A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology.

A fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute changes perceptions of an ancestor and explains why music is a powerful force.

Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet.

A first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Icarus investigates this phenomenon on Mars. Looking at the planet, researchers have discovered hundreds of craters that likely resulted from the impacts of a binary system, where one asteroid orbits another, like the moon orbits Earth.

Image from ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team (Wiki Commons)