The Sahara has not always been the dry barrier familiar today. During its most recent humid interval, grasslands, wooded savanna, wetlands and lakes spread across large parts of North Africa.
China has planted an estimated 66 billion trees since 1978 as part of the Three-North Shelterbelt Program, the afforestation effort more commonly known as the…
On Easter Sunday 1722, Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen's fleet became the first Europeans to sight Rapa Nui, counting a settled population of 2,000-3,000 people living beside nearly 900 monumental stone statues — and refusing to believe the islanders' own account of how the moai got there.
A gray wolf's bite generates roughly 1,200 pounds per square inch — nearly double a German shepherd's — and the jaw geometry that makes it possible is arranged around one specific job: cracking the bones of animals ten times its own weight.
In the early 1990s, Hồ Khanh found a dark opening while moving through the forest of central Vietnam.
For most of the twentieth century, science had a simple test for what made us human: we made tools, and no other animal did.
Earth's inner core grows by about a millimetre a year as molten iron freezes onto its surface, and the latent heat and buoyant fluids released by that slow crystallisation drive the convection in the outer core that generates the planet's magnetic field.
Dogs do not see only in black and white. That is one of the most stubborn myths in popular biology, and it is wrong.
In September 1994, David Noble used ropes to enter a remote sandstone gorge in Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney.
In 1936, Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann read faint anomalies in seismograms from a 1929 New Zealand earthquake and deduced that Earth's core has a solid inner sphere nested inside a liquid outer shell — a conclusion still holding up nine decades later.
In 2013, seismologists reading the echoes of large earthquakes found a distinct iron sphere at Earth's centre, about 650 kilometres across, whose crystals point a different way from the layer around it — a fifth planetary layer nobody has ever seen.
The experiment sounds almost designed to fail. Take glycine, the simplest amino acid used by life on Earth.
A queen honeybee can live for one or two years on average, and occasionally several years.
Earth's centre sounds like a contradiction. The inner core is hot enough to sit in the same temperature range as the visible surface of the Sun, yet it is not a liquid ocean.
A 2022 global census led by researchers at the University of Würzburg counted roughly 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any moment — a combined dry biomass matching every wild mammal and wild bird on the planet, and moving more soil each year than Darwin's celebrated earthworms.
Antarctica receives less precipitation than the Sahara, making it a desert by definition — yet its ice sheet, averaging over two kilometres thick, holds about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water. Here's how a place that barely snows became the largest freshwater reservoir on Earth.
