​Earth will run out of oxygen in about a billion years ● Nuclear waste could be used for space exploration ● Did Spain really provide the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens in Europe?

Earth will run out of oxygen in about a billion years

The disappearance of oxygen would lead to the extinction of life long before the Sun causes the oceans to evaporate, an event predicted to occur in about two billion years. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience and co-authored by experts from the US and Japan, states that the Earth will lose oxygen at most in 1.08 billion years +/- 0.14 billion years, returning to pre-Great Oxygenation levels around 2.4 billion. billions of years ago.

The researchers ran computer simulations for about 400,000 years, taking into account the changes the sun would undergo in the future, as well as the decrease in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as it is broken down by rising temperatures. Less carbon dioxide, fewer organisms capable of photosynthesis, less and less oxygen.

Oxygen levels are estimated to drop more than a million times from today’s levels, returning to levels that existed in the Archaeozoic. This discovery also has huge implications for our efforts to discover life on other planets. The duration of the existence of oxygen on the planet is reduced to about 20-30% of its existence, which means that life has a relatively short period of time during which it develops and reaches a level of higher intelligence.

Until then, the conclusion is inevitable. Namely, that the Earth in the distant future will become a planet of anaerobic life forms, as it was in the beginning.

Nuclear waste can be used for space exploration

The European Space Agency has approved the allocation of 20 million euros for a program to develop batteries capable of providing long-term energy for use in future space missions. They will be based on americium-241, a radioactive chemical element produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium.

Americium has never been used as an energy source before, but it could become an important raw material for the development of batteries capable of filling the gap in solar energy, according to ESA experts. Such batteries would prove essential for missions to the Moon, especially at night, or those exploring areas beyond Jupiter where solar panels would prove useless.

Although it provides less energy per gram than plutonium, americium is cheaper and more abundant. ESA predicts that it will have the first americium-based battery prototypes in a maximum of three years, and they could enter service by the end of the decade.

So far, ESA has used plutonium-based batteries developed jointly with Russia. Given the suspension of collaboration in light of recent events, ESA is investing in these new types of batteries, some of which NASA may also consider.

An extinct world has been revealed with the oldest DNA ever identified

Two million years old, these are the oldest samples of DNA identified in permafrost samples from northern Greenland. They are a million years older than the oldest DNA found to date from the fossil remains of a Siberian mammoth.

A group of 40 researchers from France, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Denmark and the USA managed to recover 41 fragments of DNA from soil samples at a depth of about 100 meters. What came as a surprise was that experts identified the DNA of tree or animal species that were not known to exist in northern Greenland.

These are poplars, spruces or yews, as well as the DNA of reindeer, arctic geese or mastodons. Such animals could not survive at such a latitude, but apparently the climate in the north of Greenland was much milder than previously thought.

While some DNA samples can be linked to current species or, by correlation, to extinct ones, there are also DNA fragments that cannot be linked to anything known. And this suggests that biodiversity was much richer than expected, and the number of species that inhabited the Earth in the Pleistocene is so far unknown.

Did Spain really provide the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Europe?

Discovered in 1887 in a cave near Bañoles, a town in northeastern Spain, the mandible in question was from the beginning considered a purely Neanderthal fossil. A conclusion contradicted today by a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution by a group of paleoanthropologists from Binghamton University in the United States.

Time-dating showed it to be approximately 45,000-66,000 years old, placing it in a time period when Homo sapiens would theoretically not have existed in Europe. Moreover, the absence of a chin, the defining feature of our species, is absent, which is another argument for the Neanderthal category.

However, American experts claim that their analyzes did not reveal Neanderthal traits, and the conclusion is at least surprising. More precisely, either the lower jaw belongs to a Neanderthal-Sapiens hybrid, or it belongs to a hybrid of Homo sapiens and an unknown human species. The fact is more than surprising, considering that none of the Paleolithic sites of 60,000 years ago in Europe found fossils, except for Neanderthal man.

The mandible was compared to a mandible found in Romania, at Peshteri-cu-Oase, which was genetically proven to belong to an H. sapiens species, but which had a Neanderthal ancestor only four, at most, six generations ago. They show some similarities, but compared to the Spanish mandible, the Romanian mandible has a chin.

Researchers say they hope to obtain a DNA sample to confirm the person’s ancestry. Until the result is available, we still recommend that you view the study in question with a grain of salt. Of course, there were also times when scientists got carried away by the wave of fame, and Europe around 60,000 years ago was very likely not as full of mysterious hybrids or unknown species as has been said recently.

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