Arya Udry, Assistant Professor of Igneous Petrology, Planetary Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas – 16 June 2020 Despite the pandemic, NASA is on track to launch its Mars rover, Perseverance, this July from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its central mission will be to search for evidence of previous life on Mars. An exciting component of […]

April 2020 The human evolutionary path is complicated. It’s almost impossible to say exactly when we modern humans became “us”. This quandary is best articulated by the famous naturalist Charles Darwin in his book The Descent of Man: In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, […]

Christian Schroeder, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science and Planetary Exploration, University of Stirling – March 2020 How the Earth got its moon is a long debated question. The giant impact theory – which states that the Moon formed from the a collision between the early Earth and a rocky body called Theia – has become […]

The end-Permian mass extinction is considered to be the most devastating biotic event in the history of life on Earth – it caused dramatic losses in global biodiversity, both in water and on land. About 90% of marine and 70% of terrestrial (land) species went extinct. This event may have been responsible for opening up […]

With colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, we have found a new way to estimate the intelligence of our ancestors. Roger S. Seymour, Professor Emeritus of Physiology, University of Adelaide How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied this question for decades by looking at tools found in archaeological […]

Mauro Vallati, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Huddersfield Will artificial intelligence one day surpass human thinking? The rapid progress of AI, coupled with our standard fear of machines, has raised concerns that its abilities will one day start to grow uncontrollably, eventually leading it to take over the world and wipe out humanity […]

Wonderkrater is the first site in Africa where a Younger Dryas platinum spike has been detected, supplementing evidence from southern Chile, in addition to platinum spikes at 28 sites in the northern hemisphere. Francis Thackeray, Honorary Research Associate, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand Just less than 13,000 years ago, the climate cooled for […]

Wits University – September 2019 Giant, predatory croc-like animals that lived during the Triassic period in southern Africa preyed on early dinosaurs and mammal relatives 210 million years ago. These predators, known as “rauisuchians” preyed on early herbivore dinosaurs and their mammal relatives living at the time, according to Wits Masters student Rick Tolchard. “These […]

Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor in astronomy, Monash University Dark matter, by its very nature, is unseen. We cannot observe it with telescopes, and nor have particle physicists had any luck detecting it via experiments. So why do I and thousands of my colleagues believe most of the universe’s mass is made up of […]

by Will Dunham, WASHINGTON, REUTERS – 28 August 2019 Scientists on Wednesday announced the landmark discovery in Ethiopia of a nearly complete skull of an early human ancestor that lived 3.8 million years ago, a species boasting an intriguing mixture of apelike and humanlike characteristics. The fossil dubbed MRD, which provides insight into a pivotal […]