/ en-us Â鶹ŇůÔş internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ŇůÔşics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. A team of researchers from the University of Adelaide, in collaboration with cavers, has uncovered a large number of eyeless, cave-adapted invertebrates—including spiders, cockroaches, centipedes, and, remarkably, a wasp. /news/2025-06-world-highly-cave-wasp-nullarbor.html Plants & Animals Evolution Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:22:37 EDT news670083753 A new study reveals the modern arid desert between Africa and Saudi Arabia was once regularly lush and green with rivers and lakes over a period of 8 million years, allowing for the occupation and movements of both animals and hominins. The study "Recurrent humid phases in Arabia over the past 8 million years" has been published in Nature. /news/2025-04-reveals-million-years-green-arabia.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 09 Apr 2025 11:00:10 EDT news663410621 Deep inside a labyrinthine cave in southwestern France, ancient humans who lived around 30,000 years ago carved horses, mammoths and rhinoceros into the walls, a fabulous prehistoric menagerie that has rarely been seen—until now. /news/2025-03-rarely-cave-art-prehistoric-secrets.html Archaeology Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:52:12 EDT news661611114 Using a sediment core taken from the Great Blue Hole off the coast of the Central American state of Belize, researchers from the universities of Frankfurt, Cologne, Göttingen, Hamburg and Bern have analyzed the local climate history of the last 5,700 years. /news/2025-03-tropical-cyclones-frequent-years-sediment.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:19:53 EDT news661511988 A new paper released today documents the first soil, airfall dust, and rock fragment samples collected by NASA for return from Mars. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas astrobiologist leading the specimen selection team discusses what the samples so far reveal. /news/2025-02-roving-red-planet-paper-documents.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:09:05 EST news658080539 China's dynastic history spans 13 periods of rule from 2070 BC until the last emperor abdicated in 1912. While factors leading to the transitions between dynasties are a complex mixture of environmental, social and economic issues, the role of climate change has often been invoked as a significant factor in these geopolitical shifts. This is because China's reliance upon agriculture prior to the industrial era means the country was sensitive to abrupt changes in climate that could lead to a variety of social and economic impacts. /news/2024-12-climate-patterns-cave-mineral-deposits.html Earth Sciences Environment Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:00:02 EST news652622686 Found all over the world, calcite is the most stable form of calcium carbonate and is the main mineral found in limestone. /news/2024-11-calcite-versatile-mineral-future-carbon.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 07 Nov 2024 10:03:04 EST news650196182 Today's climate change is man-made. The consensus in the climate science community is unequivocal, but in order to determine just how exceptional current climate change is, we have had to contextualize the present on a much longer time scale. To do this, scientists working in paleoclimatology (the study of past climate) use information from both natural and documentary sources from around the world. /news/2024-09-coral-sediments-reconstruct-million-years.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 25 Sep 2024 12:27:13 EDT news646486026 A study conducted by researchers at the University of SĂŁo Paulo (USP) in Brazil and reported in an article published in Nature Communications shows that the Cerrado, Brazil's savanna biome, is experiencing the worst drought for at least 700 years. Here's why. /news/2024-05-drought-brazil-cerrado-worst-centuries.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 23 May 2024 14:24:04 EDT news635693041 Pitch-black darkness. Crushing squeezes, muddy passages, icy waterfalls. Bats and spiders. Abseiling over ledges into the unknown. How far would you go for a fossil? /news/2024-04-spent-years-deep-underground-caves.html Paleontology & Fossils Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:51:40 EDT news633610294 During ice ages, dry, frozen terrain extended over much of northern Europe, Asia and North America. Many plants and animals retreated from these desolate, harsh landscapes and sought refuge in pockets of more hospitable territory. /news/2024-02-ice-ages-dry-thought-australian.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 08 Feb 2024 11:39:28 EST news626614763 Have you noticed many Australian landscapes, like the outback and our deserts, are brown and orange? This is especially easy to see when looking at a satellite image. Australia's red center is colored by an abundant mineral scorched into Australian soils and sediments. /news/2023-11-rust-riches-goethite-role-australia.html Earth Sciences Tue, 21 Nov 2023 14:02:04 EST news619797722 More than merely cracks in the ice, crevasses play an important role in circulating seawater beneath Antarctic ice shelves, potentially influencing their stability, finds Cornell University-led research based on a first-of-its-kind exploration by an underwater robot. /news/2023-10-underwater-robot-circulation-pattern-antarctic.html Earth Sciences Environment Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:00:01 EDT news617617795 The Kaokoveld region, covering north-western Namibia and south-western Angola, is one of the remotest areas in southern Africa. Although it's extremely dry, it is a center of species endemism: many species occur only there and nowhere else on earth. /news/2023-10-namibia-angola-remote-ovahimba-mountains.html Plants & Animals Ecology Fri, 20 Oct 2023 11:54:04 EDT news617021641 The Nullarbor is one of Australia's iconic natural places. It's renowned as a vast and mostly treeless plain. But hidden beneath this ancient landscape is an immense network of caves. /news/2023-10-nullarbor-rich-cultural-history-vast.html Ecology Tue, 10 Oct 2023 12:22:08 EDT news616159325 The Grand Canyon's valleys and millions of years of rock layers spanning Earth's history have earned it a designation as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. But, according to a new UNLV study, its marvels extend to vast cave systems that lie beneath the surface, which just might hold clues to better understand the future of climate change—by studying nature's past. /news/2023-10-scientists-grand-canyon-ancient-future.