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All our gold was brought here by asteroids

This may sound strange, but there’s simply too much gold. That is, there shouldn’t be gold here at the Earth’s crust – it all should have been sucked deep into the core long ago. For that, we can thank asteroids. Gold is one of the precious metals, along with platinum, silver, palladium, iridium, and a … Continued

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Floating rocks were the first cradles of life

We know that ancient organisms crawled out of the sea onto land, not the other way round. We know that the earliest life predates the existence of true continents. But life might just have began on land after all…sort of. The secret is volcanic pumice. This type of rock is one of the very few … Continued

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The Oldest-Ever Homo Erectus Gadgets Revealed

They might look like a bunch of rocks, but scientists say this is the oldest-ever collection of hand axes, picks and other cutting tools used mainly by our ancient human cousins, Homo erectus. A new analysis of the stone tools show they are 1.76 million years old – about 350,000 years older than previous estimates. … Continued

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Back in the 1700s, two science professors created the world’s first fossil hoax to prank a religious colleague

Piltdown Man, a fossil that supposedly proved early humans originated in England, was discovered in 1912, and wasn’t proven a hoax until 1953. This fraud was one of the earliest fossil hoaxes out there — but it was actually two centuries too late to claim that distinction. In the 1700s, two professors decided to humiliate … Continued

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How could an earthquake happen in Virginia?

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the small town of Mineral, Virginia was was the epicenter of a 5.9 magnitude earthquake earlier this afternoon, making today’s quake at least equal in intensity to Virginia’s largest earthquake on record, which the USGS says occurred in Giles County, Virginia in 1897. Reports of the quake — which … Continued

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East Coast of US shaken by Virginia earthquake

I don’t know if any of you on the East Coast of the United States felt that earlier this afternoon (I felt it here in New York City), but according to the United States Geological Survey, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake just hit Mineral, Virginia, a town 100 miles south of Washington DC, shortly before 2:00 PM … Continued

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Scientists have discovered the oldest fossils on Earth in Australia

The Earth was a very different place 3.5 billion years ago. In the absence of oxygen, many scientists believe Earth’s earliest ecosystems survived on sulphur, but researchers have long been unable to find any proof of this hypothesis, in the form of fossilized microbial life. Now, an international team of geologists has discovered evidence of … Continued

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The Moon is 200 million years younger than expected

For years, radiometric dating of lunar rock samples has suggested that the formation of the Moon occurred roughly 4.57 billion years ago — around the same time as the birth of the solar system itself. Now, by refining these dating techniques, an international team of scientists has revealed that the moon is likely around 200 … Continued

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The first successful prediction of an undersea volcano eruption

The Axial Seamount is an undersea volcano located 250 miles off the Oregon coast. It’s one of the most active underwater volcanoes in the world, and it’s just started erupting. For the first time ever, scientists saw that eruption coming. Could their technique help give early warning to people living in regions where volcanoes might … Continued

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Did Earth once have two Moons?

The two sides of the Moon look nothing like each other: the near side is flat and low, while the far side is incredibly mountainous. We may now be able to solve this topographical mystery…and it involves a second moon. The current best theory for the origin of the Moon is the “giant impact” model. … Continued

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Could iron dust stop global warming in its tracks?

The Ice Age can be explained by some well-placed specks of iron. Adding dust to the waters around Antarctica can supercharge plankton growth, causing global temperature drops. To stop climate change, we need a whole lot of iron filings. Here’s how the process works. Most of the time, the Southern Ocean is pretty much bereft … Continued

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The roads in North Dakota are giving people cancer

In Dunn County, North Dakota, the roads can kill you. In fact, anything you do to disturb rocks in the area, like driving or even sweeping, can kick up naturally-occurring particles that lodge in your body and give you a rare kind of lung cancer up to 30 years later. Dunn County, you see, is … Continued

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Bizarre volcanoes on the far side of the Moon erupted with gooey, viscous lava

Though scientists believed volcanoes on the Moon to be long dead, a recent discovery suggests they were active as recently as 800 million years ago, which is fairly recent in geological time. Even weirder, volcanoes studied on the far side of the Moon appear to have erupted with a very unusual kind of lava, made … Continued

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Flawed diamonds reveal the shape of a lost Earth

A tiny, blood-red flaw inside a diamond can reveal what was happening to Earth 3 billion years ago. A recent scientific study of thousands of flawed diamonds like this one have given us a window into our planet’s strange and violent past. We have a pretty good understanding of the continental plates’ behavior on Earth … Continued

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The gyrotheodolite lets you navigate by the turn of the earth

One of the wonderful things about science is that it often accomplishes things that you didn’t even think were possible in the service of doing things you would never think to do in the first place. A great example of this is the gyrotheodolite, an instrument that lets you navigate underground, by using the rotation … Continued

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200 million years ago, half the world died from a massive methane eruption

A little over 200 million years ago, when Earth had only one mega-continent called Pangaea, fifty percent of life in the oceans died abruptly. What happened? Researchers long believed that this event, called the End-Triassic mass extinction, might have been caused by intense volcanic activity as Pangaea broke into two smaller continents. But a new … Continued

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The tale of the epic struggle to make an Earth sandwich

Or at least the epic struggle to make an earth sandwich without getting the bread soggy. Where on earth could you put a piece of bread, on dry land, while having a bit of dry land on the other side to put the other piece of bread on? The world is a lot sloshier than … Continued

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Why did the temperature of the Red Sea rise abruptly in 1995?

In 1995, the temperature of the Red Sea rose abruptly. It’s already-warm waters became 0.7°C hotter, which is a significant amount for a body of water whose reefs support life that’s adapted for a very specific temperature. Scientists studying the Red Sea recently published a study using satellite data to prove that the temperature spike … Continued

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Explorers discover 3 billion-year-old life forms off the coast of Michigan

In mysterious sinkholes beneath the waters of Lake Huron, scientists have been exploring strange pockets of life that shouldn’t exist on present-day Earth. The microbes researchers have found would have been perfectly comfortable on the Earth of 3 billion years ago, before we had oxygen in the atmosphere. How did the bottom of Lake Huron … Continued

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Asteroids are making Earth’s weather unpredictable

Ceres and Vesta are two of the largest asteroids in the Belt, and their power extends far beyond the band of rocks they inhabit between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have discovered that these asteroids’ gravitational effects introduced “strong chaos” into the Earth’s orbit, making it impossible to know the exact path the Earth took around … Continued