News by Subject Earth Science

Lichens -- a combo of fungus and algae -- can grow on bare rocks, so scientists thought that lichens were some of the first organisms to make their way onto land from the water, changing the planet's atmosphere and paving the way for modern plants. But a closer look at the DNA of the algae and fungi that form lichens shows that lichens likely evolved millions of years after plants.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire, centered in northern Iraq and extending from Iran to Egypt -- the largest empire of its time -- collapsed after more than two centuries of dominance at the fall of its capital, Nineveh, in 612 B.C.E. Despite a plethora of cuneiform textual documentation and archaeological excavations and field surveys, archaeologists and historians have been unable to explain the abruptness and finality of the historic empire's collapse.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have cultivated lifelike chemical reactions while pioneering a new strategy for studying the origin of life.

UH Researcher and team developed a model to project lake levels in world's largest tropical lake

An international team of scientists working with Heliconius butterflies at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama was faced with a mystery: how do pairs of unrelated butterflies from Peru to Costa Rica evolve nearly the same wing-color patterns over and over again? The answer, published in Current Biology, forever changes the way evolution is understood.

While reports of species going extinct are sadly becoming common, an international team of scientists has identified a new species of bird living on the Southern coast of China, that diverged from their Northern relatives around half a million years ago.

A collaborative research group has succeeded in identifying an important transcription factor, GCAM1, which allows liverwort plants to asexually reproduce through creating clonal progenies (vegetative reproduction). Furthermore, this transcription factor was revealed to have the same origin as those which regulate secondary bud formation in angiosperms. It is hoped that these discoveries will lead to the development of technologies to increase the cultivation rate of a variety of plants in agriculture and horticulture.

Researchers have discovered the genetic mechanism that explains how birds sing different songs depending on their species.