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Scientist have discovered a fly that... can't fly. In December 2021, the John Midgley and Burgert Muller from the Diversity of Pollinating Diptera in South African Biodiversity Hotspots project went to Lesotho, the only country in the world that has its entire territory located at an altitude of 1,000 metres and higher to see what they could find. At the Afriski mountain resort, they found 51 male specimens of Atherimorpha latipennis (a species discovered in 1956 but whose female had never been described) and a for the first time a female belonging to the same species which couldn't get off the ground. “It’s not unheard of for only the female of a species to be flightless,” says Midgley. “But there were no examples in this fly’s family, let alone its genus.” Martin Hauser, a senior dipterologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, who was not involved in the research, told the Guardian: “Active flight has only originated four times in the last three billion years, so it’s always interesting when a species loses the ability to fly. It isn’t super surprising to find flightless species. But it is remarkable when the first case of flightlessness is reported in a family.” Scientists could only make educated guesses about why the female had lost the ability to fly. Despite it being much faster than walking, allowing flies to escape predators. “flight is also costly,” said Midgley. “You have to grow wings, and it uses a lot more energy than walking.” “For the males it is worth flying around and being able to search a larger area for females,” said Hauser. “Even if, while flying, they are exposed to birds and other predators, and risk being blown off the mountain and ending up in a hot valley with no females.” Meanwhile, there are other species that can't fly like ostriches, kiwi and emus. It is thought they evolved to lose flight after the dinosaurs became extinct because there were no predators big enough to hunt them. Fly - you had one job... Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Gary Gensler’s Securities and Exchange Commission is filling the crypto regulatory void, and the industry and its backers

By Marco Garcia and Mike Blake MAALAEA, Hawaii (Reuters) -The death toll from the Maui wildfires rose to 67 on

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It might sound more like the kind of idle daydream billionaires like Elon Musk would have, but could flooding the Sahara actually be the best way of tackling climate change in the future? The idea of creating a new “sea” in Africa is being discussed, and it’s not the first time that the notion of a great oasis in the Sahara has been discussed among the scientific community. As the ongoing climate crisis continues to worsen, the notion of flooding vast areas of the desert is being returned to once again [via IFL Science]. A new “sea” was first proposed following the study of the Messinian salinity crisis – which saw a dried-out area of the Mediterranean rejuvenated by the Zanclean flood, reconnecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean around 5.33 million years ago. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Given how the Mediterranean was transformed by the flood, the idea of flooding the Sahara to achieve similar results has been thrown around in the scientific community as far back as 1877, the Scottish engineer Donald McKenzie suggested flooding the El Djouf basin in Western Africa. The idea is now returning to popularity as the world looks for solutions to the climate crisis. One proposal centres on the Middle East’s Dead Sea and flooding the area using water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea Depression. A vast sea in Africa could represent a hugely innovative step towards tackling climate change and fostering a new hub of life – but even the people suggesting work such a project acknowledge just how expensive and dangerous it is. Even Y Combinator is a US startup accelerator who has described “desert flooding” as “risky, unproven, even unlikely to work”. Only time will tell whether the notion of a new sea in the Sahara coud ever work, or whether it’ll remain the stuff of dreams. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

OpenAI said on Tuesday it had reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO days after

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Saturn’s rings might disappear pretty soon astronomically speaking, according to new research. A new analysis of data captured by NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited the planet between 2004 and 2017, has revealed new insights into when the seven rings were formed and how long they might last. During Cassini’s Grand Finale, when the spacecraft completed 22 orbits in which it passed between Saturn and its rings, the researchers observed that the rings were losing many tons of mass per second, which means the rings will only be around another few hundred million years at most. “We have shown that massive rings like Saturn’s do not last long,” said Paul Estrada, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a coauthor of the studies, in a statement. “One can speculate that the relatively puny rings around the other ice and gas giants in our solar system are leftover remnants of rings that were once massive like Saturn’s. Maybe some time in the not-so-distant future, astronomically speaking, after Saturn’s rings are ground down, they will look more like the sparse rings of Uranus.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Saturn’s rings are made mostly of ice but have a small amount of rocky dust created by broken asteroid fragments and micrometeoroids colliding with the rings. The research also found that the rings appeared long after Saturn’s initial formation, and were still forming when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. “Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a few hundred million years old,” said Richard Durisen, professor emeritus of astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington and lead author of the studies in a statement. “If you look at Saturn’s satellite system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened there in the last few hundred million years. If Saturn’s rings are not as old as the planet, that means something happened in order to form their incredible structure, and that is very exciting to study.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

‘Remnant 2’, the follow-up to 2019's 'Remnant: From the Ashes' has sold one million copies in its first week.