Humanity Is Evolving Into One Big Ant Colony

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• The trajectory of life on Earth has always been predicated by genetic evolution, but two scientists from the University of Maine argue that culture is now the main force shaping our lives.
• A new study analyzes this phenomenon and attempts to quantify the evolutionary transition coming with it.
• Although a gene-culture coevolution framework can be incredibly adaptable, the authors’ earlier work argues that its foundation in resource extraction and sub-global groups could make solving problems like climate change particularly challenging.

For the billions of years that life has been on Earth, genetic evolution has been in the driver’s seat, slowly but steadily honing species as they face various environmental pressures. And then, roughly 600,000 years ago (by some estimates), a particularly big-brained member of the Great Ape family began displaying evidence of cumulative culture, as evidenced by increasingly complex stone tools. Those early technological steps blossomed into full, complex societies that have taken over from genetics as the key driver of evolution, according to a new paper by Timothy Waring and Zachary Wood at the University of Maine.

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Primordial Earth Was Missing Materials Critical For Life, Study Shows

Artist's impression of ancient Earth. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy)

The greatest challenge facing astrobiologists is that there is only one planet known to us that has life. Of all the bodies of the Solar System, only Earth has a dense atmosphere, liquid water on its surface, and the organic chemistry that supports life.


However, these conditions did not exist billions of years ago when Earth was still young. While the nebula from which the planets formed was rich in volatile elements, the high temperatures in the inner Solar System largely prevented them from condensing, leaving them mostly in a gaseous state.


As a result, these elements were not incorporated into the solid rocky materials from which the inner planets formed. Only celestial bodies that formed farther from the Sun retained the substances essential to life, which raises questions about how and when they were introduced to Earth.

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Physicists unveil controversial device that generates power from Earth's spin: 'Convincing and remarkable'

Physicists unveil controversial device that generates power from Earth's spin: 'Convincing and remarkable'

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Researchers have been on a long quest to harness carbon-free energy from natural processes, from tapping into tidal forces to mimicking the fusion reactions that occur in stars.

Now, a team of physicists is investigating whether the Earth's rotational energy could be a source of sustainable power, according to Futurism.

The concept of generating electricity through the Earth's magnetic field has been floated since at least 1832 when Michael Faraday tested the idea and got a negative result, as stated in a study on the topic.

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Habitable Planets out There

There Are More Planets Like Earth in Habitable Zones



Discovering several thousand planets beyond the solar system or exoplanets is a eureka moment for humans. In just twenty years of exploration, space-based and ground observations have turned up above 4,100 confirmed exoplanets in only some parts of the galaxy we searched until now. 

If you add unconfirmed planetary candidates, this number jumps to cross 9,000. But the biggest payoff would be capturing evidence of a world, some light-years far away, hospitable to life. To find a planet like Earth, astronomers need to look for habitable zones around stars, and these habitable zones should not be too cold or too hot for liquid water to be present on the surface. But do they exist?    READ MORE...

All Life on EARTH has One Ancestor

Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents the ancestor of every living thing, from the tiniest of bacteria to the grandest of blue whales.

While the Cambrian Explosion kickstarted complex life in a major way some 530 million years, the true timeline of life on Earth is much longer. For years, scientists have estimated that LUCA likely arrived on the scene some 4 billion years, which is only 600 million years after the planet’s formation. 

But a new study from an international team of scientists pushes that timeline back even further to some 4.2 billion years ago, while also discovering some fascinating details about what life for LUCA might’ve been like. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.       READ MORE...

Center of the Universe

The universe is undeniably vast, and from our perspective, it may seem like Earth is in the middle of everything. But is there a center of the cosmos, and if so, where is it? If the Big Bang started the universe, then where did it all come from, and where is it going?


To start tackling these questions, let's go back about 100 years. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made two amazing back-to-back discoveries: Early in the decade, he found that "island universes," now known as galaxies, sit very far away from us; later that decade, he discovered that, on average, all galaxies are receding away from us.     READ MORE...

Rewriting The Origins of Life

A recent study by Scripps Research proposes a credible pathway for the early formation and evolution of protocells, suggesting that phosphorylation might have been crucial in developing complex, functional precursors to life on Earth about 4 billion years ago. This discovery enhances our understanding of the origins of life and the early Earth’s chemical environment. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Recent discovery of a new phospholipid narrows the gap in understanding how primordial cells emerged during origin of life.

