7,733 results
- Paleontology
Turn Your Head and Roar
The analysis of fossils that preserve evidence of diseases that appear to be similar or identical to afflictions that strike modern animals, including humans, could help scientists better grasp the causes and courses of today's ailments.
- Earth
Antarctic sediments muddy climate debate
Ocean-floor sediments drilled from Antarctic regions recently covered by ice shelves suggest that those shelves were much younger than scientists had previously thought.
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Living it up below the ice sheet?
A recent earthquake in Antarctica points toward geologic activity that could provide the energy necessary to incubate life in a liquid lake deep beneath the ice.
- Paleontology
Lemurs reveal clues to ancient Asian roots
A diminutive lemur species inhabited what is now central Pakistan about 30 million years ago, a new fossil find suggests.
- Ecosystems
Are They Really Extinct?
A few optimists keep looking for species that might already have gone extinct.
- Earth
It’s a Rough World
Scientists are using fractals, mathematical forms that can describe objects with fractional dimensions, to model phenomena such as wildfire propagation and the spread of toxic fluids through rocks and soil.
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From the August 8, 1931 issue
TWO ARISTOCRATIC LADIES EMERGE FROM RETIREMENT There is something about newly-emerged silkworm moths that makes one think of the ladies of Cathay or Cipangu, long ago and far away, clothed in silk spun by ancestors of todays silk worms. In the cover picture of this weeks Science News Letter, Cornelia Clarke has made an admirable […]
- Earth
Pacific Northwest stirred, not shaken
Residents of the Pacific Northwest escaped the wrath of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the summer of 1999 because the ground movement of 20 centimeters along a deep fault occurred over a period of 6 to 15 days, not all at once.
- Earth
L.A. moves, but not in the way expected
Researchers monitoring small ground motions along faults in Southern California ended up detecting an altogether different phenomenon: the rise and fall of the ground as local governments pump billions of gallons of water into and out of the region's aquifers.
- Paleontology
For past climate clues, ask a stalag-mite
Mites fossilized in cave formations in the American Southwest show that at times during the past 3,200 years the climate there was much wetter and cooler.
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18898
Both definitions of “source of the Amazon” advanced by its would-be finders are capricious. They imply that a river can be a lesser stream than its tributary, which runs counter to any plausible definition of tributary. Travel up the Amazon and at every fork take the branch with greater water flow. You will eventually reach […]
- Paleontology
Two new dinosaurs chiseled from fossil gap
A sleek predator and a pot-bellied giant dinosaur have emerged from North American rocks to fill in a 30-million-year gap in the dinosaur fossil record.
