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Categories: Geoscience: Geomagnetic Storms, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

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Electrons arriving from the Sun are propelled by electrical energy generated as high as 30,000 kilometers above Earth, ultimately creating the dazzling displays of the northern and southern lights.

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Analysis of observations made by satellites in 2014 has revealed a long-lasting 'space hurricane' -- a swirling mass of plasma several hundred kilometers above the North Pole, raining electrons instead of water.

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The fossil of a bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs was found with some sort of rocks in its stomach. Previously, researchers thought that these rocks were swallowed on purpose to help clean its stomach, like modern birds of prey do, giving a hint at its diet. But in a new study, scientists discovered that these rocks are quartz crystals that likely formed after the bird died -- its diet is still a mystery.

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The temporary breakdown of Earth's magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, a new international study shows.

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Love them or hate them, there's no doubt the European Starling is a wildly successful bird. A new study examines this non-native species from the inside out to learn what exactly happened at the genetic level as the starling population exploded across North America?

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This new paper shows that melanin is more than just something that gives colour to the body. It played an important role in the evolution of warm-blooded animals and helped defined what birds and mammals look like today. By studying where melanin occurs in the body in fossils and modern animals researchers have produced the first model for how melanin has evolved over the last 500 million years.

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In the Van Allen radiation belts, electrons can reach almost the speed of light. Researchers have revealed conditions for such strong accelerations. They had demonstrated in 2020: during solar storm plasma waves play a crucial role. However, it remained unclear why ultra-relativistic electron energies are not achieved in all solar storms. They now show: extreme depletions of the background plasma density are crucial.

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Three studies uncovered the unusual sex chromosomes of platypus, emu and Pekin duck. Platypus have five pairs of sex chromosomes forming an unusual chain shape, while the sex chromosomes of emu and duck are not as different between sexes as those of human.

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New research explains how a 'stop-start' pattern of evolution, governed by environmental change, could explain why crocodiles have changed so little since the age of the dinosaurs.

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Although stellar flares are typically viewed as a detriment to habitability, study shows 'life might still have a fighting chance.' Researchers find that flares drive a planets atmospheric composition to a new chemical equilibrium.

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Scientists have found the most elaborately dressed-to-impress dinosaur ever described and say it sheds new light on how birds such as peacocks inherited their ability to show off.

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Molting is thought to be unorganized in the first feathered dinosaurs because they had yet to evolve flight, so determining how molting evolved can lead to better understanding of flight origins. Recently researchers discovered that the earliest record of feather molting from the famous early fossil bird Archaeopteryx found in southern Germany in rocks that used to be tropical lagoons ~150 million years ago.

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Bird species that have lost the ability to fly through evolution have become extinct more often than birds that have retained their ability to fly, according to new research.

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New research sheds light on the production of an 800-year-old turkey feather blanket and explores the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to supply feathers in the ancient Southwest.

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Fossil bones collected in the early 1990s on Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn Group, have revealed a new species of Polynesian sandpiper. The Henderson Sandpiper, a small wading bird that has been extinct for centuries, is formally named Prosobonia sauli after Cook Islands-based ornithologist and conservationist Edward K Saul.

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Three new articles present major advances in understanding the evolution of birds and mammals, made possible by new methods for comparing the genomes of hundreds of species. Researchers developed a powerful new genome alignment method that has made the new studies possible, including the largest genome alignment ever achieved of more than 600 vertebrate genomes.

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Most detailed every study into how animals evolve to better suit their environments shows that pterosaurs become more efficient at flying over millions of years before going extinct with the dinosaurs.

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Scientists discovered in 1996 that sunquakes are linked to solar flares. Now, using helioseismic holography, scientists have analyzed a 2011 flare and shown that the impulsive source that generated the sunquake, and the refracted acoustic waves that later rippled the solar surface, was submerged 1,000 kilometers below the photosphere and flare. Further sunquake study could reveal if submerged sources are common and whether they can predict the appearance of flares and potential impact on Earth.

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Researchers report the first ever clear images of nanojets -- bright thin lights that travel perpendicular to the magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere, called the corona -- in a process that reveals the existence of one of the potential coronal heating candidates: nanoflares.

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Scientists used observations recorded by members of the public to increase accuracy of computer model predictions of when harmful CMEs will hit Earth.