1+ day, 13+ hour ago   (1028+ words) Drilled cores from Galápagos coral carry an ocean temperature record back to the year 1000, and recent decades break the pattern. When the tropical Pacific warms every few years, the weather turns strange thousands of miles away. Direct measurements of that…...

3+ day, 20+ hour ago   (697+ words) A massive dust storm swept across West Africa in early September, sending a plume over Mali and eventually toward the Atlantic Ocean. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory shows a massive cloud of dust sweeping across West…...

5+ day, 19+ hour ago   (654+ words) California’s Vasquez Rocks have stood in for alien worlds for decades. A NASA satellite image reveals the famous landscape from space. Southern California is home to a landscape so unusual that Hollywood has spent decades pretending it belongs on other…...

6+ day, 12+ hour ago   (956+ words) A 324-million-year-old fossil suggests early insects lived between water and land as their bodies gradually changed over time. Life on Earth changed greatly when animals began moving from water onto land. It happened in stages, and some early animals, including…...

6+ day, 18+ hour ago   (701+ words) A rare satellite view reveals the persistent lava lake inside Mount Michael, an active volcano on remote Saunders Island near Antarctica. At first glance, Saunders Island looks locked in winter. Sea ice crowds the dark water, snow covers the land,…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (913+ words) New research shows that shifting urban populations can change how efficiently sewage plants operate, revealing a potential way to cut emissions without new infrastructure. Every year, hundreds of millions of people flood out of Chinese cities for the Lunar New…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago   (1023+ words) A remarkably complete armored fish fossil from Brazil survived near a massive asteroid crater, revealing an unexpected link to ancient Europe. Near the end of the Permian, an asteroid hit central Brazil and folded the rock layers around the crater…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (773+ words) At the bottom of a vertical shaft in the karst mountains of Chongqing, a mature subtropical forest grows in permanent half-light, roughly 2,000 feet below the plateau. The… The clouded leopard has been recorded down there, which means wildlife is still…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (1038+ words) Ancient ocean sediments reveal that Africa’s open grasslands began forming millions of years earlier than previously thought, long before modern grasses took over. The African savanna is one of the most recognizable landscapes on the planet: open grass, a few…...

3+ week, 21+ hour ago   (1222+ words) Antimony rarely receives the attention given to copper, lithium, or gold. This lustrous, silvery metalloid straddles the line between metals and nonmetals, possessing the unusual quirk of expanding… Antimony rarely receives the attention given to copper, lithium, or gold. This…...