How many Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth?

Tyrannosaurus rex (rex meaning “king” in Latin) lived throughout what is now western North America 68 to 66 million years ago, during the Upper Cretaceous period. Back then, there was a big island (an island continent) called “Laramidia” there. But, how many Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth? At the same time, and in total? Ashley …

Creating Power Foods with Gene Technology

At least 820 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition globally and human population growth is likely to exacerbate this problem in the future. It is becoming increasingly important to develop sustainable and efficient methods to meet food demands. To address this global issue, Dr. Sanju A. Sanjaya and Bagyalakshmi Muthan from West Virginia State …

Regrowing a tropical forest – is it better to plant trees or leave it to nature?

The destruction of tropical forests is a major contributor to biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. In response, conservationists and scientists like us are debating how to best catalyze the recovery of these forests. How do you take a patch of earth littered with tree stumps, or even a grassy pasture or palm oil plantation, …

Early magma oceans of Earth detected in 3.7 billion-year-old Greenland rocks

Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around 4.5 billion years ago, its surface was a hellscape of magma oceans, bubbling and belching with heat from Earth’s interior. Helen M Williams, University of Cambridge

Earth has stayed habitable for billions of years. Exactly how lucky did we get?

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 …

Why Crocodiles today look the same as they did 200 million years ago?

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 …