Earth news stories

A new study by researchers from China and the UK is the latest to suggest ‘Snowball Earth’ wasn’t completely covered in ice – and might have even exhibited habitable open-ocean conditions far away from the equator.

When deprived of water or snipped with scissors, plants emit a flurry of staccato “screams” that are too high-frequency for humans to hear, a study suggests. When lowered into a range that human ears can detect, these stress-induced pops sound like someone furiously tap dancing across a field of bubble wrap.

Bones found on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen suggest the ancient marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs roamed Earth’s oceans for much longer than we thought.

Chia seeds sprouted in trays have experimentally confirmed a mathematical model proposed by computer scientist and polymath Alan Turing decades ago. The model describes how patterns might emerge in desert vegetation, leopard spots and zebra stripes.

It’s easy to see why most folks think of mushrooms as some type of weird plant, popping out from under the soil when it rains and found in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store…

Scientists in Australia have unearthed 3.48 billion-year-old rock fragments that may be the earliest evidence of a meteorite crashing into Earth.

Our planet hides its scars well. It’s a shame, actually, as evidence of previous asteroid strikes might help us better plan for the next catastrophic impact. In fact, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center chief scientist, James Garvin, thinks we might have been misreading traces of some of the more serious asteroid strikes that have occurred within the past million years

Equinoxes occur twice a year, with daylight and darkness being about the same length in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. This phenomenon’s name comes from the Latin words “aequus” (equal) and “nox” (night). In 2023, the spring equinox occurs at 5:24 p.m. EDT (21:24 UTC) on March 20. The autumn, or fall, equinox will happen at 2:50 a.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2023.

Vestiges of a moon-forming cataclysm could have kick-started plate tectonics on Earth. See research here.

A dinosaur that roamed east Asia more than 160m years ago has been named a contender for the animal with the longest neck ever known.

A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question. Led by the University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Geology Megan Newcombe, researchers analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system’s formation 4 1/2 billion years ago.

Fossils of a 70 million-year-old platypus relative called Patagorhynchus pascuali found in South America show that egg-laying mammals evolved on more than one continent.

We’ve got a curious case of mistaken identity to report. Fossils previously believed to have been left by prehistoric tentacle-bearing aquatic invertebrates called Bryozoans may, in fact have been created by a different source: seaweed. See research here.

Together, amino acids form proteins that play many vital roles in organisms. This new study was designed to help establish why a specific group of 20 ‘canonical’ amino acids is used again and again to build proteins when there are so many more of these amino acids to pick from.

The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years.