As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels rising, weather can become more extreme. This means more intense major storms, more rain followed by longer and drier droughts—a challenge for growi…

Historically, Earth's climate has regularly shifted between temperatures like those we see today and temperatures cold enough to cover much of North America and Europe with ice. The difference between average global temperatures today and …

Now, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution. Changes that have historically taken thousands of years are now happening over the course of decades.The rapid …

For thousands of years now, emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere have been balanced out by greenhouse gases that are naturally absorbed. As a result, greenhouse gas concentrations and temperatures have been fairly stable, which …

The short timescale of this recent warming is singular as well. Volcanic eruptions, for example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface. But their effect lasts just a few years. Events like El Niño also work on fairly sho…

Human activity isn't the only factor that affects Earth's climate. Volcanic eruptions and variations in solar radiation from sunspots, solar wind, and the Earth's position relative to the sun also play a role. So do large-scale weather pat…

Levels of greenhouse gases have gone up and down over the Earth's history, but they had been fairly constant for the past few thousand years. Global average temperatures had also stayed fairly constant over that time—until the past 150 yea…

Scientists have known about the greenhouse effect since 1824, when Joseph Fourier calculated that the Earth would be much colder if it had no atmosphere. This natural greenhouse effect is what keeps the Earth's climate livable. Without it,…

The "greenhouse effect" is the warming that happens when certain gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat. These gases let in light but keep heat from escaping, like the glass walls of a greenhouse, hence the name.Sunlight shines onto the Ear…

Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts. All of those changes are emerging as humans continue to…

We often call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place. While many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, s…

Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, cloud forests are dying, and wildlife is scrambling to keep pace. It has become clear that humans have caused most of the past century's warming by releasing heat-trapping gases as we power our …

In our own solar system, robots such as the Mars rover Perseverance are collecting samples in search of fossils or molecules that might suggest that microbial life flourished on the Red Planet billions of years ago, when it was warmer and …

Sensitive telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, can pick up tiny variations in the light coming off of faraway exoplanets, allowing researchers to detect oxygen, sulfur or other gases that might indicate that microbes are at wor…

The effort continues today with the Allen Telescope Array, a 42-antenna array that can tune in to microwave frequencies from across the Milky Way. The SETI Institute is also launching an effort to detect laser pulses that far-flung intelli…

The first serious radio-based search for extraterrestrial life occurred in 1960. It was masterminded by astronomer Frank Drake, who used two radio telescopes to search for signals from planets potentially orbiting stars 10 and 12 light-yea…

The first efforts in the search for extraterrestrial life started well before humans had the capacity to get off our own planet. According to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, the invention of radio opened the …

Are aliens real?It's a good question. There currently isn't any evidence for life on other planets, but the universe is a big place, and it seems unlikely that out of the trillions of planets presumed to exist in our 13.8 billion-year-old …

“It could be that those children who showed greater arousal were not cognisant of any form of selfishness, and/or notions of co-operative co-existence or obligations as described,” says Nagel, who has written several books related to neuro…

However, Mike Nagel, associate professor of human development and learning at the University of the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland, says many other studies suggest the age at which children fully understand altruism, selfishness and concept…

Study co-author Margarita Svetlova says this illustrates children’s growing understanding of norms of co-operative co-existence and the obligations they entail.“Humans are highly social creatures, which can mean cooperative in some context…

To test what young children understand about the interactions involved in completing a joint task, the researchers paired 72 three-year-olds with partners (for a total of 144 children) to complete a task in which both pulled on a rope to m…

The results point to young children having a stronger understanding of joint commitments than has previously been understood, which has important implications for parents and preschool teachers, Kachel argues. “Those working with children …

Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (in Germany) and Duke University suggest that children as young as three have a sense of joint commitment and express resentment when others opt out of shared, agree…

How innate is the co-operative spirit? Does it develop naturally alongside a child’s sense of self and interactions with others, or is it cultivated through socialisation and education?Complex though this question is, part of the puzzle mi…

With most men the knowledge that they must ultimately die does not weaken the pleasure in being at present alive. To the poet the world appears still more beautiful as he gazes at flowers that are doomed to wither, at springs that come to …

Linguists now generally agree that "grammar is based on usage," and that a grammarian has no more right to say how people ought to talk than a chemist has to say how molecules ought to act upon each other. The laws of grammar are like the …

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death…

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are cl…

The researchers were not able to identify any complete DNA from the mermaid, but radiocarbon dating of the scales indicated they could date back as far as the early 1800s.The new analysis suggests that the mermaid was most likely created t…