pale blue dot
It took evolution 3 or 4 billion years to produce humans. If the climate had completely failed just once in that time then evolution would have come to a crashing halt and we would not be here now. So to understand how we came to exist on planet Earth, we’ll need to know how Earth …
Continue reading “Earth has stayed habitable for billions of years. Exactly how lucky did we get?”
One of the most enduring tropes about crocodiles is to describe them as “living fossils”. They are cold, slow-moving, and scaly, so they look like how one might picture a dinosaur. Like many clichés, there is an element of truth to this comparison. The crocodiles from 200 million years ago look surprisingly like the ones …
Continue reading “Why Crocodiles today look the same as they did 200 million years ago?”
Massive amounts of public money are being mobilised to kickstart economies out of COVID-induced recessions. Many countries are allocating parts of their stimulus packages towards ensuring the recovery is green. Charlie Wilson, University of East Anglia; Caroline Zimm, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Simon De Stercke, Imperial College London
November 2 marks 20 years since the first residents arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting habitat has been continuously occupied ever since.
Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds over the last 50 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. The sharpest declines have occurred throughout the world’s rivers and lakes, where freshwater wildlife has plummeted by 84% since 1970 – about 4% per …
Continue reading “How to reverse global wildlife declines by 2050”
Every parent knows the feeling. Your child is crying and wants to go home, you pick them up to comfort them and move faster, your arms tired with a long walk ahead – but you cannot stop now. Now add to this a slick mud surface and a range of hungry predators around you. That …
This article is originally published on The Conversation with the title of “Climate explained: why we won’t be heading into an ice age any time soon” under a Creative Commons license. James Renwick, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington
Planet Nine is a theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our solar system. The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune. But does Planet Nine actually exist? …
Continue reading “Planet Nine might not exist, many astronomers now think”
With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through space are coming. But you might be surprised to learn that modern rockets don’t go all that much faster than the rockets of the past. Iain Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder
Will our species go extinct? The short answer is yes. The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived, over 99.9%, are extinct. Some left descendants. Most – plesiosaurs, trilobites, Brontosaurus – didn’t. That’s also true of other human species. Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. erectus all vanished, leaving just H. sapiens. …
