Lithium! Is there a hotter element these days? The foundation of our attempt to move anyway from the use of petroleum products for energy sits, at least right now, on lithium and its use in batteries. Li-ion batteries are the core to electric cars, household electrical storage and pretty much any technology that requires the power for long periods. However, the lithium has to come from somewhere, just like all resources from our planet ... and unlike petroleum, it isn't life that is the ultimate ...read more

Roughly 250 million years ago, Earth’s land masses lay together in one supercontinent known as Pangea. Surrounded by a single ocean, known as Panthalassa, it saw the rise of the dinosaurs. Pangea was roughly shaped like Pac-Man, with land reaching to both north and south poles and a chunk biting into the middle that contained the Tethys Sea, explains Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at Columbia University. Over the millions of years of its existence, this supercontinent saw the flourishing of bio ...read more

A land predator that lived during the ill-fated Permian Period functioned like a “big cat,” such as a tiger or lion, that dominated its local food chain, according to the scientists behind a new fossil find. That said, this 10-foot-long, 880-pound force probably looked nothing like a feline – it likely resembled a large amphibian.During the Permian Period and before the emergence of the dinosaurs, such four-legged “tetrapods” ruled the land. Their preeminence ended, however, with the w ...read more

In 2021, the web-based word game, Wordle, took the world by storm. Developed by a Welsh software engineer for his family and friends, the game asks players to find a five-letter word in six guesses using color-coded clues to indicate correct letters in previous guess. The game had around ninety players in November 2021, then 300,000 by the end of the year and over two million by the second week of January 2022. By the end of that month, the game was bought by the New York Times which has continu ...read more

Two ancient human fossils belonging to Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi made a recent trip to suborbital space in a gesture that has roiled the scientific community.On Sept. 8, 2023, an A. sediba shoulder bone and a H. naledi finger bone soared into the heavens aboard a Virgin Galactic private spacecraft, alongside three commercial passengers, the third such crew in Virgin’s history. The fossils spent about 5 minutes in space while stowed inside a cigar-shaped, carbon fiber container in ...read more

In May 2023, a person caught malaria from a bug bite in Sarasota County, Florida. In response, the Florida Department of Public Health went to war with Anopheles, better known as the marsh mosquito.Ground teams poured insecticide into standing water. Airplanes sprayed down remote wetlands with larvae-killer. Finally, after two months, marsh mosquitoes — and new malaria cases — became scarce again.“It was a full-on assault on these mosquitoes,” says Florida Department of Public Health Pre ...read more

I still remember the nightmares I had as a kid — sometimes with vivid clarity. In one recurring dream, for example, my parent’s German Shepherd transformed into a monstrous beast with glistening fangs and glowing eyes. Yet the older I got, the more mundane my dreams became, mostly populated by normal social interactions with friends and acquaintances.It's no secret that dreams vary wildly in tone and content. What’s more, scientists have found that the different types of dream states — f ...read more

Here on Earth, we take from the moon countless myths, legends and mysteries. We give it, in return, a bunch of high-energy electrons from our magnetosphere’s plasma sheet. But this is not such a piddling gift, according to a new paper, which proposes that these electrons react with the moon’s surface to create water.Scientists have long presumed that the solar wind – an outpouring of particles from the sun – creates water on the moon. In doing so, it has joined impacts from icy comets an ...read more

Humans are meant to be around one another. It’s been that way for millennia. We needed each other to hunt, construct homes, procreate, care for our offspring and protect one another against the saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves that meant to harm us. We also need each other to be happy and to take up the burdens that sometimes weigh us down. All told, being a human is exceedingly difficult when life is lived alone.Research shows that socialization is so engrained in our survival that when ...read more

If you've been hoping for a reprieve from extreme weather, I've got disappointing news: While there are no guarantees of what it will bring, El Niño is growing and the odds that it will peak as a strong event are stronger now than scientists believed just one month ago.According to the latest forecast, the climate phenomenon almost certainly will stick around through March of 2024. And there's now a greater than 70 percent chance that it will peak this winter as a strong episode. That's up from ...read more