A Soyouz rocket lift-off from Europe's launchpad in Kourou, French Guiana, on Dec. 18 with Europe's CHEOPS planet-hunting satellite on board. JODY AMIET / AFP / Getty Images
By Matthias Klaus
The CHEOPS mission blasted off from Kourou, French Guiana atop a Russian Soyuz rocket on Wednesday. The launch came 24 hours after a first attempt was delayed shortly before liftoff because of a software problem in the upper stage of the rocket.
Study urges conservation push for critically endangered black rhinos. CC0 1.0
With the consequences of human activities pushing Earth into a
sixth mass extinction, a team of biologists have calculated that plant and animal species are being wiped out so quickly that evolution cannot keep up.
Human activities—including
pollution, deforestation, overpopulation, poaching, warming oceans and extreme weather events tied to climate change—are predicted to drive so many mammals to extinction in the next five decades that nature will need somewhere between 3 to 7 million years to restore biodiversity levels to where it was before modern humans evolved, according to an alarming new analysis published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
