All Stories by Sid Perkins
- Life
Mammoth genome approaching completion
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.
- Earth
Subglacial lakes flood, glaciers speed up
Floods that occasionally surge from immense lakes trapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet can significantly affect the flow rate of overlying glaciers, a new study shows.
- Earth
Minerals evolved along with life
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.
- Chemistry
Blueprint to repel oil and water
The texture of surfaces could be designed so that both water and oil can bead up and thus flow off.
- Earth
Stalagmite is scribe for monsoons, society
Cave formation has recorded monsoon strength in China since the third century.
- Climate
Climate change stifling lemmings
Warmer winter temperatures are altering the snowpack, squelching the rodents’ population booms.
- Chemistry
Oldest evidence for complex life in doubt
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.
- Chemistry
Long Live Plastics
With plastics in museums decomposing, a new effort seeks to halt the demise of materials commonly thought to be unalterable.
- Life
A more fearsome saber-toothed cat
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.
- Paleontology
How pterosaurs took flight
Extinct flying reptiles known as pterosaurs may have taken to the air with a technique akin to leapfrogging, new research suggests.
- Life
Fossil find may document largest snake
Rocks beneath a coal mine in Colombia have yielded fossils of what could be the world's largest snake, a 12.8-meter–long behemoth that's a relative of today's boa constrictors.
- Climate
Cooling climate ‘consensus’ of 1970s never was
Myth often cited by global warming skeptics debunked.
