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POPSVideo: Dr. Sally Ride on Our Changing Climate Studying Earth from space helps scientists understand our planet and the impact we have on it. America's first woman astronaut discusses how JPL instruments and missions have helped revolutionize what we know about Earth.
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POPSArctic Scientists Explore a "Lost" 26-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem “The origin of life discussion comes up because the rocks that are exposed on this very slow spreading ridge are not volcanic, but instead come directly from Earth’s mantle,” says geochemist Susan Humphris. “The chemistry is very much like the volcanism that occurred on the primordial Earth. If you are thinking about origins of life, you’d like to have an area that is the closest analog to what was happening on the early Earth.”
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POPSDinosaurs Diversified Over Time, not Suddenly During this epoch of riotous biodiversity, flowering plants, social insects, butterflies, modern groups of lizards, mammals, and possibly birds, too, all emerged. Some experts have suggested that dinosaurs were also part of the show, as so many weird fossils, such as duckbilled hadrosaurs, horned ceratopsians, pachycephalosaurs and other wonders, date from this time. But a new study, published on Wednesday in a British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, says that dinosaurs were less than a sideshow in the DNA spectacular. Researchers led by Graeme Lloyd of the University of Bristol, western England, devised a "supertree" of dinosaur evolution, patiently analyzing how more than 450 species -- about 70 percent of the known finds -- developed.
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POPSDino diversity earlier than first thought Maybe there is the idea that species including the dinosaurs were trying to deal with conditions brought about by the meteor, so many adaptations arose, but nature loves nothing more than competition, even when times are good.
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POPSFuture Climate Change
The average surface temperature of the Earth is likely to increase by 2 to 11.5°F (1.1-6.4°C) by the end of the 21st century, relative to 1980-1990, with a best estimate of 3.2 to 7.2°F (1.8-4.0°C) (see Figure 1). The average rate of warming over each inhabited continent is very likely to be at least twice as large as that experienced during the 20th century. Warming will not be evenly distributed around the globe (see Figure 2): Land areas will warm more than oceans in part due to water's ability to store heat. High latitudes will warm more than low latitudes in part due to positive feedback effects from melting ice (as discussed above). Most of North America; all of Africa, Europe, northern and central Asia; and most of Central and South America are likely to warm more than the global average. Projections suggest that the warming will be close to the global average in south Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and southern South America. The warming will differ by season, with
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