) inc, The PADI Foundation, and the Sea World Research and Rescue Foundation.

Researchers describe the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land as one of the most significant cultural and archaeological sites in the world — but it's unprotected in a mining lease.

First global analysis of all mass–produced plastics has found humans have produced 8.3bn tonnes since the 1950s with the majority ending up in landfill or oceans

Humans have produced 8.3bn tonnes of plastic since the 1950s with the majority ending up in landfill or polluting the world’s continents and oceans, according to a new report.

The first global analysis of all mass–produced plastics has found that it has outstripped most other man-made materials, threatening a “near permanent contamination of the natural environment”.

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Australian Conservation Foundation asks environment and energy minister to revoke Carmichael mine approval

A fresh legal challenge could be brewing for Adani’s planned Carmichael coalmine. New advice has found the federal environment minister’s approval of the mine may have been unlawful in light of new scientific evidence of its impacts on the endangered black-throated finch.

As a result, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has asked the federal minister for the environment and energy, Josh Frydenberg, revoke the approval and ask Adani to resubmit its plans for consideration.

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Brexit department warns EU counterparts it will ‘return waste to its country of origin’ if an agreement on nuclear cooperation cannot be reached

Britain has warned the EU that it could return boatloads of radioactive waste back to the continent if the Brexit talks fail to deliver an agreement on nuclear regulation.

In what is being taken in Brussels as a thinly veiled threat, a paper setting out the UK position for the negotiations stresses the right “to return radioactive waste … to its country of origin” should negotiations collapse.

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A UK zoo is taking part in a radical plan to save the world's last northern white rhinos from extinction.

Neart na Gaoithe project on east coast likely to go ahead after long-running court battle despite claim it threatens seabirds

A £2bn offshore windfarm in Scotland looks set to go ahead after the RSPB lost a long-running legal challenge against the plans, which the conservationists said threatened puffins, gannets and kittiwakes.

The Scottish government gave its consent to four major windfarms in the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay in 2014, but the RSPB launched a judicial review, saying it was extremely concerned at the impact on seabirds.

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Catholic order builds chapel in middle of cornfield in attempt to use religious freedom protections to block Atlantic Sunrise pipeline

Catholic nuns in Pennsylvania are resisting plans to build a $3bn pipeline for gas obtained by fracking through its land by creating a rudimentary chapel along the proposed route and launching a legal challenge, citing religious freedom.

The Adorers of the Blood of Christ order has filed a complaint against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in a bid to keep the pipeline off their land. The nuns’ lawyers argue in court papers that a decision by FERC to force them to accommodate the pipeline is “antithetical to the deeply held religious beliefs and convictions of the Adorers”.

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It was a night with a twist in the 2017 Clean Energy Council Awards, as several projects tied for first place in the Innovation category at the NAB Gala Dinner at the Australian Clean Energy Summit in Sydney.

The wall of Republican climate denial is starting to crack; who will be the Neo that accelerates the process?

Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt wants to hold televised ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ climate science ‘debates.’ The idea is that a ‘Red Team’ of scientists will challenge the mainstream findings of ‘Blue Team’ scientists. That may sound familiar, because it’s exactly how the peer-review process works. But climate deniers have lost the debate in the peer-reviewed literature, with over 97% of peer-reviewed studies endorsing the consensus on human-caused global warming, and the few contrarian papers being flawed and failing to withstand scientific scrutiny.

So Scott Pruitt is trying to put his thumb on the scale, giving the less than 3% of contrarian scientists equal footing on a ‘Red Team.’ John Oliver showed how to do a statistically representative televised climate debate (so brilliantly that it’s been viewed 7.4m times), but it’s probably not what Pruitt had in mind:

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Flooding in Cornish coastal village of Coverack described as horrendous, and further deluges possible further north

Much of England and Wales has been warned to prepare for more stormy weather and localised flooding after several people in Cornwall had to be rescued from flash floods overnight.

Heavy rain and thunderstorms caused “devastating” flooding in the coastal village of Coverack in Cornwall on Tuesday, with about 50 homes and businesses affected. Met Office forecasters put in place a yellow warning, the lowest of the three weather warnings, for most of the rest of Wednesday and said that as much as two-thirds of a month’s average rainfall could come down in a few hours.

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Every winter thousands of giant Australian cuttlefish gather to breed in a stretch of shallow, rocky water off Point Lowly in South Australia. The phenomenon, known as an aggregation, is the only known instance of cuttlefish gathering in such large numbers – it is estimated there can be more than 150,000 in a 10km stretch of water – and has become a tourist as well as scientific attraction. This video, taken by mpaynecreative.tv, captures male cuttlefish as they display their brightest pigments in a bid to attract females. It is not known why the giant Cuttlefish aggregate in this area particularly but it is believed they are likely attracted to the shallow rocky area along the coast as it provides optimal habitat to lay their eggs. Video courtesy of mpaynecreative.tv

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Four re-introduced beavers in Scotland engineered a network of dams, canals and ponds that left the landscape ‘unrecognisable’ from the original drained pasture

The extraordinary ability of eager beavers to engineer degraded land into wildlife-rich wetlands has been revealed by a new study in Scotland.

Scientists studied the work of a group of four re-introduced beavers over a decade and found their water engineering prowess created almost 200m of dams, 500m of canals and an acre of ponds. The result was a landscape “almost unrecognisable” from the original pasture that was drained over 200 years ago, with the number of plant species up by nearly 50% and richly varied habitats established across the 30 acre site.

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June 2017 was beaten only by June in 2015 and 2016, leaving experts with little hope for limiting warming to 1.5C or even 2C

Last month was the third-hottest June on record globally, temperature data suggest, confirming 2017 will almost certainly make a hat-trick of annual climate records, with 2015, 2016 and 2017 being the three hottest years since records began.

The figures also cement estimations that warming is now at levels not seen for 115,000 years, and leave some experts with little hope for limiting warming to 1.5C or even 2C.

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