Carbon stores up in smoke with vanishing wilderness and other top stories.

• Carbon stores up in smoke with vanishing wilderness

  

  The Conversation* The Earth’s last intact wilderness areas are shrinking dramatically. In a recently published paper the Wildlife Conservation Society showed that the world has lost 3.3 million square kilometres of wilderness (around 10 per cent of the total wilderness area) since 1993. Hardest hit were South America, which has experienced a 30 per cent wilderness loss, and Africa, which has lost 14 per cent. These areas are the final strongholds for endangered biodiversity. They are also essen..

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• Scientists caught black holes swallowing stars — and burping energy back up

  

  Supermassive black holes are voracious beasts. Their tremendous gravitational pull sucks in everything that gets too close, including stars. For the first time, astronomers have clearly observed at infrared wavelengths what happens after a black hole eats a star: it burps back up a brilliant flare of light that echoes through space. Two studies published this week -- one by scientists at NASA, the other by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China -- describe these "tidal..

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• Inspirational thing about Mars colony

  

  We’re knocking on the door of humanity’s next great project.HUMAN colonisation of Mars could occur in under two decades and the man largely responsible for making it happen is inspired by the amount of people putting their hands up for the mission. Jason Crusan has a pretty tough job, but it may not be as tough as those willing to lead the human settlement on the Red Planet and usher in a new age of galactic colonisation.Mr Crusan is the former chief technologist for space operations for NASA, a..

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