Plants dominate life on Earth, making up more than 80 percent of biomass as measured in gigatons of carbon. On land, plants today boast a wide range of complex shapes, from stout baobab trees to winding ivy, but they all evolved from a simpler past. Land plants trace their roots to aquatic algae that were limited to pretty much two options when it came to structure: stringy or flat. But somewhere along the way, these early plants learned to grow in a multitude of shapes to adapt to l ...read more

Fire at will! Researchers present evidence that Neanderthals were just as capable of producing fire as early Homo sapiens were, sending another long-held notion of our species' exceptionalism up in smoke. I'm not just fanning the flames here: The question of whether our closest evolutionary kin used fire the same way our ancestors did has been a controversial one for decades, and its debate mirrors broader trends in paleoanthropology. Members of the genus Homo appear t ...read more

Although NOAA's just-released analysis differs somewhat, both show that June 2018 continued the long-term global warming trend Last month tied with June 1998 as the third warmest such month since 1880. Only June 2015 and 2016 were warmer, according to the monthly analysis released this week by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Today, the National Oceanic and Administration issued its own, independent analysis, ...read more

Snakes alive! Preserved in a piece of amber about the size of a small potato, a tiny snake hatchling — less than two inches long — is unprecedented in the fossil record. At nearly 100 million years old, the baby snake's remains provide researchers with significant new information about the animals' development and global distribution. But wait, there's more... The early Late Cretaceous hatchling, from Myanmar's northern Kachin province, was donated to rese ...read more

A new origami-inspired robotic claw that looks like a cross between a flower and a crab pincer could help marine biologists capture delicate underwater organisms currently unknown to science. The oceans are the largest and least-explored habitats on Earth, with some estimates suggesting that up to a million unknown species lurk within its deepest waters. Marine biologists typically use submarines or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to grab or scoop life from the seafloor, but plucking se ...read more

We’re not always the same person. The jokes you tell at home aren’t necessarily the ones you tell at work, and I don’t know about you, but I certainly talked differently around my grandmother than I did around my friends. Linguistics people call this tendency code-switching. People are complicated, multi-faceted, and some situations bring out certain qualities in us — it makes sense. But we’re not the ...read more

Two robots traverse the desert floor. Explosions from a decades-old conflict have left a pockmarked and unstable territory, though many more improvised bombs lie concealed in its vast reaches. Sunlight splays off the beaten edges of Optimus, the smaller robot. Its motors whir as its claw grasps an unusual orb lying by its side. If Optimus were programmed to hope, it would hope the object was just a rock and not another bomb. It couldn’t afford to take many more hits, and its a ...read more

Think back to the earliest memory you have. How old were you? Three, maybe 2? Younger? If it’s the latter, you’re not alone. Problem is, you’re probably imagining it. Most brain experts agree we’re not really capable of forming full, autobiographical memories until we’re a little more than 3 years old; our brains just aren’t that sophisticated yet. But a new paper published in Psy ...read more

Alexandria, known for its ancient library and a lighthouse counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, just keeps on giving. The reaction to its latest gift has been bad mummy jokes online. During a construction survey, a sealed sarcophagus was found in the Egyptian city 16 feet beneath the Sidi Gaber district, according to a news release this month. The tomb is made of black granite, 9 feet long and 5 feet wide, the largest ever discovered in the city. Mortar seals the ...read more

Most of us think of coffee as a morning essential, not a cancer-causing hazard. So the nation got a jolt after a California judge made a final ruling in May that Starbucks and other coffee sellers must inform customers about carcinogenic chemicals in their brews. The ruling stemmed from a court case invoking Proposition 65, a state law that requires warnings if products or places contain certain types of hazardous chemicals. But the implications reach far beyond the Golden State. Californ ...read more