A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching...

How 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.

What happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that...

How 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.

The 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,...

To 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.

When 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...

We 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.

How 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?

It 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.

We 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.

Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.

After having solved the small matter of evolution by natural selection - becoming one of the most famous scientists in the world in the process - Charles Darwin turned his focus to a different personal obsession…

There are hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy. Scientists now think hundreds of millions of them have conditions where life could arise. What do scientists think are the best ways of reaching out to them? And why do some...

Are you an insect fetus who'd rather not get eaten by your siblings? How about a baby frog who'd rather not drown before getting to leave your egg? Well, you had better figure out a way to hatch when you need to.



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The Appalachian Mountains are some of the oldest geological features on earth. And they also hold fossils that tell us about some of the very earliest life forms that we'll ever manage to see in the fossil record. So how did these...

Science offers a way of discovering and understanding the world around us, driven by questions and tested with evidence. And it’s a twisty-turny team effort— you won’t find many lone geniuses out there, or straight lines from hypothesis...

Biology is the study of life—a four-letter word that connects you to 4 billion years worth of family tree. The word “life” can be tricky to define, but a shared set of characteristics helps biologists identify living things. In this...

If you were really into gift shops as a kid, you probably loved to look at all the shiny geodes. But those little geodes are nothing compared to the mother of all geodes, found is in Put In Bay, Ohio. So let's talk about how this...

In the early 1960s, NASA rolled up to a US Navy facility in Pennsylvania with one goal in mind: stick its newly-minted astronauts into one of the most extreme centrifuges that has ever been built, and whirl them around really fast to...

If all goes well, we'll be sending astronauts back to the Moon in just a couple of years. And scientists have a lot to figure out before then, including the answer to a seemingly simple question: What time is it up...

The conditions in many medicine cabinets turn out to be detrimental for medicines—some worse than others. <b<br/>r/>

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Not long after the supernova of 1604, the telescope was invented. But astronomers would have to wait nearly FOUR CENTURIES to witness the next supernova that was visible to the naked eye. It was 1987, and a blue supergiant in the Large...

Naloxone, better known as Narcan, is today's gold standard to treat opioid overdose. But sometimes it comes up short against more potent opioids like fentanyl. So future treatments might take advantage of opioid receptor...