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Langley Bush, Cambridgeshire A bronze age grave, Roman shrine, gibbet mound, parish marker, gypsy haunt - centuries of decisions and deaths right here

Odd, the durable significance of some places. You can understand a mountain or cliff or sprawling forest – places that awe the eye on the ground, horizon or map. More enigmatic are the little places. Slid away, unremarkable but exquisite in appearance or legacy, for reasons frequently forgotten but strangely lingering.

This one, historically, a bronze age grave, then Roman shrine, then outdoor court, place of execution, parish marker, gypsy haunt, poet’s muse. Today, the name of a road and the title of a plaque. This is Langley Bush, lost in a field near Peterborough.

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There are lessons for South Australia and the rest of the country in how Port Augusta has gone about their transition to renewable energy so far.

This footage from the Antarctic summer of 2007-08 shows how Australian scientists endure extreme conditions to drill ice cores from Antarctica’s Law Dome area. Law Dome is a spot in eastern Antarctica where scientists have been drilling to gather historic climate datat. New research using Law Dome ice cores suggests the world might be able to burn less fossil fuels than previously thought

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Australia Clean Energy Council Recognizes Project with Energy Makeovers and Sunverge Employing Storage and Software to Reduce Peak Demand and Eliminate New Poles and Wires

The rapid, short-term growth in Australia's large-scale solar market has already been enough to drive costs down faster than even the most optimistic project developers could have predicted. Stand by for a big solar boom.

When the main interconnector closed in South Australia prices surged. But the bidding patterns by the fossil fuels generators were curiously spaced.

Here’s a summary of new batteries and new energy storage systems that have been announced in Australia in June and July 2016.

Infigen Energy says big rise in quarterly revenue due mainly to higher merchant electricity prices in South Australia, strong winds and higher LGC prices.

Analysis of bubbles trapped in ancient Antarctic ice suggests that as the planet heats up, plants and soils will add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere

“When the earth burps, Law Dome records it,” says Australian climate scientist Dr David Etheridge.

Law Dome is a special spot in eastern Antarctica where scientists have been drilling down into the continent’s long-frozen surface to pull out cores of ice.

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Seven's Today Tonight report into renewable energy included some shocking errors, and it didn't mention that one of its quoted critics is actually a big supporter of solar energy.

New report forecasts that the energy storage market in Germany will have an annual value exceeding USD1 billion by 2021.

TAKEAWAY MESSAGE: Up to 900 reef sharks survive in a small patch of one of the most untouched reef environments in the world thanks to an annual migration of groupers arriving at their door, researchers have found.

It's a rare albino squirrel, living in a garden in Sussex.

Scientists are calling for a "thoughtful debate" about the wisdom of global attempts to limit temperature rises under 1.5C.

Crossing the English Bulldog with another breed is the best way to ensure its survival, according to US scientists.

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

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