Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard, is certain that he has identified possible relics of extraterrestrial technology in the debris of a meteor that crashed into the seas off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014.

The materials have recently been transported back to Harvard by Loeb and his colleagues for further examination. The United States Space Command is able to establish with an almost unshakeable confidence level of 99.999% that it originated from another solar system. The government provided Loeb with a radial distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) around the possible landing site.

That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. Its a very big area the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down, said Loeb, We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly.

Because of their calculations, they were able to plot out a possible course for the meteor. The results of their computations carved a course that occurred to pass exactly across the ten kilometer range that was predicted by the United States government.

Loeb and his team traveled to the location in a vessel known as the Silver Star. The ship made a number of laps both along and around the course that had been forecast for it. The researchers explored the ocean bottom using a sled that was loaded with magnets and was attached to their boat.

We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background, explained Loeb, They have colors of gold, blue, brown and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth.

Their examination of the spherules composition revealed that they are co...

Humans have transformed the planet to a staggering extent. Studies estimate that, as a species, weve modified at least three-quarters of the Earths land surface. Over time, vibrant mosaics of forest, grassland and wetland have been replaced with our road networks, bustling cities, and industrial-scale pastures, plantations and croplands. With so much of the globe under our influence, more focus needs to be placed on recognizing and preserving the biodiversity value of human-dominated landscapes, says an international team of researchers in a new review study published in Global Ecology and Conservation. The idea that we can have nature conservation of biodiversity in some parts of a landscape, country, or continent, and then have our food production landscapes and human-dominated landscapes in separate areas, I think is a bit ridiculous, study co-author Ben Scheele, an ecologist at Australian National University, told Mongabay. We really have to be serious about having wildlife in areas that are heavily human-modified. To this end, Scheele and his colleagues from Australia and the United States present a new conceptual framework, based on ecological theory, which they say will help resource managers and conservation biologists anticipate how species living in modified landscapes are likely to respond to repeated and rapid changes in land use. Natural forest abuts an oil palm plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. The large old trees are vital for species survival as surrounding land is converted from one human land use to another. Image by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay. While individual species responses willThis article was originally published on Mongabay