A landmark decision by a top UN court has cleared the way for countries to sue each other over climate change, including over historic emissions of planet-warming gases. But the judge at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands on Wednesday said that untangling who caused which part of climate change could be…
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Artwork: The new system predicts missing text from broken inscriptions, their date and original location A new AI tool has the potential to turbocharge our understanding of all human history, researchers say. Artificial intelligence has already been used to fill in gaps in ancient Roman scrolls, but a new system…
In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up as the building blocks of life and not others? A new study by Scripps Research scientists helps answer these longstanding questions….
During the midday Friday prayer hours on March 28, 2025, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck central Myanmar along the Sagaing Fault. With an epicenter close to Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, it was the most powerful earthquake to strike Myanmar in more than a century and the second deadliest in its modern history. The cause…
A new commentary published in Nature Communications by Dr James Bradley, Reader in Environmental Science at Queen Mary University of London, and his team reveals a dramatic and concerning shift in the Arctic winter. During a fieldwork campaign in Svalbard in February 2025, researchers encountered exceptionally high temperatures, widespread snowmelt, and blooming vegetation. Svalbard, warming…
New research in Plants, People, Planet indicates that bread wheat’s micronutrient content can be increased by cultivating it with a specific type of fungus. When investigators grew different types of wheat with and without the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus Rhizophagus irregularis, they observed that crops grown with fungi developed larger grains with greater amounts of phosphorus…
Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News Link et al/Biology Letters The researchers say the terror bird did not survive the encounter Teeth marks made on the leg bone of a large avian reptile known as a terror bird 13 million years ago suggest an even bigger predator may have killed it, scientists say. Terror birds…
Artist’s impression of an encounter between an ancient caiman and a terror bird Julian Bayona Becerra About 13 million years ago in a vast South American wetland, colossal predators clashed. The fossilised bone from an enormous flightless bird found in Colombia shows tooth marks made by a giant caiman. Andrés Link at the University of the…
Mollisonia, a Cambrian period marine animal, may have been an early arachnid Junnn11 @ni075 CC BY-SA 4.0 The brain of a sea creature that lived over 500 million years ago was organised like that of a spider – suggesting that arachnids may have not evolved on land as previously thought. Mollisonia lived during a period…
A leaf-toed gecko from Rábida Island Rory Stansbury/Island Conservation A tiny gecko has been rediscovered on Rábida Island in the Galápagos, where it was believed to have been wiped out by invasive rats. The leaf-toed gecko (Phyllodactylus maresi), whose adults are just 8 centimetres long, was previously only known to have existed on Rábida from…
