early

Ape evolution: Family tree of extinct apes reveals our early evolutionary history

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A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins Humans 16 March 2022 By Michael Marshall Dryopithecus, an extinct ape from the Miocene JOHN SIBBICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A huge study of fossil apes clarifies … Read more

2 NASA astronauts performing spacewalk early Tuesday: Watch it live

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Two NASA astronauts will conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday morning (March 15), and you can watch it live. Kayla Barron and Raja Chari are scheduled to step outside the orbiting lab Tuesday at 8:05 a.m. EDT (1205 GMT), kicking off a roughly 6.5-hour spacewalk designed to help pave the way … Read more

Too much of a good thing: Early impacts delivered iron to Earth but almost wiped out life

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Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. The Hadean era was a pretty wild ride. Earth had just formed, but meteorites constantly rained from the sky, pummeling our young planet for over 700 million years. Those impacts posed a … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope will study super-bright quasars to understand early universe

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Some of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first science investigations will probe the role that bright objects called quasars played in early galaxy evolution. Quasars are distant objects powered by black holes typically a billion times as massive as our sun. They emit energies that can climb to trillions of electron volts, exceeding the total … Read more

‘Weird’, Long Lost Rocks Could Explain How a Hellish Earth Became Habitable

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Early Earth is often described as ‘Hadean’ for good reason. Arising from the ashes of a collision that gave us our Moon, the primordial eon was characterized by hellish heat trapped beneath a thick blanket of carbon dioxide and water vapor.    Strangely those conditions should have been inhospitable for far longer than they were. … Read more

Tiny New Species of Stegosaur Unearthed in China

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A newly discovered fossilized stegosaur found in China is the most ancient ever found in Asia, and could be the oldest in the world. Treading the Earth some 170 million years ago, during the Middle Jurassic Bajocian age, the beastie was also small for a stegosaur, measuring just 2.8 meters (just over 9 feet) from … Read more

Major James Webb Space Telescope project will map half a million early galaxies

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It’s been nearly 350 years since Sir Issac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” but the sentiment certainly holds true today. Newton’s wisdom is exemplified by a grand project called the Cosmic Evolution Survey, or COSMOS. COSMOS builds on the legacy of the Hubble Space … Read more

The chances of early life on Mars faced a meteorite problem

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Early chances for life on Mars might have been diminished by meteorites. A new study suggests that a period of heavy cratering on the Red Planet (and elsewhere in the solar system) persisted 30 million years longer than thought. Studies of the Late Heavy Bombardment, as this period is called, also has implications for the … Read more