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In his book, Earth Emotions, Glenn Albrecht coins “psychoterratic.”

Extraterrestrial life should arise fairly easily. But intelligence is another matter entirely. Planet Earth has been around for the past 4.5 billion years or so: about the last third of […]

We’re not made out of the densest elements, but we’re the densest planet nonetheless. Here’s why. Of all the planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids and more in the Solar System, only […]

2019 could prove to be the second-hottest year on record.

The remarkable distributed nervous system of the octopus is discussed at an astrobiology conference.

It’s where Earth’s axial tilt with respect to the Sun is most extreme. Here are the consequences. Today is June 21st, 2019: the day of the solstice. Although there are […]

There’s something special about islands – in some cases, it’s the price tag

The Bajau people’s nomadic lifestyle has given them remarkable adaptions, enabling them to stay underwater for unbelievable periods of time. Their lifestyle, however, is quickly disappearing.

The history of life on Earth took many meandering turns before it gave rise to us. When Earth first formed, all the raw ingredients for life — atoms, molecules, a potentially habitable planet […]

Hurricane Dorian has devastated the islands.

Study shows minerals sequester carbon for thousands of years, which may explain oxygen’s abundance in the atmosphere.

The second in a three-part series on the history of research on the origin of life.

Earth wasn’t the only potentially habitable planet in the early Solar System. What happened to Mars? If you could travel back in time to the early stages of the Solar System, […]

The Category 5 hurricane was moving at speeds of about 1 mph over the Bahamas on Sunday and Monday.

Is capitalism naturally unempathetic?

In 774/775, tree rings show a spike in carbon-14 unlike anything else. At last, scientists think they know why. Every once in a while, science gives us a mystery that comes […]

The dream of an ‘Earth-like’ planet showcases our astrobiological ignorance. Over the past decade, our understanding of what planets exist around stars other than our own has exploded. The number […]

Before you judge someone’s personality based in their playlist, you may want to read the results of this study.

Not everything needs a medium to travel through. If we can overcome that assumption, we don’t need the aether at all. All throughout the Universe, different types of signals propagate. Some […]

Scientists say it might even rain on the exoplanet, dubbed K2-18b.

How does one supernova get so bright, so energetic, and so massive? It’s a spectacular mystery to solve. On February 22, 2016, one of humanity’s automated sky-scanning telescopes — the Pan-STARRS Survey for […]

The blood of horseshoe crabs is harvested on a massive scale in order to retrieve a cell critical to medical research. However, recent innovations might make this practice obsolete.

Synthetic biology is changing the way the planet works.

It’s a “canary in the coalmine,” said one climate scientist.

The planet has had life on it, in some form or another, for nearly as long as Earth has existed. If you came to our Solar System right after it formed, […]

Satellite movie shows clouds of carbon monoxide drifting over South America.

Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, we always have the Universe to contend with. Wiping out all life on Earth is hard, but causing mass extinctions is easy. The 1991 eruption […]

If we restrict ourselves to looking for extraterrestrial life on Earth-like worlds, we might miss it entirely. When we think about life out there in the Universe, far beyond the […]

Can sensitive coral reefs survive another human generation?

The meaning—and range—of “habitable” goes much farther than we once thought.