Once, long ago, a little reptile going about its business plopped itself down in the mud before getting up and carrying on with its day. Nearly 300 million years later, that brief rest has yielded the world’s earliest known fossilized imprint of reptile skin, complete with scales and – remarkably – what scientists interpret as
Scientists have many theories about how Earth’s raw materials turned into living cells, but a new proposal is particularly slimy. In a recent paper, an international team argues that life may have first emerged within a blob of sticky goo clinging to a rock, long before true cells existed. Similar to the bacterial biofilms we
Researchers have found that the iron released by melting ice in West Antarctica isn’t in a form that benefits marine life. That may spell trouble for the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon pollution. What’s happening? According to ScienceDaily, the study found that iron released by melting ice in West Antarctica is not suitable for marine
A powerful quantum chemistry engine is now available that can help scientists tackle complex chemical problems. The new technology could drastically speed up research in drug discovery, materials science and other fields, the system’s developer, QDX, claims. The Extreme-scale Electronic Structure System (EXESS) can perform more than 1 quintillion calculations per second to address questions
On February 13, Jason Howery, a fossil hunter in Missouri, stunned viewers after hauling a massive prehistoric bone from a river near Ravenwood. The discovery, believed to belong to a mammoth or mastodon, was captured on video and quickly drew national attention. The footage shows Howery wading into the water and physically pulling the enormous
For decades, scientists have been studying intriguing “gravity holes,” which are enormous depressions in the Earth’s crust where the effects of gravity are significantly lower than average. It’s an especially pertinent phenomenon in the Antarctic, a region that has seen significant changes not just due to global warming, but far longer-term climate changes spanning tens
The Cambrian period is most famously remembered as an era of biological experimentation, with bizarre creatures such as Hallucigenia, whose body resembled anti-bird spikes, and Wiwaxia, which looked like a medieval flail come to life. But the Cambrian should also be remembered as a time when shit got extremely real for fish. If life in
NASA has officially categorized the 2024 failure of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which stranded astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months, as a Type A mishap. This is NASA-speak for the maximum level of failure a mission can reach, defined as
Faded white rings around rusting barrels on the ocean floor have been traced to leaks of highly corrosive chemical waste into the surrounding mud. The finding shows that material dumped off the U.S. coast decades ago is still reshaping deep habitats more than 50 years later, reacting with the seafloor and changing deep ocean life
The first major astronomical event visible in 2026 is a total lunar eclipse, or “blood moon.” This phenomenon is highly prized by stargazers because the entire lunar disk takes on a reddish color for a few moments. The total lunar eclipse will occur on March 3. It will be clearly visible in North and Central