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A new study is suggesting that human influence is affecting the planet in an unexpected way: human-driven global warming appears to be accelerating the shift the planet’s axis. Although scientists have known about the slow wobble in the Earth’s axis for a long time, NASA researchers have found that the planet’s shrinking ice sheets are altering the Earth’s balance, causing the pole to drift one-third faster than it would if the planet’s temperature had remained stable.
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One of the ways that scientists propose that we tackle the problem of global warming is to actively remove greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. To be an effective compliment to reducing our CO2 output from transport and industry, carbon sequestration will have to be done on a massive scale, meaning that the materials used in the process will need to be plentiful. One of those materials, magnesite, readily absorbs CO2, but there are both practical and economic limits keeping industry from mining the mineral in quantities large enough to be effective. However, researchers in Canada have discovered a way to quickly produce the mineral artificially.read more

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A recent survey of the DNA of over 100,000 of the Earth’s animal species, including modern humans, has yielded a shocking result: 90 percent of all extant species arose at the same time, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, upending the assumption that most creatures would have reached their modern forms at different point throughout the planet’s history. The survey also found that genetic diversity between different species doesn’t increase over time–meaning modern humans haven’t diverged genetically over the course of our history from other species at all.
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On April 15, 2018, asteroid 2018 GE3 set a record as the largest-known asteroid of its size to make a close pass to the Earth–and at less than half the distance between the Earth and the Moon, that’s a fairly close shave. The 48 to 110 meter (157 to 361-foot) object is between three to six times the size of the object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.

2018 GE3 was only spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey the day before its close, 193,000-kilometre (120,000-mile) pass, moving at 29.5 km/s, or 66,000 mph. As it whizzed away from us it passed even closer to the Moon, only one-third the distance between La Luna and Terra Firma.
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