George Monbiot writes: Vengeful nihilism, the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand, is a major theme in Maga politics. It is applied as viciously to culture and science as it is to the natural world. It is hard to avoid the thought that environmental destruction is not just a means by which Trump serves his corporate backers, but an end in itself. At the same time, Trump enthusiastically (albeit vaguely) boosts Musk’s plans to send people…
Science News reports: A barrage of intense, wild swings in climate conditions may have fueled the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. A re-creation of how ancient sea surface temperatures, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and landmasses interacted revealed an Earth plagued by nearly decade-long stints of droughts, wildfires and flooding. Researchers knew that a spike in global temperatures — triggered by gas emissions from millions of years of enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia — was the likely…
Stella Sandford writes: It was once common, in Western societies at least, to think of plants as the passive, inert background to animal life, or as mere animal fodder. Plants could be fascinating in their own right, of course, but they lacked much of what made animals and humans interesting, such as agency, intelligence, cognition, intention, consciousness, decision-making, self-identification, sociality and altruism. However, groundbreaking developments in the plant sciences since the end of the previous century have blown that view…
Veronique Greenwood writes: Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists believe. Hundreds of millions of years ago, glaciers and sea ice covered the globe. The most extreme scenarios suggest a layer of ice several meters thick even at the equator. This event has been called “Snowball Earth,” and you’d think it would be a terrible time to be alive — and maybe, for…
Science Alert reports: Once upon a time, Earth was barren. Everything changed when, somehow, out of the chemistry available early in our planet’s history, something started squirming – processing available matter to survive, to breed, to thrive. What that something was, and when it first squirmed, have been burning questions that have puzzled humanity probably for as long as we’ve been able to ask “what am I?” Now, a new study has found some answers – and life emerged surprisingly…
Philip Ball writes: You could be forgiven for thinking that the turn of the millennium was a golden age for the life sciences. After the halcyon days of the 1950s and ’60s when the structure of DNA, the true nature of genes and the genetic code itself were discovered, the Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 and culminating with a preliminary announcement of the entire genome sequence in 2000, looked like – and was presented as – a comparably dramatic…
The Washington Post reports: President Biden shuffled onto the debate stage. He whispered, mumbled and repeatedly trailed off. When he wasn’t speaking, he stood slightly stooped, his mouth at times agape and his eyes flickering between apparent confusion and recognition. When his halting 90-minute 2024 debate debut was over, his wife took him by the hand, escorting him gingerly offstage. Biden’s debate performance a week and a half ago set off a swirl of political angst and upheaval in the…
Dan Samorodnitsky writes: Researchers recently reported the discovery of a natural protein, named Balon, that can bring a cell’s production of new proteins to a screeching halt. Balon was found in bacteria that hibernate in Arctic permafrost, but it also seems to be made by many other organisms and may be an overlooked mechanism for dormancy throughout the tree of life. For most life forms, the ability to shut oneself off is a vital part of staying alive. Harsh conditions…
Africa Studio/Shutterstock By Fiorentina Sterkaj, University of East London Experts often highlight social media and harsh economic times as key reasons why young people are getting unhappier. And while those factors are important, I would like to emphasise another. Younger generations have less freedom and independence than previous generations did. The area where children are allowed to range unsupervised outside has shrunk by 90% since the 1970s. Parents increasingly organise entertainment – ranging from play dates and sports and music…
The Washington Post reports: A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic step into the future: It made a copy of itself. Then the copy made a copy, and over the course of many millions of years, RNA begot DNA and proteins, all of which came together to form a…
The Scripps Research Institute: Roughly 4 billion years ago, Earth was developing conditions suitable for life. Origin-of-life scientists often wonder if the type of chemistry found on the early Earth was similar to what life requires today. They know that spherical collections of fats, called protocells, were the precursor to cells during this emergence of life. But how did simple protocells first arise and diversify to eventually lead to life on Earth? Now, Scripps Research scientists have discovered one plausible…
Brandon Keim writes: Last spring I came to know a pair of pigeons. I’d been putting out neighborly sunflower seeds for them and my local Brooklyn house sparrows; typically I left them undisturbed while feeding, but every so often I’d want to water my plants or lie in the sun. This would scatter the flock—all, that is, except for these two. One, presumably male, was a strapping specimen of pigeonhood, big and crisp-feathered in an amiably martial way. The other,…
Brian Klaas writes: The 21st century has been defined by unexpected shocks—major upheavals that have upended the world many of us have known and made our lives feel like the playthings of chaos. Every few years comes a black swan–style event: September 11, the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the coronavirus pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Even daily life can feel like a roll of the dice: With regularity, some Americans go to…
Joel Achenbach writes: The young Earth got beat up a lot, including one day 3.26 billion years ago when a rock four times the size of Mount Everest slammed into the planet. Scientists believe that the rock, which was much bigger than the Chicxulub object that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, probably landed in the ocean, since Earth had barely begun to form continents. The collision was so violent it boiled off the top layer of that ocean and,…
The New York Times reports: Scientists have detected a poison among the spray of molecules emanating from a small moon of Saturn. That adds to existing intrigue about the possibility of life there. The poison is hydrogen cyanide, a colorless gas that is deadly to many Earth creatures. But it could have played a key role in chemical reactions that created the ingredients that set the stage for the advent of life. “It’s the starting point for most theories on…
Scientists still debate the origins of Earth’s life-sustaining elements. BlackJack3D/E+ via Getty Images By Shichun Huang, University of Tennessee and Wenzhong Wang, University of Science and Technology of China For many years, scientists have predicted that many of the elements that are crucial ingredients for life, like sulfur and nitrogen, first came to Earth when asteroid-type objects carrying them crashed into our planet’s surface. But new research published by our team in Science Advances suggests that many of these elements,…