Category: Earth

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record and, unfortunately, this came as no surprise. Summers have been getting hotter and drier around the world, including in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to intense droughts and heatwaves in North…

Photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae and certain kinds of bacteria convert solar radiation into chemical energy, must adjust itself to changes in the intensity of sunlight, so as to ensure its efficient use. Just like our pupils,…

Gold nuggets occur predominantly in quartz veins, and the current paradigm posits that gold precipitates from hot water and carbon dioxide-rich fluids owing to changes in temperature, pressure and/or fluid chemistry. However, the widespread…

The Mesoamerican site of Mitla was swallowed by a seismic landslide event, according to a new study by the Lyobaa Project.

Mitla, known as Mictlán in Nahuatl, means the “place of the dead” or “Underworld”. Mitla was established in…

Mescaline, a natural hallucinogen known since ancient times, was not only a favorite of artists and bohemians but also a mainstay of brain research throughout the first half of the 20^th century, until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by the much more…

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef faces critical danger from back-to-back bouts of extreme ocean heat.

Ocean heat in the Coral Sea is at its highest in four centuries, scientists report in the Aug. 8 Nature. The researchers drilled…

In the new study, Dr. David Hernández Uribe from the University of Illinois Chicago used computer models to study the formation of magmas thought to hold clues to the origin of Earth’s continents.

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Researchers from the Scottish Association for Marine Science and colleagues have discovered that the polymetallic nodule-covered abyssal seafloor in the Pacific Ocean produces the so-called ‘dark oxygen.’

In an unexpected twist, metal-rich nodules found on the seafloor are generating oxygen, new research suggests. This meager but steady supply of the vital gas may help support seafloor ecosystems in areas currently targeted for deep-sea…