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This crazy scheme would have restored the prehistoric land bridge between the UK and the Continent

Two teams of researchers have confirmed that an asteroid circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has water ice and organic compounds.

The island inspired a Soviet SF novel and movie

If you crave adventure, you couldn’t wish for a better alien planet on which to crash-land

Large swaths of European airspace remains closed due to Eyjafjallajökull eruption – and there is no clear end in sight. UPDATE: Now with chemical composition of the ash!

This rather sinister image is one of the biggest mysteries in the history of western cartography. Most often referred to simply as the Fool’s Cap Map of the World, it […]

“This map is basically what would happen if you got a bunch of Japanese guys in a room, got them drunk, and then asked them to draw what they could […]

n This remarkable painting was made by the Norwegian artist Rolf Groven as a poster proposal for Norway’s pavilion at the World Exhibition in Seville (Spain) in 1992. The title […]

n A gallant piper, stuggling through the bogs,nHis wind bag broken, wearing his clay clogs;nYet, strong of heart, a fitting emblem makesnFor Scotland – land of heroes and of cakes. […]

Art critic Karen Wright charts her run-ins with English painter David Hockney over the last ten years. The prolific painter has taken to photography and even drawing on his iPhone.

A volcanologist speaks with Scientific American about the rare case of Iceland’s disruptive volcanic eruption and how long it might last.

“Just rejoice at this news!” So said Mrs Thatcher outside Downing Street as Prime Minister on news that the Royal Marines had recaptured the uninhabited, ice bound island of South […]

The Vikings set foot in America just over a millennium ago, but credit for the discovery generally goes to Columbus, who only stumbled upon the New World almost 500 years later. […]

They even made it through the Northwest Passage

Finland gained independence from Russia right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. A civil war ensued, along the lines of the post-revolution conflict in Russia itself: ‘Reds’ against ‘Whites’. The […]

Welcome to Earth Science Week, everyone! Why not start off with a bang? At the end of last week, there was some buzz in the geoblogosphere and Twitter about a […]

Garrison Keillor is feeling especially powerless these days: “As the Gulf turns dark and the polar ice cap melts, I intend to listen to Bach more and listen to the news less,” he says.

Whatever you want to call it, a half-zebra, half-donkey hybrid was born last week in a wildlife preserve in Georgia. The offspring of a zebra father and a donkey mother, […]

From Philip K. Dick to Stephen King, the film and TV industry not only adapt the creative narratives of authors but also lean heavily on their devoted fan base to […]

Not merely a nice flower, but also a political tool

James Randi has shunned faith since he was a kid spending collection plate money on ice cream. “If my dad and mom are up there someplace… I ask them to […]

“Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in […]

Over the weekend, Andrew Revkin at the NY Timeswrote a very timely and important peice detailing the growing unease among many scientists and policy experts with the new “normal’ in […]

“Intuition can help us make good decisions without expending the time and effort needed to calculate the optimal decision, but shortcuts sometimes lead to dead ends,” says The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would […]

The fourth in my ongoing “Volcano Profile” turns our attention to the southernmost (known) active volcano, Mt. Erebus in Antarctica.

Almost 200 years later, you still have to just be awestruck by the magnitude of the “Great Eruption” of Tambora that produced the “Years without a Summer”.

“Arctic amplification” refers to the fact that the region is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet—and as ice warms, exposing more ocean water, the process naturally speeds up.

Scientists have discovered the reason why the earth wasn’t covered with a layer of ice four billion years ago, when the Sun’s radiation was much less than it is today.

Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research, is searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. But what kinds of signals is she hoping to find? Tarter explains that her […]