We can say it’s been a breakthrough year !!!
1. There might be a habitable ocean planet just 4 light years away from Earth. Proxima b is an earth-like planet that orbits a Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun.
2. The computer can beat a human in Go. A Google’s AlphaGo computer defeated Lee Sedol, the Go world champion.
3. Sloths risk their lives every time they poop. They can lose one-third of their body weight during one long run.
4. It is possible to live without 90 percent of your brain. The French man was 44 years when scientist discovered that he have only 10 percent of his brain left.
5. Strange metallic sounds are coming from Marianas Trench. The scientist believes that they came from the sounds of new kind of baleen whale call.
6. Human’s lost their penis bones when our species became monogamous. We lost our penises (baculum) for ourselves.
7. Earth has another moon orbiting it. It is a mini-moon (quasi-satellite), with a catchy name of 2016 HO3.
8. There is a 400 years old shark. Greenland shark is slow-moving deep-sea dweller and is the longest-living vertebrates known on Earth.
9. Red squirrels in Britain carry a strain of leprosy that afflicted the humans during the Middle Ages. Scientists presume they have been affected with leprosy for centuries.
10. Some dinosaurs had a feathery tail. Researchers find preserved feathered dinosaur tail in amber.
11. Soot killed dinosaurs. Paleontologists believe that an amount of 1.5 billion tons of soot was in the Earth’s atmosphere during the asteroid blast.
12. Tardigrades can live frozen for 30 years. Because of this scientists believe that they can survive even in the space.
13. The ozone hole is healing. Since 2000 the Antartic ozone hole is shrunk for 4 million square kilometers.
14. Earth lost the amount of the sea ice as much as the entire land mass of India. In November 50,000 square kilometers of sea ice was lost due to the high temperatures.
15. Gravitational waves do exist. Scientists confirmed Einstein theory after observing the collision of black holes.