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A recent study of the bone structure in the fossilized skulls of Flores Man has confirmed that the hominid, nicknamed "Hobbits" due to their diminutive 3’6" stature, are not an ancestor of modern humans, but quite probably a cousin of ours, sharing a common ancestor.

First discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, the remains of the nine individuals of Homo floresiensis that were uncovered represent a unique species that lived on the island from 94,000 to 13,000 years ago. Since their discovery, a debate has ensued regarding their place in our family tree, with one side believing that they may have been a human ancestor, and the other saying that they were an offshoot that shared a common ancestor with us.
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The warming trend continues: both NASA and NOAA report that the month of January 2016 was one for the record books yet again. Hot on the heels of the hottest year on record, January broke yet another record for global average temperatures for that month, the ninth straight month to do so, at 1.04ºC (1.87ºF) above the 1951-1980 average. This January’s temperature departure was surpassed only by the previous month (December 2015, at 1.11ºC (2.00ºF) above average); this marks the first time on record that two back-to-back months surpassed the 1.0ºC temperature departure.
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One of the big drawbacks of data recorded by our culture is that it’s longevity relies on the robustness of the medium that it is encoded on: paper rots, magnetic sectors on hard drives fade, and the plastic and aluminum used in optical disks like DVDs eventually degrade and oxidize. The ancients had a penchant for setting things down in stone, a method of preserving information that seems to have worked quite well, but it’s a method that our culture doesn’t use very frequently. But what if we were to encode information in glass?
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Construction is currently underway on what will be the world’s largest radio telescope, being built in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province. As it’s name implies, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, will be 500 meters (1,640 feet) across, surpassing the 305-meter (1,000 foot) Arecibo array in Puerto Rico in size. Unfortunately, 9,110 nearby residents will need to be relocated  by Guizhou’s provincial government before the array goes online next year.
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