Approximately 4 billion years ago, Earth was in the process of creating conditions suitable for life. Origin-of-life scientists often wonder if the type of chemistry found on the early Earth was similar to what life requires today. They know that spherical collections of fats, called protocells, were the precursor to cells during this emergence of life. But how did simple protocells first arise and diversify to eventually lead to life on Earth?  READ MORE...

NASA Found a Super Earth

A NASA telescope orbiting our planet has spotted an intriguing super-Earth — a world some 30 to 70 percent bigger than Earth.

This rocky planet is in another solar system 137 light-years away, which in the vastness of space is considered relatively close (a light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles). The exoplanet, called TOI-715 b, is about 1.5 times the size of Earth. And, crucially, this world orbits inside the habitable, or "Goldilocks," zone.

"That’s the distance from the star that could give the planet the right temperature for liquid water to form on its surface," NASA explained on its website. "Several other factors would have to line up, of course, for surface water to be present, especially having a suitable atmosphere."

TOI-715 b orbits quite close to its star (each orbit lasts just 19 days) — but scientists don't think its a hellish, scorching world, like some other exoplanets. That's because its star is a "red dwarf," which is both cooler and smaller than our medium-sized star, the sun.   READ MORE...

Predicting Erthquakes

An earthquake, in the simplest terms, is when the earth shakes.

Did you know that there are hundreds of earthquakes every single day, not always strong enough for us to notice them? Then there are some massive ones that cause huge damage and loss of life. These terrifying events raise many questions; here are some answers.

Whose ‘fault’ is it when an earthquake happens?
The surface of the Earth is made of kilometres of hard rock broken into a puzzle of moving pieces called tectonic plates, which sit on a sea of hot, liquid rock that rolls as it cools, pushing the plates around. Earthquakes and volcanoes occur on the surface where they meet.

Plates are always technically in motion but are usually locked together, building stress until something underground snaps, freeing them to slide along known lines of fractured rock called faults, that can run for kilometres.

When the pressure suddenly releases and the plate moves, energy explodes into the surrounding rock.

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A Change in Jupiter's Orbit

A shift in Jupiter's orbit could make Earth's surface even more hospitable to life than it already is, new research suggests.

University of California-Riverside (UCR) scientists simulated alternative arrangements of our solar system, finding that when Jupiter's orbit was more flattened  —  or 'eccentric'  —  it would cause major changes in our planet's orbit too.

And this change caused by the orbit of Jupiter  —  the solar system's most massive planet by far  —  could impact Earth's ability to support life for the better.  READ MORE...

Massive Triple Star System Detected

Artist’s interpretation of HD 98800, a quadruple-star system located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW Hydrae. Bin Liu and Alejandro Vigna-Gomez suggest that the more massive 

tertiary-star system TIC 470710327 could have started in a similar configuration – two binary 

systems with one of them eventually merging into one, bigger star. TIC 470710327 is located 

very close to “Cassiopeia”. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Compact, massive triple star system detected by University of Copenhagen researchers.

Earlier this year, researchers revealed the discovery of an extraordinarily compact “one-of-a-kind” system of three stars. A partnership between two young researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen is currently focusing on how this unusual combination of a binary set of stars and a revolving larger star can form.

Tertiary star formation on a massive scale
The star system is made up of a binary set of stars, two stars that orbit each other, and one more massive star that orbits the binary.

“As far as we know, it is the first of its kind ever detected”, Alejandro Vigna-Gomez says. “We know of many tertiary star systems (three star systems), but they are typically significantly less massive. 

The massive stars in this triple are very close together – it is a compact system. The orbital period of the binary (~1 d) is the same as that of the rotation of Earth (1 day). The combined mass of the two of them is twelve times the mass of our Sun – so rather big stars. 

The tertiary star is approximately 16 times the mass of our Sun, so even bigger! The inner orbit is circular in shape with close to six revolutions of the tertiary star around the binary per year. 

Pretty fast, when you consider the size of them – unsurprisingly, the system is very luminous, so at first they were detected as a stellar binary”.  READ MORE...

A New Class of ExoPlanet

Artist's illustration of a half-rock, half-water world orbiting a red dwarf star. 

(Image credit: Pilar Montañés (@pilar.monro))

A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, researchers say.


Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, making up more than 70% of the universe's stellar population. These stars are small and cold, typically about one-fifth as massive as the sun and up to 50 times dimmer.

The fact that red dwarfs are so very common has made scientists wonder if they might be the best chance for discovering planets that can possess life as we know it on Earth. For example, in 2020, astronomers that discovered Gliese 887, the brightest red dwarf in our sky at visible wavelengths of light, may host a planet within its habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water.

