Over the last 485 million years, Earth has been both a lot colder and a lot hotter than once thought. A new temperature timeline that combines geologic data with computational simulations reveals a rich, detailed and dramatic picture of the ebb and flow of icehouse and greenhouse conditions on Earth throughout this span of time,…

<div data-thumb="https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/tmb/2024/tiny-nuclear-powered-b-1.jpg" data-src="https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2024/tiny-nuclear-powered-b-1.jpg" data-sub-html="Two different architectures of radiophotovoltaic batteries. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07933-9″> Two different architectures of radiophotovoltaic batteries. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07933-9 A team of physicists and engineers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed an extremely small nuclear battery that they claim is up to 8,000 times more efficient than…

Researchers looking for objects in the Kuiper Belt – the donut-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune containing icy objects including dwarf planet Pluto – appear to have found 11 objects far beyond it. It could be a major discovery – revealing, among other things, that the Solar System is much larger than we thought.…

A person looks at cap carbonate rocks in South China in 2019. The new study provides a new explanation for dramatic global environmental changes that led to their formation. Credit: Yarong Liu Some of the most dramatic climatic events in our planet’s history are “Snowball Earth” events that happened hundreds of millions of years ago,…

USGS Droughts in the coming decades could be longer than projected by current climate models, a new study published Wednesday in Nature warns. The international team of scientists examined potential biases that could skew climate models used to make drought projections under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change midrange and high emissions scenarios. The researchers corrected…

image:  Jessica Tierney is a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper.  view more  Credit: University of Arizona Published in the journal Science, the study presents a curve of global mean surface temperature that reveals Earth’s temperature has varied more than previously thought over much of the Phanerozoic Eon a…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Lavas from hotspots—whether erupting in Hawaii, Samoa or Iceland—likely originate from a worldwide, uniform reservoir in Earth’s mantle, according to an evaluation of volcanic hotspots published in Nature Geoscience. The findings indicate Earth’s mantle is far more chemically homogenous than scientists previously thought—and that lavas only acquire their unique chemical “flavors”…

Abstract Determining causal relationships between environmental change and early animal evolution has been limited by our lack of a robust temporal framework for the Ediacaran Period (635-539 million years ago). Here we present six new radioisotopic age constraints from the Sultanate of Oman, which furnish a quantitative temporal framework for biogeochemical changes associated with animal…

Abstract Despite the increasing relevance of temperature overshoot and the rather ambitious country pledges on Afforestation/Reforestation globally, the mitigation potential and the Earth system responses to large-scale non-idealized Afforestation/Reforestation patterns under a high overshoot scenario remain elusive. Here, we develop an ambitious Afforestation/Reforestation scenario by harnessing 1259 Integrated Assessment Model scenarios, restoration potential maps, and…

Abstract Loss of protein homeostasis is one of the hallmarks of aging. As such, interventions that restore proteostasis should slow down the aging process and improve healthspan. Two of the most broadly used anti-aging interventions that are effective in organisms from yeast to mammals are calorie restriction (CR) and rapamycin (RM) treatment. To identify the…