Few things get armchair paleontologists as excited as the phrase "soft tissue preservation." But a new study is casting doubt on some of the most stunning of these finds: Researchers argue that claims of brains, nerves and blood vessels preserved in animals for 520 million years are just a bunch of microbial goo called biofilm. For the last decade, researchers working in Southern China have described a number of fossils from Stage 3 of the Cambrian Period, more than 500 mil ...read more

A tiny chip implanted just under the skin could be the Breathalyzer of the future. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego reported today that they had created a tiny chip that can read levels of alcohol in the body and relay that information to a smartwatch. It could be an alternative to traditional means of detecting whether someone has been drinking, and offers users the ability to monitor their blood-alcohol levels in real-time. The chip, which hasn't been tested i ...read more

The internet is clearly still a wild frontier. We are bombarded by sensationalist or fake news all the time, sometimes by sources who merely want to increase traffic and sometimes by people who intentionally want to deceive. It is a challenge even for the seasoned professional to figure out what is trustworthy information and what is merely conjecture, rumors and downright lies. So when news about geologic events moves from the realm of the researcher to the media, what happens when the scie ...read more

Two independent studies show how much we need to limit warming to preserve the ice. But we're currently headed on a very different path. Almost every month now we get news of dramatic losses of Arctic sea ice due to human-caused warming — and last month was no exception. The ice extent in March 2018 turned out to be the second lowest for the month in the satellite record. The best estimates are that unless we significantly reduce our emissions of planet-war ...read more

Last fall, Ambae (aka Aoba) made headlines after almost 13,000 people had to be evacuated due to the increasingly violent eruptions from the volcano in Vanuatu. The activity subsided after a few weeks and people were able to return to their homes. Since November of last year, the volcano settled down, producing minor steam-and-ash plumes from the summit caldera lake, Lake Voui. However, starting in mid-March, the volcano has become more restless again. Ash from eruptions (see below) h ...read more

Dinosaurs may hog the Mesozoic spotlight, but some of the neatest finds of recent note in paleontology come from under the sea: a very pregnant ichthyosaur and the partial remains of another that was a supersized specimen (think blue whale territory). A quick ichthyosaur refresher: these marine reptiles show up in the fossil record and explode in size and number during the Triassic, get smaller but are still plentiful in the Jurassic (201-145 million years ago) and then die out durin ...read more

From Spock to "The Rock," arched eyebrows can speak volumes. Now researchers suggest that communicative eyebrows may have proven key to the evolution of modern humans, a marked advance over the prominent brow ridges of early humans. Modern humans possess smooth foreheads with expressive eyebrows. In contrast, early humans had sloping foreheads with thick brow ridges. "There have been many explanations over the years for why early humans had these huge bony ridges," said study co-author ...read more

Well, well, well...you could say a new and highly significant fossil is really giving the finger to the human evolution and migration timeline once considered all but carved in stone. A discovery in the Arabian desert confirms Homo sapiens had wandered far beyond our ancestral African homeland thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Over the past few years, a number of separate research teams have been turning up evidence, including fossils, artifacts and genet ...read more

The tales we tell — from Homer and Genesis to your friend’s ninth recounting of that epic rave last summer — are rich with drug use. But studies show our ancestors were chewing, brewing and blazing long before they started to record their intoxicated escapades. Virtually all human societies use mind-altering substances. What’s more, about 90 percent give drug-induced altered states of consciousness a role in their fundamental belief systems, according to a survey of ...read more

In late 2016, staff at the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, began to report hearing unusual sounds. Over the coming months, some staff were struck down by hearing loss and concussion-like symptoms. The strange sounds were interpreted as the cause, perhaps even reflecting a sonic weapon of an unknown nature. The story of the 'Havana embassy attack' has been told in detail but, until recently, there were no scientific studies of the event or its aftermath. That changed on February 15th, w ...read more