The history of Earth is written on the great tablets of tectonic plates. The motions of plates shaped land masses, formed ...

A new study shows cultural evolution helped humans expand across Earth far faster than genetic change alone could achieve.

Roughly 2.5 million years ago, a nearby star exploded. Around the same time, the diversity of viruses infecting fish in Africa’s Lake Tanganyika rose dramatically. Three researchers from the ...

Over the course of nearly five months in 2022, NASA's Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the red planet and even contain evidence for past ...

My colleague and I have published a new study of cactus flowers which may help explain the conundrum. For more than a century ...

Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and steadily began to ...

Dear EarthTalk: Are any plants and animals evolving backward by incorporating traits that they lost long ago? -- Joseph R., ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In "One Hand Clapping," Nikolay Kukushkin traces the origin of human consciousness from the ...

We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways? How do you look for alien life when you don’t know what alien life might look like ...

A new study has found that nearly half of the body traits identified across mollusks – a group that includes snails, clams, ...

Astrophysicists have done a bit of crime scene investigation on what’s almost a reverse murder mystery. They’ve traced radioactive elements on the seafloor back to the cosmic explosions they might ...