Nature reports: Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so. “We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and… Read More »
Howard W French writes: It has long been said that no one knows with any certainty the population of Lagos, Nigeria. When I spent time there a decade ago, the United Nations conservatively put the number at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The one thing everyone agreed was that… Read More »
Daniel Immerwahr writes: Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia was at peace and enmeshed in a complex global economy. Would it really sever trade ties – and threaten nuclear war – just to expand its already vast territory? Despite the many… Read More »
Joanna Thompson writes: The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings… Read More »
Motherboard reports: Scientists can reconstruct incredible details about bygone eras in Earth’s history using fossils, rocks, and other clues preserved in its crust. But sometimes, the absence of geological records is just as telling as their presence. The Great Unconformity, a missing chunk of time that appears in rocks across the world, is the ultimate… Read More »
Inside Science reports: Earth’s first continents may have emerged from the oceans roughly 750 million years earlier than previously thought, rising from the seas in a manner completely unlike modern continents. These early masses of solid rock may have floated buoyantly atop magma welling up from below, a new study finds. Unlike any other known… Read More »
Sam Grinsell writes: The city is a lie that we tell ourselves. The crux of this lie is that we can separate human life from the environment, using concrete, glass, steel, maps, planning and infrastructure to forge a space apart. Disease, dirt, wild animals, wilderness, farmland and countryside are all imagined to be essentially outside,… Read More »
Live Science reports: For thousands of years, the Nile River has fertilized valleys along its winding path through northeastern Africa, anchoring ancient civilizations and still serving as an important route of transport and irrigation today. But the age of its venerable waters, which stretch over 4,225 miles (6,800 kilometers), has been debated, with one group… Read More »
PsyPost reports: An analysis of 108 Old World countries found that cold/wet climates suitable for dairy farming were associated with lactose tolerance in the year 1500, which was in turn associated with higher child survival rates, greater per capita income, and fewer children per family in the year 1800. This enhanced production power was in… Read More »