A team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology have published a paper documenting strong circumstantial evidence for a large planet with an orbit outside of Pluto’s. This yet-undiscovered planet is hypothesized to be smaller than Neptune, but would be 10-times more massive than Earth, and comes no closer than 30.5 billion km (19 billion miles) to the Sun.
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Earlier this month, the North Atlantic experienced a rare January hurricane, named Hurricane Alex. While Alex’s northward track kept it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it’s arrival in the waters south of Greenland coincided with a sudden outflowing of meltwater through a bay in the Western Greenland, indicating that the warm winds that accompanied Alex had triggered a melting event.
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Fairy tales are an intrinsic part of our lives: in childhood, we are entertained and educated by the lessons imparted in their stories, and later in life, they continue to inspire and be adapted into popular culture, spawning new books, movies, television and video games.
While some of our oldest fairy tales can be traced to the 6th century storyteller Aesop, there is some contention that he based his stories on older fables. 19th century author Wilhelm Grimm said that he believed that the tales that he and his brother Jacob authored were thousands of years old, but this idea was dismissed by others shortly afterward. However, a new study shows that the origins of fables that have been retold over the centuries may have roots in our deep past.
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In comparison to geological timescales, human documentation of geological events only extends back into a mere fraction of the Earth’s past: the oldest-known depiction of a volcanic eruption is found in Turkey, in a mural dating back to 6,600 BCE. But according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, that date may have just been pushed back even further, by a scene painted in France’s Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave.
Discovered in 1994, Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave is the home to an extensive gallery of Paleolithic cave art, created over a number of periods between 23,000 and 36,000 years ago. The illustrations in this cave are the earliest known examples of human art, documenting the evolution of mankind’s artistic expression.
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