The Earth’s oceans may be acidifying faster than at any point during the last 300 million years due to industrial emissions, endangering marine life from oysters and reefs to sea-going salmon, researchers said. Scientists found surging levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forced down the pH of the ocean by 0.1 unit in the…
Neanderthals were already on the verge of extinction in Europe by the time modern humans arrived on the scene, a study suggests. DNA analysis shows most Neanderthals in western Europe died out as early as 50,000 years ago – thousands of years before our own species appeared. A small group of Neanderthals then recolonised parts…
A new study finds that diaries and writings from ninth-century Baghdad provide insight regarding strange weather from the era, which could allow scientists to better understand the planet’s weather history. The surviving documents were written by historians and scholars during the Islamic Golden Age between A.D. 816 and A.D. 1009. They represent one of the…
For more than 500 years, the Maya kings ruled the New World’s richest and most advanced civilization. But then, around 800 C.E., the Maya empire began to collapse and its kings soon disappeared; by 1000 C.E., most of its great cities and temples lay in ruins. What happened? In recent years, scientists have increasingly blamed…
Back in the day of the first mammals, horses started out the size of house cats, weighing about 8 pounds and standing only a few inches tall. Then they got even littler, a direct result of the warm temperatures that characterized the Eocene era. Only when Earth cooled down a bit did the beasts get…
Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year. The goal of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals. At a major science meeting in Canada, Professor Mark Post said synthetic meat…
Internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit think tank, showing its funding of leading skeptics of global warming and a plan to teach climate change skepticism in schools. An anonymous person leaked the documents to several publications and activists supporting the science of climate change. “The heart of the climate…
When an oncoming hurricane curves offshore — as most do — we usually breathe a sigh of relief. But soon, those offshore storms might give us something more to worry about. Offshore hurricanes could demolish half the turbines in proposed wind farms just off the USA’s coastlines, according to a recent study in the Proceedings…
When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog–but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might…
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…