Earth news stories

Nearly every animal on this magnificent planet has blood… but where the heck did it come from? Now, in an ambitious effort, an international team led by Kyoto University in Japan has traced the evolutionary history of blood cells back 700 million years – and discovered that they weren’t created from scratch after the rise of multicellular life. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new discovery in South Korea suggests that the asteroid effect may have been even more complex than we realized. The research has been published in Communications Earth & Environment.

Our new research, published in the journal African Archaeological Review, reveals how we found 260 previously unknown enclosure burials east of the Nile River, across almost 1,000km of desert…The carbon dates and pottery from the few excavated monuments tell us these people lived roughly 4000–3000 BCE, just before Egyptians formed a territorial kingdom we know of as Pharaonic Egypt.

A study published in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology has identified the earliest evidence of prehistoric occupation by island dwellers of northern Sri Lanka. Long thought to be unsuitable for human occupation due to its scarce stone resources and semi-arid landscape, the findings at Velanai Island challenge this long-held belief and offer insights into early raw-material exploitation, seafaring capabilities, and subsistence behavior.

Mayflies are among the world’s oldest winged insects, emerging roughly 300m years ago – long before dinosaurs walked the Earth. Even the Mesopotamian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature, makes reference to the short-lived mayfly. Over the epochs, the insect’s basic design has changed very little compared with the fossils of their ancestors.

Prehistoric humans in Africa may have avoided areas infested with malaria-spreading mosquitoes, a new study suggests —published April 22 in the journal Science Advances

A recent study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, presents and discusses the earliest burial site in Patagonia and one of the earliest pieces of evidence of Early Holocene human settlement on the South American Atlantic coast.

The exact origin of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is still a mystery, but researchers believe they are edging closer to the source of one of the most important food staples worldwide. Using genetic studies and ancient plant remains, an international team of scientists has narrowed the location and timeline to the Neolithic period(around 8,000 years ago) in Georgia, in the South Caucasus. They present their findings in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some fungi can produce proteins that freeze water, which may allow them to reach into the atmosphere and trigger rain. Now, scientists have discovered the secret to this process: a gene from ancient bacteria. The new study was published March 11 in the journal Science Advances.

In our research, published today in Current Biology, we show that when some animals spot a predator, they issue a warning cry that is picked up by others and spread through the rainforest canopy. For a time, different species are linked into a shared information network, and parts of the forest briefly fall silent.

Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, African scientists are championing the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna

A landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe had temperate forests that could have sustained Stone Age people for millennia before the landmass was flooded, a new study suggests. The results were published on March 10 in the journal PNAS.

In his new book, “The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life” (Hachette Book Group, 2025), Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, explores these complex interdependencies found across the natural world, including the numerous mutualisms humans engage in, such as our relationships with dogs and with the microbes in our guts.

The last common ancestor of all living things did not just suddenly appear on Earth roughly 4.2 billion years ago. Some of its genes came from an even older and more mysterious source…The study was published in Cell Genomics.

Recreating cosmic dust may help answer questions about how meteorites hitting Earth came to contain organic matter

There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4 per cent), but non-negligible… A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released as a preprint on arXiv, looks at the bright side of the potential science we could do if a collision does indeed happen.