In the forest, certain fungi attach to trees and fallen logs to break down and digest the carbon within their wood before releasing it as carbon dioxide. But when their preferred meal isn’t available, these wood-decaying fungi can chow down on plastic instead, according to a new study published July 26 in the journal PLOS … Read more
Devastating volcanic eruptions may have been so enormous they turned the planet into “Snowball Earth” 717 million years ago, a study has found. The volcanic outburst — one of the largest in Earth’s history — likely triggered a series of chemical reactions that sucked carbon dioxide (CO2) from Earth’s ancient atmosphere. The massive eruptions, which … Read more
Look up at the sky and clouds may look like “feather canyons” and “ice cream castles in the air,” as they did to Joni Mitchell. But why do they look as if they’re suspended in mid-air, and are they actually floating? And if so, what keeps them aloft? “It’s sort of an illusion,” Alex Lamers, … Read more
Astronomers have discovered a new class of stellar object that seems to be defying death in inexplicable ways. The object, located about 15,000 light-years from Earth, appears to be a magnetar — the collapsed heart of a once-giant star, now cramming a sun’s worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city, while … Read more
Nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s left the first obvious and indelible marks of “overwhelming” human activity on Earth, and these events may signal the beginning of a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, geologists say. Fallout from these tests snowed down from the atmosphere and became trapped in the earth … Read more
A 64-year-old man got a medical checkup after his tongue began sprouting green “hairs.” The bizarre-looking fuzz turned out to be caused by a fairly common and harmless condition known as hairy tongue. The patient’s tongue had turned green about two weeks before he visited the clinic, shortly after he had completed a course of … Read more
Astronomers have peered back to the dawn of the cosmos to observe time ticking five times more slowly in the early universe than it does now — finally proving a prediction that Albert Einstein made more than a century ago. Researchers spotted the extreme slow-motion effect in data taken from bright cosmic beacons known as … Read more
In science fiction films, nothing raises tension quite like the good guys’ spaceship getting caught in an invisible tractor beam that allows the baddies to slowly reel them in. But what was once only a sci-fi staple could soon become a reality. Scientists are developing a real-life tractor beam, dubbed an electrostatic tractor. This tractor … Read more
It’s long been assumed that men were hunters and women were gatherers, but a new study reveals that both sexes have been equally adept at hunting in hunter-gatherer cultures. An international team of scientists made the finding after examining data culled from dozens of academic papers, published over the past 100 years, that focused on … Read more
Earth is being choked by a thick, curling fog of carbon dioxide that coats the planet as the months go by, a series of NASA videos shows. The newly released animations visualize the astonishing scale of human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over a year by coloring the invisible greenhouse gas. The animations were produced by … Read more
