Chalconatronite, a result of quarrying, Mont Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, Canada. (Credit: RRUFF)
To the ever-growing list of uniquely human tweaks to the planet, we can add the creation of 208 minerals.
A list compiled by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of Maine and the University of Arizona provides the first assessment of how many unique compounds human activities have created. The collection is another piece of evidence in favor of the Anthropocene, the auth ...read more
Egyptian paleontologist Sanaa El-Sayed, shown here in the field, is the first woman vertebrate paleontologist from the Middle East to be first author on a paper published internationally — and her colleagues at Mansoura University are not far behind her. (Photo courtesy Sanaa El-Sayed)
Sometimes, paleontology is about looking forward. Sure, the field is focused on uncovering and understanding the past, but to continue to progress, like every other area of science, paleontology n ...read more
A Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker pierces the Beaufort Sea ice pack in September. (Credit: Alek Petty/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
Watching Arctic sea ice shrink to record lows has become a summer tradition for climatologists. And while few would expect that long-term trend to reverse, it’s still a struggle to predict the annual highs and lows of polar sea ice.
In fact, just looking at long-term statistics — how much the sea ice maximum and minimum usual ...read more
“People protect what they love.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
When I was a kid, my family and I used to love watching “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.” Every week we’d set out the TV tables and share our dinner with the French marine explorer as he led us on underwater adventures and taught us to appreciate the beauty of science and the sea.
His show is one of the main reasons I became an environmental reporter and earned my scuba diving certification in Monterey ...read more
Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, associate scientist at the New York Genome Center, prepare to make trillions of of a DNA file. (Credit: New York Genome Center)
By 2020, the volumes of data that humanity generates may reach 44 trillion gigabytes, according to information technology analyst firm International Data Corporation in Framingham, Massachusetts. That’s equivalent to over 6 towers of 128-gigabyte iPad Airs, each reaching from Earth to the moon.
To make use of all this data, ...read more
There’s nothing but bones left of this mighty woolly mammoth, now on display at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Credit: Ernie Mastroianni.
The extinct woolly mammoth lives on today as a regal symbol of the last ice age, a poster child for de-extinctionists and an occasional guest on HBO’s Game of Thrones. But new research reveals that when it made its last stand on a remote island, the species was a mess.
Mammuthus primigenius had disappeared from most of Eurasia and No ...read more
Leprechaun skulls! Kidding. The vivid green chosen for this reconstruction of two partial human crania sure does help them stand out from the background, a photograph of the site in China where they were found. Credit: Xiujie Wu.
The period about 100,000 years ago was a crucial one for our species — and a time not well represented in the fossil record. A pair of partial human skulls from Central China are helping to fill in some of the mystery, but their blend of archaic and modern Homo s ...read more
