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Mars could be harvesting water from its own atmosphere

These are Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, so named because it literally never rains there… but this photo shows a patch of moisture. The salty soil is actually sucking water out of the atmosphere. And this discovery could be great news for Martian microbes. Oregon State geologist Joseph Levy says the complete lack of precipitation doesn’t … Continued

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A Simple Flow Chart to Show Climate Change Conspiracy Theorists

If you know someone who keeps insisting that global climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by greedy scientists and the powerful environmentalist lobby, then here’s a handy infographic you can show them. Everybody loves infographics, right? And as always, Occam’s Razor cuts like a mother. This great infographic appears to be the creation of Brooke … Continued

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What really destroyed the Maya civilization?

One of the biggest debates in archaeology is what destroyed the extensive, highly-advanced Maya civilization 1,000 years ago. It’s known that the empire went through a long collapse from roughly 800 to 1,000, leaving behind a network of pyramids and monumental architecture in the Yucatán jungles. But why? We have only educated guesses, and one … Continued

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The Earth might have a “pulse” that causes extinctions every 60 million years

Every sixty million years, the biodiversity of our planet’s oceans mysteriously crashes. This strange boom and bust cycle goes back 500 million years, and we now might know why: rising continents make the oceans too shallow for species to survive. The key to this mystery, according to new research led by University of Kansas physicist … Continued

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This ancient Arctic plant regenerated after being frozen for 32,000 years

The narrow-leafed campion is not a particularly long-lived flower; and yet, the parents of the campion pictured here blossomed in the presence of mammoths and woolly rhinos. How is that possible? The explanation is simple, but the circumstances are unprecedented. The fruits that gave rise to the flowers you see here first fell to the … Continued

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Changing ocean temperatures may have made human evolution possible

A lot of the most basic traits we associate with humans, not the least of which include intelligence and walking on two legs, evolved when our ancient habitat changed from dense forest to wide-open grassland. So what caused this change? The reason behind East Africa’s big shift from forest to grassland has puzzled scientists, with … Continued

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X-rays reveal why the Moon has no volcanoes

The Moon is an almost completely still world, its eternal peace and quiet disrupted only by the occasional meteor or Apollo astronaut. But we now know there’s plenty of magma inside the Moon. So why are there no volcanoes? That’s the question researchers at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) set out to answer. They … Continued

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Start your weekend with an expertly crafted mashup of the internet’s most gorgeous time-lapse videos

There’s a good chance you’ll recognize a few of the clips featured in Welcome to Earth — a beautifully composed “universal time-lapse” made up of 179 of the internet’s most stunning videos — but we’re guessing you haven’t seen them all, and you definitely haven’t seen them like this. At the bottom right hand corner … Continued

io9Books & Comics

The Year Without a Summer, and How It Spawned Frankenstein

The summer of 1816 brought unseasonably cold temperatures to the Northeastern United States, Canada, and Europe. Damaged crops and impeded trade caused widespread famine, leading to skyrocketing food prices, and the deaths of thousands. What caused this deadly cold snap? And how exactly did this terrible time give us both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the … Continued

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A visual account of the 22-year vertical trip into Lake Vostok

On February 5th, more than twenty years after they first started drilling, Russian scientists finally broke through the last remaining layers of an ice sheet that has separated Lake Vostok from the rest of the world for twenty million years. But when Russian scientists first began boring their way through the ice above Vostok, they … Continued

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A super-sized Sun could explain why Earth didn’t freeze to death long ago

Sun-like stars become brighter over the course of their long lives, which means that the Sun once provided Earth with far less heat than it does now – so much less, in fact, that life should have been impossible. This is known as the faint young Sun paradox, and it was first identified by astronomers … Continued

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Shifting ocean currents can (and do) actually speed up Earth’s rotation

Time just flies by, and that was especially true during the first half of November 2009, when the Earth’s daily spin around its axis became 0.1 milliseconds shorter. You can blame that lost time on the waters around Antarctica. Back in November 2009, something strange happened the Southern Ocean. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current suddenly slowed … Continued

Tech News

The Most Precise Image of a Post-Earthquake Landscape Ever Created

A new measurement tool that uses light detection and ranging (or LiDAR) can show how earthquakes have changed the landscape down to a few inches—and that can help us prepare for difficult-to-predict earthquakes. In the image above, blue means the earth has descended, and red shows upward movement compared to a 2006 survey. LiDAR makes … Continued

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Meet the Bloop, the mysterious sound from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean

In the summer of 1997, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up a sound from deep beneath the Pacific. The sound seemed to come from an animal far larger than any we’ve ever seen. This was the Bloop. The Bloop is one of about a half-dozen unexplained sounds that the NOAA’s Acoustic Monitoring … Continued

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Earth’s ice is melting less rapidly than previously thought — but sea levels continue to rise

In the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date, scientists have used NASA satellites to gauge just how much of the world’s ice has been lost to the oceans. Their results? Data collected over eight years of the past decade indicates that melting ice raised sea levels worldwide by an average of 1.48 millimeters. … Continued

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The World’s Next Supercontinent: Amasia!

The United States hasn’t always had the closest relationship with China or Russia. But give us a few hundred million years, and we could be a lot more unified: A new prediction for the motion of the continents suggests that the Americas and Asia will smoosh together at the north to form the supercontinent dubbed … Continued

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Can you guess the subject of this photograph?

This beautiful image [hi-res available here] was recently recognized by National Geographic as one of the best photographs of 2011. Two of the magazine’s photo editors appreciated it for its cryptic quality. Is the subject of this photograph a sprouting fungus? A microscopic photo of a leaf? A snowy landscape? For me, this image immediately … Continued

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NASA is too poor to help Europe go to Mars

This is devastating news. The BBC is reporting that ExoMars — a joint program between NASA and the European Space Agency with Martian missions scheduled for 2016 and 2018 — is on the ropes, owing to America’s budgetary woes. Is this the first scientific casualty of the 2013 budget cuts? For those of you unfamiliar … Continued

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Your state sucks at science

Seriously. This map suggests that unless you live in California, a smattering of states out East, or a small handfull of other states sprinkled across the country, you’re looking at a very grave problem when it comes to scientific illiteracy in your community’s youth (and, presumably, its population in general). Come to think of it, … Continued

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An Early Warning System to Predict the Next Supervolcano Eruption

We can’t predict a volcanic eruption more than a few days or months in advance. But one of the most devastating eruptions in human history could give us a huge boost in predicting the next massive volcano. About 3,500 years ago, the Santorini caldera erupted, wreaking havoc throughout the Mediterranean and all but wiping out … Continued