There is an optimistic view of the unprecedented migration we are witnessing from rural to urban areas, and it’s that cities could offer the biggest hope for the survival of other species and ecosystems in the Anthropocene. Cities are entirely shaped and created by humans to protect and separate them from the natural world, allowing…
The story of how humans evolved from knuckle-walking primates to upright bipeds is still a matter of great debate among anthropologists. One of today’s leading theories suggests that our forest-dwelling ancestors began walking on two feet as climate change stripped away the trees they lived in, forcing them to move to the ground. Another explanation…
Over the next few months, chlorine will ensure that countless swimming pools don’t turn into microbe-choked petri dishes. That’s only one of many uses we’ve found for the element. We sprinkle it on our food as table salt — a k a sodium chloride. We pump water through pipes made of polyvinyl chloride. Perchlorate, a…
Researchers from the University of Chicago and several international institutions found that several groups of genes in humans and dogs—including those related to diet and digestion, neurological processes, and disease—have been evolving in parallel for thousands of years. This parallel evolution was likely driven by the shared environments of humans and dogs, wrote the authors…
The solid iron core is actually crystalline, surrounded by liquid. But the temperature at which that crystal can form had been a subject of long-running debate. Experiments outlined in Science used X-rays to probe tiny samples of iron at extraordinary pressures to examine how the iron crystals form and melt. Seismic waves captured after earthquakes…
SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 kelvins (about 1.08 million F). In this wavelength it is easy to…
Any kind of underwater diving involves process for that very reason. There’s the early-morning wake-up, the weather check, the gear check (masks, fins, regulators … check). And then there’s the dive site approach – whether you’re walking in from the shore or taking a boat to some far forgotten reef. Diving Lake Untersee is just…
Geological detectives are piecing together an intriguing seafloor puzzle. The Indian Ocean and some of its islands, scientists say, may lie on top of the remains of an ancient continent pulled apart by plate tectonics between 50 million and 100 million years ago. Painstaking detective work involving gravity mapping, rock analysis, and plate movement reconstruction…
Scientists have known for almost five years now that the moon is watery–or at least that lots of water molecules are trapped in its crust and its permanently dark, frozen craters. The prevailing theory is that this water comes from molecules in the solar system. But maybe the moon has had water all along, according…
Languages are like species. They evolve in mostly predictable ways, splitting into new species or dying out over time. Now, a group of linguists and computer scientists in the US and Canada have created a piece of software that can analyze enormous groups of languages to reconstruct what the earliest human languages might have sounded…