pale blue dot
As I scuba dive in Oslob Bay off Cebu Island in the Philippines, I see a tiny shadow dart over the surface of the spherical coral block – a minute fish, a goby of the genus Eviota, among the smallest vertebrates in existence, only about a centimetre long and less than 1/10th of a gramme …
Continue reading “Is bigger always better, or will the tiny inherit the Earth?”
The blue whale (scientific name: Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the baleen whales (Mysticeti). Up to 31 meters (102 feet) in length and 190 tonnes (210 short tons) in weight, it is the largest extant animal and also is the heaviest known to have existed. But it’s hard to conceptualize how big …
Continue reading “Blue whale facts: How big is the blue whale?”
Evolution has favoured the modification and expansion of primate vision. Compared with other mammals, primates have, for example, greater depth perception from having forward-facing eyes with extensively overlapping visual fields, sharper visual acuity, more areas in the brain that are involved with vision, and, in some primates, trichromatic colour vision, which enables them to distinguish …
Continue reading “How seeing snakes in the grass helped primates to evolve”
I recently saw a question on Quora and it was like that: “why is it called the ‘theory of evolution’ but the ‘law of gravity’?” This question is strongly related to a common misconception about evolution: “it is just a theory” – creationists always say “evolution is just a theory”.
The Moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite. It is also the fifth-largest natural satellite in the Solar System and the largest among planetary satellites relative to the size of the planet that it orbits. It formed about 4.51 billion years ago from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a …
Continue reading “Earth without Moon: what would it be like?”
By studying lunar craters, scientists have discovered that asteroid impacts became more frequent about 290 million years ago. So was just a matter of time for dinosaurs to become extinct.
We only see one side of the moon, because it is tidally locked to the planet Earth (tidal locking the situation when an object’s orbital period matches its rotational period). What if the Earth was tidally locked to the Sun?
What if the Earth’s history (our planet’s age is approximately 4.54 billion years), compressed into just one year? @YearOnEarth just did that. At midnight on the 31st of December, Chris Jennings started a little project for the incoming year: tweeting the entirety of the geological history of the Earth, compressed into one year. The result …
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What would convince you that aliens existed? The question came up recently at a conference on astrobiology, held at Stanford University in California. Several ideas were tossed around – unusual gases in a planet’s atmosphere, strange heat gradients on its surface. But none felt persuasive. Finally, one scientist offered the solution: a photograph. There was …
Continue reading “Proof of life: how would we recognize an alien if we saw one?”
It’s ironic how calling a person a “monkey” or “orangutan” is considered offensive when we all know that humans are descended from these apes. Well, sometimes it is hard to find logic in the customs and practices of our society, but if you are willing to find the path of evolution that turned monkeys into …
Continue reading “The Significance of Fossils in Revealing the Evolution on Earth”
