Scientists: ‘Look, One-Third Of The Human Race Has To Die For Civilization To Be Sustainable, So How Do We Want To Do This?’
1/26/12 9:15AM

WASHINGTON—Saying there’s no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet’s resources—and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.

Representing multiple fields of study, including ecology, agriculture, biology, and economics, the researchers told reporters that facts are facts: Humanity has far exceeded its sustainable population size, so either one in three humans can choose how they want to die themselves, or there can be some sort of government-mandated liquidation program—but either way, people have to start dying.

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“The longer we wait, the higher the number of people who will have to die, so we might as well just get it over with,” said Dr. Chelsea Klepper, head of agricultural studies at Purdue Univer­sity, and the leading proponent of a worldwide death day in which 2.3 billion people would kill themselves en masse at the exact same time. “At this point, it’s merely a question of coordination. If we can get the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Beijing, India, Europe, and Latin America to voluntarily off themselves at 6 p.m. EST on June 1, we can kill the people that need to be killed and the planet can finally start renewing its resources.”

Thus far, humanity has been presented with a great variety of death options, among them, poisoning the world’s water supply with cadmium, picking one person per household to be killed in the privacy of his or her home, mass beheadings, and gathering 2.3 billion people all in one place and obliterating them with a single hydrogen bomb.

More: https://www.theonion.com/scientists-look-one-third-of-the-human-race-has-to-di-1819573235

‘Wonderchicken’ is the earliest known modern bird at nearly 67 million years old
The animal is a common ancestor of today’s ducks and chickens

By Carolyn Gramling

March 18, 2020 at 12:02 pm

Behold the Wonderchicken, the earliest modern bird ever found.

Asteriornis maastrichtensis lived 66.7 million years ago, less than a million years before the asteroid impact that doomed all nonavian dinosaurs. The winged and beaked descendants of this quail-sized bird, however, survived that mass extinction event, forming a long lineage that includes modern chickens and ducks.

Based on analyses of fossil remains, which consist of a nearly complete skull and a few limb bones, the bird is closely related to the most recent common ancestor of land fowl and waterfowl, researchers report March 18 in Nature.

A. maastrichtensis’ skull is “a never previously seen mashup of ducklike and chickenlike features,” says Daniel Field, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge. “It’s like a turducken.”

More: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/wonderchicken-fossil-earliest-known-modern-bird