New Scientist Reports: A new-and-improved successor to the troubled Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa – which finally returned a capsule to Earth earlier this year – could launch as soon as 2014. Hayabusa 2 would then be expected to return in 2020, bearing clues to the origin of life on Earth. Last week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration [...]
Archive for August, 2010
Aug
17
Humans butchered horned turtles to extinction
New Scientist reports The giant horned turtles of the Pacific became extinct later than we thought – and we were to blame. The half-tonne meiolaniid turtles were thought to have died out 30 to 40,000 years ago. With no signs of human interference, climate change was blamed. Now butchered turtle remains have been found in [...]
Aug
4
Can fish feel pain?
I’ve always figured that all animals – big, small, ugly – could feel pain. It makes sense that every creature should be able to detect horrible stimuli in order to quickly move away from it. Whilst this feeling of “pain” may not be as complex as the human experience of pain, it is still “pain” [...]