A planet can enter the habitable zone only after its young red dwarf has faded, but the same early radiation may already have stripped away the water needed to benefit from milder conditions.
Five Earth oceans could erase the continents and weaken familiar climate and nutrient cycles, but seafloor chemistry leaves room for long-lived, potentially inhabited waterworlds.
For the first time in history, humanity's creations now outweigh all living organisms combined, a milestone that exposes the hidden cost of our species' outsized planetary footprint.
Two communities had names for the animal before it had a Latin one. The paper describing Colobus congoensis rests on three confiscated bodies, two mitochondrial haplotypes and 114 detections, and it hedges harder than the announcement of it did.
At shallow hydrothermal vents off Taiwan and Greece, chemosynthetic microbes fed by sulfur and heat share the seafloor with sunlit algae — and the same crabs eat from both food webs.
What New York's restaurants are turning into a second life for the harbor itself.
A massive Montana ranch shows how rewilding on billionaire-scale might reshape western land—and what gets left behind in the trade-offs.
A beloved origin story about Shakespeare and starlings turns out to be mostly myth, obscuring what actually happened in Central Park.
Mars, K2-18 b and decades of UAP reports offer intriguing fragments, but each remains separated from confirmed extraterrestrial life by a different evidentiary gap.
A Georgia family's radical act of conservation—donating an island for half its worth, then ensuring it could never be developed by forbidding the one thing that would make it valuable: access.
A wealthy English settler's nostalgic hunting hobby sparked an ecological catastrophe that would reshape an entire continent.
Apollo's discarded jettison bags could test whether any viable human microbes or readable biological traces survived decades of radiation, vacuum and thermal cycling on the Moon.
David Raup's fossil-record kill curve estimated average waiting times for extinction events of different magnitudes. Those intervals describe an uneven historical distribution, not a periodic schedule or forecast of when the next crisis will occur.
A 2026 PNAS study links end-Permian extinction patterns to temperature-dependent hypoxia, while modern observations show oceans are warming and losing oxygen. The mechanisms align, but the ancient catastrophe is not a direct forecast of present conditions.
A peer-reviewed expert survey and a self-selected online preprint sample found a 58.2-to-95 percent belief gap, but their methods prevent a simple population comparison.
Photosynthesis is generally confined to the upper 200 metres of the ocean, while direct sunlight disappears below roughly 1,000 metres, leaving most ocean water aphotic.
