ADVENTURES IN VOLCANOLAND: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves, by Tamsin Mather

I live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales.

Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “Well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the Earth — so nothing to worry about there.”

Over the past 500 million years, vertebrates have evolved into a staggering variety of forms, from hummingbirds to elephants, bullfrogs to hammerhead sharks, not to mention our peculiar species of upright ape. But underneath all that diversity, vertebrates share some key features.

We all have a backbone made of vertebrae, for example, along with a skull that houses a brain. We share these hallmarks because we all descended from a common ancestor: a fish that swam in the Cambrian seas.

Continue reading “Was This Sea Creature Our Ancestor? Scientists Turn a Famous Fossil on Its Head.” →

Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not easy to find on the forest floor.

“It doesn’t catch the eye,” said Dr. Pellicer, who works at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain. “You would probably step on it and not even realize it.”

Continue reading “Scientists Find the Largest Known Genome Inside a Small Plant” →

It takes a lot of energy to grow a baby — just ask anyone who has been pregnant. But scientists are only now discovering just how much.

In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, Australian researchers estimated that a human pregnancy demands almost 50,000 dietary calories over the course of nine months. That’s the equivalent of about 50 pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, and significantly more than the researchers expected.

Continue reading “Scientists Calculated the Energy Needed to Carry a Baby. Shocker: It’s a Lot.” →