These mammal ancestors birthed live young far earlier than thought - Science News

An artist's impression of the second-generation planet orbiting HS 0209+0832, the first such planet to be found orbiting a white dwarf. A star’s explosive death is often apocalyptic for its closest planets. In our solar system, the sun’s expansion into a red giant about five billion years from now will spell doom for Mercury, Venus, and possibly even Earth. But a dead star isn’t only capable of destruction. Astronomers suspect that gravity from highly magnetized, fast-spinning neutron stars known as pulsars can sometimes assemble enough material to form second-generation planets. But for the first time, scientists have detected a potential planet birthed from a white dwarf—and it may only be the first of more to come

The first people in the Americas arrived no earlier than 21,000 years ago, but "there are huge gaps in our genetic dataset," a new study reports.