However, whether the worlds orbiting red dwarfs are potentially habitable remains unclear, in part because of the lack of understanding that researchers have about these worlds' composition. Previous research suggested that small exoplanets — ones less than four times Earth's diameter — orbiting sun-like stars are generally either rocky or gassy, possessing either a thin or thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.


In the new study, astrophysicists sought to examine the compositions of exoplanets around red dwarfs. 

They focused on small worlds found around closer — and thus brighter and easier to inspect — red dwarfs observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  READ MORE...

Photos of an Alien World

The HIP 65426 b gas giant planet photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope on the 

background of the Digitized Sky Survey (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), 

the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI))

The James Webb Space Telescope took its first direct image of a planet orbiting a distant star, proving its potential to revolutionize exoplanet research.


The absolute majority of exoplanets have only been observed through temporary dips in brightness of the stars they orbit; only about two dozen have been imaged directly. But that might soon change. Less than two months after it started its science operations, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered its first direct photo of a planet beyond our solar system.


The planet, a gas giant orbiting the star called HIP 65426 some 385 light-years from Earth, appears in the image as a tiny splotch close to the glowing star. Webb photographed the exoplanet using its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), each of which focuses on a different flavor of infrared light.

"This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally," Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the U.K. who led these observations, said in a statement(opens in new tab).


Scientists had discovered the planet in 2017 with the Very Large Telescope in Chile; Webb isn't tailored to discovering new exoplanets and will instead excel at teaching scientists about worlds other observatories identified.

Exoplanets are extremely difficult to observe directly because they are so much fainter than the stars they orbit. This one, HIP 65426 b, could only be spotted thanks to a combination of factors. First, it's extremely far away from its parent star, 100 times the distance from the sun to Earth (for comparison, Pluto orbits only 40 sun-Earth distances from the sun). Second, HIP 65426 b is also extremely massive — 12 times the size of Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet.  READ MORE...

Tracing Earth's Path Through the Galaxy

"To see a world in a grain of sand," the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do.




We observe the composition of mineral grains, smaller than the width of a human hair. Then, we extrapolate the chemical processes they suggest to ponder the construction of our planet itself.

Now, we've taken that minute attention to new heights, connecting tiny grains to Earth's place in the galactic environment.

Looking out to the universe
At an even larger scale, astrophysicists seek to understand the universe and our place in it. They use laws of physics to develop models that describe the orbits of astronomical objects.

Although we may think of the planet's surface as something shaped by processes entirely within Earth itself, our planet has undoubtedly felt the effects of its cosmic environment. This includes periodic changes in Earth's orbit, variations in the sun's output, gamma ray bursts, and of course meteorite impacts.

Just looking at the Moon and its pockmarked surface should remind us of that, given Earth is more than 80 times more massive than its gray satellite. In fact, recent work has pointed to the importance of meteorite impacts in the production of continental crust on Earth, helping to form buoyant "seeds" that floated on the outermost layer of our planet in its youth.

We and our international team of colleagues have now identified a rhythm in the production of this early continental crust, and the tempo points to a truly grand driving mechanism. This work has just been published in the journal Geology.  READ MORE...

Life at Jezero Crater

As for any consensus among scientists that signs of past or present life have been seen by Perseverance, once again, don't wait for a slam dunk observation.

Depiction shows Jezero Crater — the landing locale of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — as it might have appeared billions of years ago when it was perhaps a life-sustaining lake. An inlet and outlet are also visible on either side of the lake. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Since its wheels-down landing in February of last year, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been busily at work, on the prowl steering itself across the Jezero Crater landscape.


A key duty of the robot is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. The Mars machinery is industriously gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil that could help tease out an answer concerning the past habitability of the Red Planet.


Perseverance is on a roll, a collectible outing to stash core samples in sealed tubes that are to eventually find their way to Earth via the Mars Sample Return program.

But how tough is it to spot and sample potential past life on Mars? Perhaps the rover already has? Then there's the question of whether we need the samples back on Earth to find signs of past life, or can Perseverance, on-location, detect past or even present life with its suite of instruments?


Above all, just how hard might it be to have a consensus among scientists that, yes, signs of life, be it past or present has been observed by the rover? What's a slam dunk finding look like?  READ MORE...

We Were Ocean Dwellers in Early Life

By studying the genetic tree of life, scientists have determined that the first life on Earth may have lived underwater, where it would be shielded from harmful ultraviolet light from the sun.

