A new study has estimated it would cost $15.6 billion per year for 30 years to prevent extinction for 99 of Australia’s priority species. The research, led by Griffith University’s Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security with WWF-Australia and the University of Queensland, highlights the urgent need for increased funding to combat threats such as habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change.

A team led by a Rutgers-New Brunswick scientist has concluded water did not arrive as early during Earth’s formation as previously thought, an insight that bears directly on the question of when life originated on the planet.

The finding, reported in the science journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, is significant because the data reported by the study support the idea that water arrived towards the final stages of Earth’s development into a planet from dust and gas, what geologists refer to as late accretion.

Berger’s project, Insights into the Martian Environment Through Pattern Analysis of Compound Dunes, focuses on studying dune formations on Mars using high-resolution images captured by NASA's orbiting cameras. These “compound dunes”—dunes with smaller dunes layered on top—are well-documented on Earth but remain unexplored on Mars.

A research team led by Dr. Sofia Sheikh of the SETI Institute, in collaboration with the Characterizing Atmospheric Technosignatures project and the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, set out to answer a simple question: If an extraterrestrial civilization existed with technology similar to ours, would they be able to detect Earth and evidence of humanity? If so, what signals would they detect, and from how far away?

“One of the most satisfying aspects of this work was getting to use SETI as a cosmic mirror: what does Earth look like to the rest of the galaxy? And how would our current impacts on our planet be perceived,” said Sheikh. “While of course we cannot know the answer, this work allowed us to extrapolate and imagine what we might assume if we ever discover a planet, with, say, high concentrations of pollutants in its atmosphere."

Early detection of earthquakes could be vastly improved by tapping into the world's internet network with a groundbreaking new algorithm, researchers say. Fibre optic cables used for cable television, telephone systems and the global web matrix now have the potential to help measure seismic rumblings thanks to recent technological advances, but harnessing this breakthrough has proved problematic. A new paper published today in Geophysical Journal International seeks to address these challenges by adapting a simple physics-based algorithm to include fibre optic data that can then be used hand-in-hand with traditional seismometer measurements.