The wrecks of several warships that were sunk during the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942 have mysteriously disappeared, after marking the graves of their respective sailors for nearly three-quarters of a century. Officials are blaming commercial scrap metal scavengers for looting the site, having pilfered ships that belonged to the American, British and Dutch navies. But at least one salvage expert is skeptical about this being the work of ordinary scavengers.
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The study of planets found outside our solar system has been booming over the past few decades, with over two-thousand of these fascinating exoplanets having been cataloged. One of the next obvious steps for researchers is to attempt to detect signs of life on them, although the technology to directly determine if anything is living that far away has yet to be developed. In the meantime, studies are underway to help determine the best candidates to focus on, using what we know about life on Earth, and what information we can currently gather from the exoplanets themselves.
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hidden was solved when it was found that it was being trapped deep in world’s oceans. While this had granted us a minor reprieve in the otherwise measurable increase in the atmosphere’s temperature, a new study has shown to what extent the ocean’s heat-absorbing ability has been helping us.
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This is not a morality tale about planetary preservation – and what happens if you don’t take good care of your literal ground of being. But after years of assuming that Mars is and always had been inhospitable to life, scientists at NASA are now convinced that an ocean once covered 20% of the surface of Mars. In some places, the ocean was likely a mile in depth. And according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, “The longer water persists on a planetary body in one location, particularly if there is geological turnover, the more likely it is that it would provide a habitable environment for a suitable duration for life to either originate or proliferate. An ocean would meet this need.”
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