Researchers have identified a 26 million-year cycle of meteor impacts that coincides with the timing of mass extinctions over the past 260 million years. Pictured is a graph showing how the rate of cratering has changed on Earth over time. The arrows indicate the dates of mass extinctions
Gravitational disturbance of the Oort Cloud - a shell of icy objects on the outer edge of the solar system - is believed to lead to periodic showers of comets pouring through the inner region where the Earth resides.
The last of these events is said to have occurred about 11 million years ago, roughly the same time as the Middle Miocene mass extinction.
Eight of the 12 surviving sons of Saudi Arabia’s founding monarch are supporting a move to oust King Salman, 79, the country’s ailing ruler, and replace him with his 73-year-old brother, according to a dissident prince.
The prince also claims that a clear majority of the country’s powerful Islamic clerics, known as the Ulama, would back a palace coup to oust the current King and install Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, a former Interior Minister, in his place. “The Ulama and religious people prefer Prince Ahmed – not all of them, but 75 per cent,” said the prince, himself a grandson of King Ibn Saud, who founded the ruling dynasty in 1932.
Support from the clerics would be vital for any change of monarch, since in the Saudi system only they have the power to confer religious and therefore political legitimacy on the leadership.
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