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As Earth Day approaches and the Wonder Theory newsletter celebrates three years of arriving in your inbox, I look to the future with hope.
We all start somewhere. Encouragement and the pursuit of knowledge help us grow. When Jane Goodall As a little girl, her mother fostered the celebrated primatologist’s love for the living world.
Now 90, Goodall fosters that same appreciation through her Roots & Shoots program, which empowers young people to create change within their communities around the world.
Even as the world changes in response to the climate crisis, Goodall remains hopeful that humanity can save the planet.
“Remember that as an individual you have an impact on the environment every day,” Goodall recently told CNN. “And it is up to you to choose what impact you make.”
Ocean secrets
In May 2020, Ruby Reynolds, then 11, and her father, Justin, were looking for fossils on a beach in Somerset along the English coast when she discovered something unusual.
The fossils Ruby found have now been reassembled with the help of experts, revealing the jawbone of a giant ichthyosaur that roamed the seas 202 million years ago. And in size, the marine reptile likely rivaled the blue whale, currently the largest living animal.
“It was so cool to discover part of this giant ichthyosaur. “I am very proud to have played a role in a scientific discovery like this,” she said.
Meanwhile, paleontologists at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in India have found evidence of another enormous reptile: a prehistoric snake that was longer than a school bus.
A long time ago
Archaeologists have pieced together the puzzle of a dramatic collapse of the dynasty after finding burned remains in an ancient Mayan pyramid in Guatemala.
The research team discovered the scorched bones of four adults, as well as luxurious decorations and weapons, in a room beneath a temple, leading them to believe the people were of royal descent.
It’s likely that a new type of leader emerged at a time of political and social change for the Mayans, and that the bones were burned as a sign of deliberate desecration, the team said.
Separately, two 5,500-year-old skeletons recovered from an archaeological site in southwestern France belonged to women who were likely buried alive during a sacrificial ritual using a form of Italian mafia-style torture.
Other worlds
For the first time, astronomers have discovered a rainbow-like effect called glory on a planet outside our solar system.
Scientists using the Cheops Space Telescope noticed an unexpected glow in the atmosphere on WASP-76b. An artist’s illustration shows the phenomenon, which appears as colorful, concentric rings of light and has only ever been observed on Earth and Venus.
The red-hot exoplanet, located 637 light-years away, is also intriguing because it has one side perpetually pointed toward a Sun-like star, causing molten iron to rain down from the clouds.
In another study, scientists discovered that an ancient, cataclysmic collision with another planet created the telltale bright, white heart that glittered on Pluto’s surface.
Throughout the universe
A star’s unusual wobble led astronomers to what they have dubbed a cosmic “sleeping giant” in the Milky Way.
The Gaia Space Telescope has detected the most massive known stellar black hole, or a black hole formed by the collapse of a giant star, in our Milky Way.
The celestial heavyweight, called Gaia BH3, has a mass nearly 33 times that of our Sun, and lies just 1,926 light-years away.
Fantastic creatures
When scientists accidentally immersed a specific type of hibernating bumblebee in water, they made a remarkable discovery: Common Oriental bumblebees can survive underwater for up to a week.
It’s possible that the queens, which hibernate only during the cold season after male and worker bees die, enter a state of suspended growth called diapause, which allows them to survive.
Meanwhile, with billions of crickets set to emerge this spring after more than a decade underground, scientists expect some of these insects will be manipulated by a zombifying fungus.
The pathogen turns the crickets into ‘salt shakers of death’, as described by Dr. Matt Kasson, associate professor at West Virginia University.
Explorations
Take a closer look at these surprising stories:
– Budget cuts threaten the program that could retrieve rare samples from Mars collected by the Perseverance rover. Now NASA is calling for creative methods to return them to Earth.
– Excavations in South Australia have uncovered three new species of giant kangaroos that lived millions of years ago, and one of them was about double the size of the largest kangaroos alive today.
– NASA expected debris ejected from the International Space Station to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but a piece of space junk survived the fiery reentry process and crashed into a house in Naples, Florida.
– Camels once roamed what is now Canada, but they crossed the Bering Land Bridge 17,000 years ago and became fully adapted to life in the desert – and people can learn from their transformation.
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