The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy on Friday announced both had awarded Lockheed Martin substantial aircraft contracts.

(MENAFN — The Conversation) A large crack, stretching several kilometres, made a sudden appearance recently in south-western Kenya. The tear, which continues to grow, caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse. Initially, the appearance of the crack was linked to tectonic activity along the East African Rift. But although geologists now think that this feature is most likely an erosional gully, questions remain as to why it has formed in the location that it did and whether its appearance is at all connected to the ongoing East African Rift. For example, the crack could be the result of the erosion of soft soils infilling an old rift-related fault.

The Earth is an ever-changing planet, even though in some respects change might be almost unnoticeable to us. Plate tectonics is a good example of this. But every now and again something dramatic happens and leads to renewed questions about the African continent splitting in two.

The Earth’s lithosphere (formed by the crust and the upper part of the mantle) is broken up into a number of tectonic plates. These plates are not static, but move relative to each other at varying speeds, ‘gliding’ over a viscous asthenosphere. Exactly what mechanism or mechanisms are behind their movement is still debated, but are likely to include convection currents within the asthenosphere and the forces generated at the boundaries between plates.

Scattered across the world are a number of bewildering ‘mystery spots’ that appear to defy gravity — places where cars seem to drift uphill, and cyclists struggle to push themselves downhill.

Also known as gravity hills, these bizarre natural phenomena can be found in places like Confusion Hill in California and Magnetic Hill in Canada, and while they’ve inspired rumours of witchcraft and giant magnets buried in the countryside, the actual scientific explanation will have you questioning every slope you encounter from here on out.

There are reportedly dozens of gravity hills around the world, in the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Italy, and they all have one thing in common — if you drive your car to the bottom of the hill and put it in neutral, it will proceed to roll back UP the slope.