News

Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, was announced …

New extremely distant Solar System object found during hunt for Planet X Read More »

How and when did early humans start walking upright? For clues, researchers have been looking at feet—and, more specifically, at toes. Bipedalism was a critical step in human evolution, and one that affected so many subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage, from social behavior to the development of material culture, says Sergio Almécija, a senior research …

When Did Human Feet Become “Made for Walking”? Read More »

The Alps are on the go: The mountain range drifts northwards an average of one-half millimeter every year and rises 1.8 millimeters. However, there are strong regional variances. In order to follow these movements, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have evaluated measurements made by more than 300 GPS antennas over a period …

Mountains in Motion ! Read More »

A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has used a combination of genomic and fossil data to explain the history of life on Earth, from its origin to the present day. Palaeontologists have long sought to understand ancient life and the shared evolutionary history of life as a whole. However, the …

A timescale for the origin and evolution of all of life on Earth Read More »

A quick look at the fossil record shows that no species lasts forever. On average, most species exist for around a million years, although some species persist for much longer. A new study published in Scientific Reports from paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama shows that young species can take advantage of new opportunities …

Old Species Learn New Tricks Very Slowly Read More »