PBS
How To Detect Faster Than Light Travel
New ReviewWarp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce gravitational waves that we could see here on Earth? According to a recent study.. Actually maybe, at least eventually....
PBS
Why The Giraffe Got Its Neck
New ReviewHow and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works over and over again.
PBS
That Time The Ocean Lost (Almost) All Its Oxygen
New ReviewThis is the story of how our planet rescued itself from extreme conditions in the Cretaceous Period, at the cost of essentially suffocating the oceans for half-a-million years.
PBS
You're Living On An Ant Planet
New ReviewHow did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.
PBS
We Helped Make Mosquitoes A Problem
New ReviewAround 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve to live...
PBS
Do Thunderbeasts Prove Giant Animals Are Inevitable?
New ReviewThe journey the thunder beasts took to reach such mega proportions from such humble beginnings forces us to ask an important question, one that paleontologists have been asking for more than a century: from an evolutionary perspective,...
PBS
The Huge Extinctions We Are Just Now Discovering
New ReviewWhat graptolites tell us is a story of incredible changes in the ocean, of periods where the oceans became poisonous and suffocating before eventually clearing up again. They unlock extinctions and recoveries that scientists didn't see....
PBS
Beans & Bees (Not Bats) Gave Us Butterflies
New ReviewTurns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.
PBS
Why Only Earth Has Fire
New ReviewTo get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.
PBS
How Ancient Microbes Rode Bug Bits Out to Sea
New ReviewTiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.
PBS
Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins
New ReviewThere was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but...
PBS
Animals Are Older Than We Thought
New ReviewWhat are animal-like fossils doing in rocks a billion years old, and what does that mean for our understanding of their evolution and geologic time itself? Turns out, there might've been a long, slow-burning fuse that ultimately ignited...
PBS
Why Is It So Hard to Tell the Sex of a Dinosaur?
New ReviewWhile we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?
PBS
How Snake Venom Sparked An Evolutionary Arms Race
New ReviewFor some, the rise and spread of venomous elapids was just another challenge to adapt to. For others, it was a catastrophe of almost apocalyptic proportions. And we humans are no exception, because it seems that when elapids slithered...
PBS
What Was The Earliest Surgery?
New ReviewWhen did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...
PBS
What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?
New ReviewWe spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over.
PBS
The Hazy Evolutionary History of Cannabis
New ReviewHow did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get us high?
PBS
No Single Cradle of Humankind
New ReviewIt would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
PBS
The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World
New ReviewResearchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.
PBS
When The Atlantic Ripped Open A Supercontinent
New ReviewWhile the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.
PBS
When India Was An Island
New ReviewWe need to talk about the biggest break-up of all-time: the break-up of the supercontinent Pangea, and how, ultimately, when India smashed back into Asia, it traded one form of evolutionary isolation for another.
PBS
When the Amazon Flowed Backwards
New ReviewWhat did life look like when the Amazon watershed flowed backwards? How did its direction shape the evolution of life around it? And what force could have possibly been strong enough to up-end one of the world’s mightiest rivers between...
PBS
When Neandertals Became Apex Predators
New ReviewClimbing to the summit of the Eurasian food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most impressive evolutionary feats, but in the end, it may have actually been what doomed them.
PBS
How Asteroids Set the Stage for Life on Earth
New ReviewWe may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.