Genetic material extracted from the hair of woolly mammoths has revealed new information about the extinct creatures, including how closely related they are to modern elephants.

Turns out, the variety and number of minerals in the solar system and on Earth have increased through time, and some minerals exist because Earth has life.

The texture of surfaces could be designed so that both water and oil can bead up and thus flow off.

A volleyball-sized stalagmite taken from a cave in northern China has given scientists insight about how the region’s precipitation has varied — and possibly influenced the rise and fall of various dynasties — for the past 1,800 years. Researchers collected the telltale formation about 1 kilometer inside Wanxiang Cave, which lies along the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. In recent years the area has received an average annual precipitation of 48 centimeters, with about 80 percent of that falling during the May-to-September monsoon season. But rainfall amounts have varied signific...

Warmer winter temperatures are altering the snowpack, squelching the rodents’ population booms.

Chemical biomarkers in ancient Australian rocks, once thought to be the oldest known evidence of complex life on Earth, may have infiltrated long after the sediments were laid down, new analyses suggest. (p. 5)

Because plastic products can be mass-produced cheaply, they have long been considered the poster child of a throwaway culture. Plastics are versatile: Some are soft and flexible, but others are completely rigid. A few mimic natural substances; some are infused with colors rarely found in nature. Others are as clear as glass. And some polymer substances composing plastics can be molded into shapes impossible to reproduce with materials such as wood. Perhaps because they are so versatile, some objects made from plastics have become highly collectible. Some museum collections, in fa... (p. 34)

Los Angeles' Rancho La Brea is one of the world's most famous fossil-bearing sites. Tar pits, or sticky pools of asphalt, there have yielded more than 1 million fossils representing 50 mammal species, 125 types of birds, and dozens of reptiles, insects and other invertebrates. But L.A.'s claim to fossil fame could someday soon be equaled or surpassed by similar tar pits found far south of the U.S. border. In Venezuela, thousands of miles from Rancho La Brea, hundreds of oil seeps, also called menes, dot the landscape. Explorers have known about these sites that trap animals with their s...

Analyses of fossils reveal that a third, newly recognized type of saber-toothed cat — one that killed by biting large chunks of flesh from its victim instead of biting its neck and slashing the major blood vessels there —roamed the Americas about a million years ago.

Myth often cited by global warming skeptics debunked. (p. 5)

Trace elements in the carbonate shells of freshwater mussels could serve as an archive of road salt pollution. (p. 16)

Analyses of trees and other organic material buried in a riverbank near Lake Superior’s northwestern shore shed new light on how much and when the lake level varied soon after the last ice age.