Earth news stories

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.

On March 1 and 2, Jupiter and Venus will appear side by side in the night sky in an event called a conjunction, which is visible without a telescope or binoculars.

A newly discovered Moai statue on Easter Island has been found buried in a dried up lake bed.

The Arctic today is a hostile place for most primates. But a series of fossils found since the 1970s suggest that wasn’t always the case. See study here.

A circular depression that holds a vineyard in a French winery is actually an old impact crater, new research finds. The new research did not give an estimate of the crater’s age. However, the winery website estimates that the crater impact occurred around 10,000 years ago.

The new findings suggest that magnetoreception could be much more common in the animal kingdom than we ever knew. If researchers are right, it might be an astonishingly ancient trait shared by virtually all living things, albeit with differing strengths. The study was published in Nature.

The endless excavations of yesteryear are no longer the best solution. Big digs aren’t the big idea they once were: mapping the human archaeological record is now moving upward, into the sky.

Over thousands of years, Indigenous communities have cultivated relationships with and accumulated knowledge on psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, the Amazonian botanical brew ayahuasca, and the West African shrub iboga.

A new analysis of Earth’s innards suggests the presence of an inner core within the inner core – a dense ball of iron at the very center of our planet.

In a new study conducted by an international team of scientists, researchers identified compounds in the lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus) – an edible fungus species also known as yamabushitake or hou tou gu – that could boost nerve growth and enhance memory.

Between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans began to make their way across the megacontinent of Sahul, a landmass that connected what is now Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands.

The use of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance found in some “magic” mushrooms, has stronger connection to how people feel about nature compared to the use of other psychedelic drugs, according to new research published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

About 250 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed over 80% of the planet’s species. In the aftermath, scientists believe that life on Earth was dominated by simple species for up to 10 million years before more complex ecosystems could evolve. Now this longstanding theory is being challenged by a team of international researchers. See paper here.

Archaeologists have revealed what could be the oldest stone tools ever found, and they think someone other than our closest Homo ancestors may have made them. See paper here.

Copper’s allure has endured for millennia. Both ancient and modern mines for the extremely useful metal abound in North America’s Lake Superior region; long before modern miners extracted the ore from deep underground, local Indigenous communities dug it from shallow pit mines.