Earth news stories

According to a new study published in the journal Fungal Ecology, fungi may have their own unique measure of intelligence, making them capable of basic shape recognition and decision-making throughout the networks they build.

Palaeontologists studying fossils of corals and algae from 385 million years ago have found a symbiotic relationship between the organisms today was present in the ancient past as well. The research was published in Nature.

Meteorites have a pretty bad reputation. The most recent major impact with our planet was – to be fair – pretty devastating, wiping out a good three-quarters of all animal species on the planet. But a much, much larger impactor, much longer ago, may have had the opposite effect. The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

…Over one hundred Shipibo-Conibo Onanyabo, or ancestral medicine healers, from the Ucayali region of Peru…met in July to discuss the future of spiritual tourism, the defense of traditional knowledge, and the protection of the forest and Indigenous territories. One of the main takeaways from the meeting was ayahuasca is under threat of extinction.

An ability to sense and respond to the world is vital for the survival of most organisms, but methods of perception can vary significantly. We tend to think of animals as the most gifted in that regard… but a species of fungus is offering a challenge to what we think we know about intelligence. The research has been published in Fungal Ecology.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have cracked the code of plant-to-fungi communication in a new study published in the journal Molecular Cell.

Until now, only a small fraction of meteorites that land on Earth had been firmly linked back to their parent body out in space – but a set of new studies has just given us compelling origin stories for more than 90 percent of meteorites today. The research has been published in Nature, here and here, and Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The trees, the researchers found, were able to do this despite sharp declines in population range and numbers, especially during ice ages. The results of the study are published in Nature Communications.

Humans seem to have been adapted to the last ice age in similar ways to wolves and bears, according to our recent study, challenging longstanding theories about how and where our ancestors lived during this glacial period.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances by researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea shows that the patchwork of different ecosystems found in mountainous regions played a key role in the evolution of humans.

Using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) telescope to survey large expanses of sky, a team of researchers led by the University of Maryland investigated a stream of space debris known to drift near Earth called the Taurid swarm.

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, we have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years.

The huge asteroid that hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was not alone, scientists have confirmed. A second, smaller space rock smashed into the sea off the coast of West Africa creating a large crater during the same era.

When an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, it caused a mass extinction. Now, researchers have evidence that this catastrophe ushered in the invention of agriculture by ants. See the paper here.

Fossils found in Brazil are leading palaeontologists to re-write the evolution of mammals…The findings are detailed in a paper published in Nature.

New research published in The Planetary Science Journal suggests that the moon was captured during a close encounter between a young Earth and a terrestrial binary—the moon and another rocky object.