A cricket song last heard 165 million years ago has been played again. To reconstruct the sound, paleontologists compared microscopic wing structures of fossil Archaboilus musicus, a Jurassic ancestor of modern crickets, to contemporary wings. Crickets sing — or, technically, “stridulate” — by rubbing together the ridged edges of their wings. From noises generated by…
A swathe of seagrass in the Mediterranean could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Carlos Duarte of the University of Western Australia in Perth sequenced the DNA of Posidonia oceanica at 40 sites spanning 3500 kilometres of seafloor, from Spain to Cyprus. One patch off the island of Formentera was identical over 15…
Trace elements in stars may influence the evolution of habitable zones around them where life as we know it might dwell. Stars are made nearly entirely from hydrogen and helium gas. Still, traces of heavier elements — which astronomers call metals, even if they are not what one normally think of as metals — can…
A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star. The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither…
The first plants to appear on earth 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages by causing a reduction in atmospheric carbon, British researchers said. Scientists say the first plants to grow on land, the ancestors of mosses that grow today, had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and the world’s…
The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins. The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago,…
For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy. This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000…
Life found in underwater caves in the Bahamas could give clues to what types of marine life might be found on distant planets and moons, researchers say. Discoveries made in so-called blue holes by Texas A&M University at Galveston researchers include specialized forms of bacteria life at different depths, suggesting that microbial life in such…
Fundamental particles are the building blocks of matter, and, apparently, come in many more flavors than the basic few that make up the atoms we’re familiar with. Flavor is the name scientists give to different versions of the same type of particle. For instance, quarks (which make up the protons and neutrons inside atoms) come…
Charles Darwin recognized that natural selection can make eyes sharper, muscles stronger, and fur thicker. But evolution does more than just improve what’s already there. It also gives rise to entirely new things—like eyes and muscles and fur. To study how new things evolve, biologists usually have to rely on ancient clues left behind for…