The 25 Biggest Turning Points in Earth's History

From fins to legs With plants well-established on land, the next step was for animals to move out of the water. Insects were among the first, around 400 million years ago. But they were followed soon after by big, backboned animals such as Tiktaalik, a fish that looked a bit like a salamander. Fish like Tiktaalik would eventually evolve four limbs, and give rise to amphibians, reptiles and mammals. It may be a good thing it left the water when it did, as soon afterwards the Late Devonian Extinction wiped out many marine animals, including some terrifying-looking armoured fish.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/bespoke/story/20150123-earths-25-biggest-turning-points/index.html

The 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs and Websites of 2014 Editor’s note: 2015’s list of the best, most interesting websites has arrived! The video above is a sampling from that list. Welcome to the most awesome blog post you’re going to see all year. Yep, it’s the third installment in the super-popular annual series in which I document the sites I think you’ll want to spend a lot of time on in the coming year (below you’ll find a few highlights from recent years in case you missed out). I have one major rule: a site can only appear on this list once, so there are never any duplicates. Every year this list is 100% fresh.

UN experts denounce 'myth' pesticides are necessary to feed the world The idea that pesticides are essential to feed a fast-growing global population is a myth, according to UN food and pollution experts. A new report, being presented to the UN human rights council on Wednesday, is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”. The report says pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole”, including an estimated 200,000 deaths a year from acute poisoning. Its authors said: “It is time to create a global process to transition toward safer and healthier food and agricultural production.” The world’s population is set to grow from 7 billion today to 9 billion in 2050.

1011_0 - PhidgetInterfaceKit 2/2/2 Product Description Designed for customers who only need a couple of Analog Inputs, Digital Inputs or Digital Outputs, the dongle size PhidgetInterfaceKit 2/2/2 is ideal for projects where space is critical. To keep the board small, we have removed the connectors from the board and brought them out through a 12-Wire cable. 29 Incredibly Useful Websites You Wish You Knew Earlier There are so many wonderful websites around, and it is difficult to know each and every one of them. The below list provides some of those websites that I find particularly helpful, even though they are not as famous or as prevalent as some of the big names out there. 1. BugMeNot Are you bugged constantly to sign up for websites, even though you do not wish to share your email?

10 Online Learning Tools for Students MakeUseOf.com When I was in elementary school I was very annoyed by all this studying. But my idea and hope was that once I was done with school, I would also be done learning. I couldn’t wait. Thus I was rather irritated when I heard that my dad had to complete training for his job to learn new things. Types of Wind Turbines Used Today Capturing the earth’s natural energy through wind was once an abstract idea. Eventually, however, engineers were able to focus the idea and put it into action through innovative technology. Throughout the development of wind turbines, many prototypes were created, and many of the first ones designed are still used today, just with more modern engineering. Here are a few of the different wind turbines we are used to seeing today, and some we definitely are not. HAWT Wind Turbines A “HAWT” is a Horizontal Access Wind Turbine.

disposableWebPage Hello World. This is LMWIFY, short for “Let Me Write It For You”. LMWIFY lets you create simple yet stunning looking messages on a canvas and distribute it as an image to your family and friends. The Concept Design a classical spectrograph This spectrograph is typical for studies fines structures in stellar spectra, like variations in line spectral profile of Be stars for example. A good target is to determine gas movements in these stars' circumstellar disk with a precision of some 20 to 100 km/s, using the H-alpha spectral line at 6563 angströms. In Be stars, radial velocities of several hundreds of km/s are often observed. In most cases, spectral lines will be just correctly resolved if a radial velocity dv of about 100 km/s can be detected.

How climate change may drive extreme weather —Whether a specific extreme weather event can be linked to climate change rarely gets a straightforward answer from climate scientists or meteorologists. It's complicated, they'll say, but that doesn't mean there isn't a relationship. "Climate scientists have been willing to link the general increase in certain types of weather extremes (heat waves, droughts, and floods) to climate change in a generic sense," says Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University. Rising global temperatures and other climate forces can certainly change the conditions that underlie weather, which climate scientists have said can lead to a change in the frequency of a type of weather event.

uk.businessinsider The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase. Sean Gallup/Getty Some of us (myself included), need a cup of coffee every morning to kick-start our day. I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since World War II. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in such a remote part of the world. Over the past two months though, I’ve been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration. At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on January 21st.

5 Fantastic Video Tools for Virtual Travel Around the World After years of watching Discovery and Lonely Planet, can you really see something in a travel video that you haven’t already watched? As it turns out, there’s a whole lot of the unexplored world available on the Internet. It’s a story we’re all too familiar with. We want to travel. We want to explore the world, catch new sights, get a whole new perspective on life.