We know we got here from somewhere, but who would have suspected it was by way of a fish that used electrical currents to hunt and communicate and locate itself?
Diseased trees in forests may be a significant new source of methane that causes climate change, according to new research. The study was conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and published in Geophysical Research Letters. Sixty trees sampled at Yale Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut contained concentrations of methane…
Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings…
Earth is the planet of the plants—and it all can be traced back to one green cell. The world’s lush profusion of photosynthesizers—from towering redwoods to ubiquitous diatoms—owe their existence to a tiny alga eons ago that swallowed a cyanobacteria and turned it into an internal solar power plant. By studying the genetics of a…
To hear some people tell it, the increasingly energetic and sophisticated fishing industry has left the world’s oceans a shambles, with species of cod, sharks, tuna and other fish hunted almost to extinction and vast stretches of the ocean floor wrecked by bottom-scraping trawlers. To hear some other people tell it, many depleted stocks are…
At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. Stars crowd each other as they whiz through space like cars on a rush-hour freeway. Supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. Powerful gravitational forces from a supermassive…
Ever since Darwin first published The Origin of the Species, scientists have been striving to identify a last universal common ancestor of all living species. Paleontological, biochemical, and genomic studies have produced conflicting versions of the evolutionary tree. Now a team of researchers has developed a novel method to search the vast archives of known…