Free Republic

This revelation has made the Yunxian skulls from Hubei province the oldest evidence of our early human relatives, known as hominins, in East Asia, according to research published Wednesday (Feb. 18) in the journal Science Advances...H. erectus has long been considered the first human relative to leave Africa, with 1.78 million to 1.85 million-year-old fossils found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia being the earliest evidence of humans in Asia. But stone tools discovered at two sites in China dated to 2.1 million and 2.43 million years ago have complicated that picture, since they predate experts' theory of when H....

Earth's solid surface and moderate climate may be due, in part, to a massive star in the birth environment of the Sun, according to new computer simulations of planet formation. Without the star's radioactive elements injected into the early solar system, our home planet could be a hostile ocean world covered in global ice sheets."The results of our simulations suggest that there are two qualitatively different types of planetary systems," said Tim Lichtenberg of the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS in Switzerland. "There are those similar to our solar system, whose planets have little water, and those in...

...in a new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University of Chicago... suggest that our solar system formed billions of years ago in a vast "bubble" of gas and dust around a giant, long-dead star, contradicting the commonly held view which suggests a nearby supernova was responsible... The dead star in question is what scientists call a Wolf-Rayet star. These are more than 40 to 50 times the size of our own Sun and burn hotter than any other stars, producing vast quantities of material -- much of which is blown off the surface by intense stellar...