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 02 Oct 2023 16:23:05 EDT news615482581 Glacial cyclicity of the Earth has often been considered on 100,000 year timescales, particularly for the Late Pleistocene (~11,700 to 129,000 years ago) swapping between periods of extensive polar and mountain glacier ice sheets, to warmer interglacial periods when ice sheets and glaciers retreated, with subsequent sea level rise. This is thought to be related to three key drivers affecting the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth from the sun. /news/2023-08-late-pleistocene-glaciations-terminated-earth.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 28 Aug 2023 10:14:10 EDT news612436447 In late July, a study published in Nature Communications warned that a critical ocean system that brings warm water up the North Atlantic, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), was at risk of collapse by 2095 for want of drastic emissions cuts. /news/2023-08-atlantic-collapse-qa-scientists-controversial.html Earth Sciences Environment Sun, 13 Aug 2023 11:00:01 EDT news610883525 What connects a fossil found in a cave in northern Laos with stone tools made in north Australia? The answer is, we do. When our early Homo sapiens ancestors first arrived in Southeast Asia on their way from Africa to Australia, they left evidence of their presence in the form of human fossils that accumulated over thousands of years deep in a cave. /news/2023-06-rare-glimpse-ancestors-mainland-southeast.html Archaeology Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:00:03 EDT news605868673 Even in their dark isolation from the atmosphere above, caves can hold a rich archive of local climate conditions and how they've shifted over the eons. Formed over tens of thousands of years, speleothems—rock formations unique to caves better known as stalagmites and stalactites—hold secrets to the ancient environments from which they formed. /news/2023-03-wisconsin-cave-tantalizing-clues-ancient.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 02 Mar 2023 12:04:46 EST news596981082 One of the most hotly debated questions in the history of Neanderthal research has been whether they created art. In the past few years, the consensus has become that they did, sometimes. But, like their relations at either end of the hominoid evolutionary tree, chimpanzees and Homo sapiens, Neanderthals' behavior varied culturally from group to group and over time. /news/2023-01-neanderthals-oldest-art-world-wasnt.html Archaeology Tue, 17 Jan 2023 11:10:02 EST news593175964 Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, contributing more than 20% of global warming since preindustrial times. Anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) is an important methane sink, reducing methane emission from various environments to the atmosphere. Methylomirabilota bacterium (Methylomirabilis oxyfera) that can use nitrite as the electron acceptor to drive AOM has been recently reported. /news/2022-10-discovery-microbial-pathway-combat-methane.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Mon, 17 Oct 2022 14:25:02 EDT news585235501 South Australia's Naracoorte Caves is one of the world's best fossil sites, containing a record spanning more than half a million years. Among the remains preserved in layers of sand are the bones of many iconic Australian megafauna species that became extinct between 48,000 and 37,000 years ago. /news/2022-09-australian-caves-years-older-thought.html Paleontology & Fossils Tue, 27 Sep 2022 12:20:03 EDT news583499993 Char from ancient fires and stalagmites in caves hold clues to the mysterious disappearance of Neanderthals from Europe. /news/2022-09-archaeology-mysterious-demise-neanderthals.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Sep 2022 02:09:54 EDT news583376978 A pair of researchers at the University of Granada has solved the mystery of the purple stains on the ceilings of the famous Alhambra palace in Spain. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Carolina Cardell and Isabel Guerra describe their study of the ceiling of the famous medieval fortress and what they learned about its mysterious purple stains. /news/2022-09-electron-microscopy-reveals-purple-alhambra.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Mon, 12 Sep 2022 09:27:24 EDT news582193637 Cave explorers have traversed what's now the deepest known cave in Australia. On Saturday a group of explorers discovered a 401-meter-deep cave, which they named Delta Variant, in Tasmania's Niggly-Growling Swallet cave system within the Junee–Florentine karst area. Its depth just beat out its predecessor, the Niggly Cave, by about four meters. /news/2022-08-explorers-uncovered-australia-deepest-cave.html Earth Sciences Tue, 02 Aug 2022 09:19:27 EDT news578650764 Although you'll probably never see them, you can spot them by the tell-tale mounds of sandy soil dotting a field: pocket gophers. Beneath your feet, the gophers continuously create and remold a labyrinth of winding tunnels hundreds of feet long. /news/2022-07-root-farming-gophers-closest-agricultural-relatives.html Plants & Animals Mon, 11 Jul 2022 11:00:04 EDT news576734797 As natural climate archives, the deposits found in caves can play an important role in our ability to understand—and predict—climate change. /news/2021-09-ancient-cave-deposits-reveal-climate.html Environment Thu, 09 Sep 2021 10:37:44 EDT news550402661 The grass flickered gently above a crack in the limestone and Ludvik Husu instinctively knew he had found what he was searching for: a new cave in Slovenia's dramatic Karst region. /news/2021-08-slovenia-underground-labyrinths-cave.html Archaeology Sun, 15 Aug 2021 05:10:16 EDT news548223006 Large thunderstorms in the Southern Great Plains of the U.S. are some of the strongest on Earth. In recent years, these storms have increased in frequency and intensity, and new research shows that these shifts are linked to climate variability. /news/2021-06-intense-frequent-thunderstorms-linked-global.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 22 Jun 2021 16:29:04 EDT news543598133