Researchers believe the nation’s food supply may be vulnerable to rapid groundwater depletion from irrigated agriculture. The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints the highest resolution picture yet of how groundwater depletion varies across space and time in California’s Central Valley and the High Plains of the…
Cosmic impacts that once bombed Mars might have sent temperatures skyrocketing on the Red Planet in ancient times, enough to set warming of the surface on a runaway course, researchers say. According to scientists, these findings could potentially help explain how this cold, dry world might have once sustained liquid water and conditions potentially friendly…
As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions. In contrast, the Milky Way’s center shows little activity. But it wasn’t always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the…
The mysterious fall of the largest of the world’s earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the…
Despite what the movies tell us, any aliens that visit Earth probably won’t want to enslave or vaporize us, veteran E.T. hunter Jill Tarter says. Hostile aliens abound at the multiplex these days, terrorizing our planet in films such as “Battleship” and “Men in Black 3.” But science fiction is probably far from reality in…
A study of more than 300 Neolithic skeletons suggests evidence of “hereditary inequality” among farmers 7,000 years ago, researchers claim. Archaeologists from Cardiff University led a team who studied the skeletons from across Europe. They say evidence suggests farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without. Dr. Penny Bickle, of…
From an evolutionary standpoint, the key players in the mating game were males with poor fighting skills and females faithful to them.
Noted paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey says scientific discoveries may soon make the debate over evolution a part of history. The Kenyan-born scientist serves as a professor at Stony Brook University on New York’s Long Island and recently spent a month in New York raising funds for his Turkana Basin Institute. Leakey says the institute welcomes scientists,…
The end of the classic Mayan civilization in the lowlands of Mesoamerica was likely expedited by shifting trade routes that started to bring valuable goods to coastal regions instead of the inland city-states of the ancient Native Americans. While the cause of this decline is still shrouded in mystery, most scholars consider the period of…
The Earth’s greatest mass extinction, 250 million years ago, was so severe that it took 10 million years for the planet to recover. Life was nearly wiped out, with only 10% of plants and animals surviving. And the sheer intensity of the crisis, and continuing grim conditions on Earth after the first wave of extinction,…