7,733 results
- Earth
Buried Saharan rivers might have been early expressways
Humans might have migrated across the arid region along three once-lush waterways.
- Planetary Science
Europa vents water, Hubble data suggest
Plumes from ice-covered oceans would increase likelihood of life-friendly conditions on one moon of Jupiter.
- Earth
Faults can reseal months after quakes
Measurements in southern China find quick healing of fractured rock.
- Animals
Oxygen boost aided carnivore evolution in Cambrian explosion
Atmospheric change and rise of predators caused burst in complexity of life.
- Earth
Huge quakes may foretell smaller, human-caused ones
Distant powerful temblors triggered ominous activity at wastewater injection sites.
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- Humans
Eruption early in human prehistory may have been more whimper than bang
If Hollywood’s right, the apocalypse will be brutal. Aliens, nuclear war, zombies, plague, enslavement by supersmart robots — none of them are good endings. Some archaeologists, however, believe an apocalypse has already come and gone. About 75,000 years ago, they say, a monster volcanic eruption nearly wiped out humankind, leaving behind only a few thousand people to […]
- Environment
Atomic ant sand
Robb Hermes asked for sand ants to get samples of Trinitite, a material created in the test blasts of the first atomic bomb.
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Science Past from the issue of December 1, 1962
NEW DATING METHOD FOR MILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSILS — A new radioactive dating method promises to close one of the major remaining gaps in methods of fixing dates on the geological and archaeological time scales. The new procedure, based on radioactive inequality in nature between uranium-234 and its parent U-238, was originated by David Turber of Columbia’s […]
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- Earth
Quakes may bring nearby rocks closer to rupture
Lab studies could explain how a seemingly stable geologic fault can fail.
- Quantum Physics
Quantum timekeeping
Recent advances in controlling the quantum behavior of particles have inspired physicists to dream of a global clock that would tell the same time everywhere. It would be hundreds of times as accurate as current atomic clocks.