The origin of life on Earth remains a mystery, but scientists are slowly putting together genetic puzzle pieces to learn more about how the first life on Earth lived, between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago. Now, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Riverside, have used machine learning to trace the evolutionary development of a protein-based molecule called rhodopsin back to some of the most ancient microbial life-forms to have existed on Earth. The results may also inform the search for life beyond Earth, the scientists argue.

"It's like taking the DNA of many grandchildren to reproduce the DNA of their grandparents," astrobiologist Edward Schwieterman of the University of California Riverside, a co-author on the new research, said in a statement(opens in new tab).

The researchers suspect that rhodopsin provided the battery power for early life, turning light from the sun into energy. On modern Earth, rhodopsin can absorb blue, green, yellow and orange light. (It is also tangentially related to the light-absorbing rods and cones that our eyes use to see the world.)

Schwieterman and his colleagues began by using machine learning to look for the genes that control rhodopsin in as wide a swathe of life on Earth as possible, then identifying those genes that had the longest lineages.

This analysis suggested that ancient rhodopsin absorbed just blue and green light. This reduced capability makes sense in a scenario in which early life may have originated in the ocean, where blue and green wavelengths of light penetrate deeper into a column of water than other optical wavelengths: Being able to absorb these wavelengths to derive energy would have been vitally important.  READ MORE...

Earth is Suddenly Spinning Faster

Our planet set a record for completing one rotation faster than scientists had ever previously recorded, according to TimeAndDate.com. Earth rotated once around its axis on Wednesday, June 29, in 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours.

Hang on! Earth takes exactly 24 hours to rotate once on its axis, right? Almost, yes, but not exactly.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) had even begun adding leap seconds every now and again to make up for the slower spin (it last happened on December 31, 2016).

Over a longer time period that may still be the case—Earth’s rotation may, in general, still be slowing down.

After all, the Moon is gradually slowing down the Earth’s rotation. Its gravitational pull causes tides and makes the Earth’s orbital path around the Sun slightly elliptical.  READ MORE...

Experience Daylight Together

At any given moment, one side of the Earth is facing the sun and the other is in the dark — it's simple geometry. Intuitively then, it makes sense that roughly half the planet's population is in the dark at any given time; this is the only way Santa Claus' December gift delivery schedule makes any sense, right?

But the geography and distribution of people across our world is actually a little more complicated than that. So much so that almost every human will experience some form of direct (or indirect sunlight) at the same moment on July 8.

Every year around now, reports start to circulate that 99 percent of Earthlings will experience daylight at the same time, specifically at 4:15 a.m. PT.

This year Timeanddate.com decided to fact check this claim and found it to be "technically true" with the caveat that at least three percent of the world's population might not be able to really perceive the limited amount of late-night or early-morning photons crashing into their eyeballs.  READ MORE...

Putting a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon

Fission surface power systems – depicted in this conceptual illustration – could provide reliable 

power for human exploration of the Moon under Artemis. Credits: NASA

NASA is one step closer to finalizing nuclear power some 238,900 miles away from Earth.

The space agency and the U.S. Department of Energy have selected three design concept proposals for a fission surface power system that would be stationed on the moon.

The hope is that a nuclear reactor would produce the power needed to operate rovers, conduct experiments and help support life.


Scientists say that the concepts for the technology will benefit future exploration under the Artemis umbrella and will be ready to launch by the end of the decade.

The contracts fund the development of initial design concepts for a 40-kilowatt class fission power system planned to last at least 10 years in the lunar environment and valued at approximately $5 million each, NASA says. Forty kilowatts of power is enough to run 30 households for ten years continuously.  READ MORE...

Earth's Inner Core Oscillates

Scientists identify a six-year cycle of super- and sub-rotation that affected the length of a day based on their analysis of seismic data.

Earth’s structure is divided into layers, with the inner core at the center followed by the outer core, lower mantle, upper mantle, crust, and atmosphere. The inner core is the hottest part of the planet at about 10,000 °F (5400 °C), which is similar to the temperature of the surface of the sun!

Believed to consist mostly of an iron-nickel alloy, the inner core is mainly a solid ball with a radius of about 760 miles (1,220 km). It rotates slightly faster than the planet as a whole, which is called super-rotation.

University of Southern California (USC) scientists have found evidence that the Earth’s inner core oscillates, contradicting previously accepted models that suggested it consistently rotates at a faster rate than the planet’s surface.

Their study, published today (June 10, 2022) in the journal Science Advances, shows that the inner core changed direction in the six-year period from 1969-74, according to the analysis of seismic data. The scientists say their model of inner core movement also explains the variation in the length of a day, which has been shown to oscillate persistently for the past several decades.  READ MORE...