On:

A recent large-scale survey of Antarctica’s ice sheets has revealed that the rate of ice melt from the (mostly) frozen southern continent has tripled over the last decade, releasing volumes of water into the ocean on par with the freshwater flow from Greenland. Increasing temperatures from the air above and the ocean below has accelerated the melting of the ice shelves in West Antarctica, and overall ice sheet growth in East Antarctica has slowed. Additionally, the loss of ice mass in the south means that sea level rise will be more pronounced in the north, spelling trouble for populations living in coastal areas, including those of the United States.
read more

On:

Cuba may be off the hook as a possible culprit behind a debilitating illness that struck US and Canadian diplomats stationed in Havana in 2016, as the same phenomenon is now happening to US embassy staff in China. Although the Cuban government was initially accused of being behind the attacks, this new outbreak, halfway around the globe, has raised suspicions that another source, perhaps China or Russia, might be behind the attacks.
read more

On:

A recent survey of the DNA of over 100,000 of the Earth’s animal species, including modern humans, has yielded a shocking result: 90 percent of all extant species arose at the same time, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, upending the assumption that most creatures would have reached their modern forms at different point throughout the planet’s history. The survey also found that genetic diversity between different species doesn’t increase over time–meaning modern humans haven’t diverged genetically over the course of our history from other species at all.
read more

On:

NASA has just announced two major breakthroughs in the search for life on Mars: the first is that the Mars Curiosity rover has detected the presence of organic molecules preserved within the bedrock of the Martian soil; the other is that Curiosity has also detected a wide variation in the amount of methane present in the Martian atmosphere that fluctuates with the planet’s seasons. Although NASA cautions that these phenomena could ultimately have non-biological origins, they add to the growing evidence that Mars, once home to a habitable environment, might very well have had lifeforms of its own–lifeforms that may still be living there today.
read more