Reuters Science News Summary

Following is a summary of current science news briefs. Nuclear, climate threats keep Doomsday Clock close to apocalypse

A renewed nuclear arms race, rising greenhouse gas emissions and the emergence of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have left the modern world as close to annihilation as it was at the height of the Cold War, atomic scientists said on Thursday. The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as an indicator of the world's susceptibility to apocalypse, remained at two minutes to midnight for a second year running in what the scientists called a dangerous "new abnormal." Odd duckbilled sea reptile thrived after ancient global calamity

In shallow warm seas about 247 million years ago in what is now China, an oddball marine reptile flourished in the aftermath of Earth's worst mass extinction, possessing a duckbilled snout and unusually small eyes that made it resemble a platypus. Scientists on Thursday described fossils of the three-foot-long (one meter) creature, called Eretmorhipis carrolldongi, that boasted a head that looks too little for its body and weak vision that indicates it relied upon a sense of touch, not sight, to forage in murky water using its cartilaginous bill.