“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species. Our caffeine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
“Planet Earth Report” provides summaries of headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species. Our caffine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
“The really surprising conclusion here is that the most intense selection pressures in the recent history of these wasps has not been dealing with climate, catching food or parasites but getting better at dealing with each other,” said Michael Sheehan, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University about a wasp species that has evolved the unique ability to recognize individual faces among their peers—signaling an evolution in how they have learned to work together. “That’s pretty profound.”
Phosphorus, present in our DNA and cell membranes, is one of the six main elements that make up the human body and an essential element for life as we know it. Unlike hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and calcium, phosphorus is rare. It is even more scarce in the rest of the Solar System. The source of its arrival on early Earth has long been up to debate.
Are we entering a new evolutionary epoch? “A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need,” say researchers at the University of Vermont who have repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide “xenobots”, a 21st-century echo of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut.
“Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species –including “The Year UFO’s Became Legit” to “Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of the Decade” to “Antarctica’s Ghostly Invader.”
