New plant named after Jimi Hendrix

California researchers have named a newly discovered rare plant after Jimi Hendrix. The plant, found in Baja California, Mexico, has been christened Dudleya hendrixii, or "Hendrix's live-forever." Live-forevers are a kind of succulent with enormous life spans. This one is a stalky plant less than a foot tall with pinkish-white flowers that dies in summer and re-sprouts in fall.

Prehuman male was tall for his time

He stood at 5-foot-5 and weighed around 100 pounds. That's what scientists figure from the footprints he left behind some 3.7 million year ago. He's evidently the tallest known member of the prehuman species best known for the fossil skeleton nicknamed "Lucy," reaching a stature no other member of our family tree matched for another 1.5 million years, the researchers say. The 13 footprints are impressions left in volcanic ash that later hardened into rock, excavated last year in northern Tanzania in Africa. Their comparatively large size, averaging a bit over 10 inches long, suggest they were made by a male member of the species known as Australopithecus afarensis. Researchers named the new creature S1.

Mexico plans to catch vaquita porpoises

So few of Mexico's vaquita porpoises remain that the international committee to protect the endangered species is preparing to catch and enclose as many as it can in a last-ditch effort to save them from extinction, experts said. It will be a risky effort, because the species has never been held successfully in captivity. According to rough estimates, only about three dozen of the world's smallest porpoise remain in the upper Gulf of California, the only place it lives. With population numbers falling by 40 percent annually, there could now be as few as eight breeding females left.

Weird weather events pegged to warming

A new scientific report finds man-made climate change played some role in two dozen extreme weather events last year. An annual report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found climate change was a factor in 24 of 30 strange weather events. They include 11 cases of high heat, as well as unusual winter sunshine in the United Kingdom, Alaskan wildfires and odd "sunny day" flooding in Miami. In six cases — including cold snaps in the United States and downpours in Nigeria and India — the scientists could not detect climate change's effects. Other scientists, though, disputed that finding for the cold snap that hit the Northeast.

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