Planet Science

Scientists are exploring how Ice Age grazing could stabilize Arctic soils and slow carbon release.

Scientists believe reviving woolly mammoths could do more than bring back an Ice Age icon—it might help fight climate change. The idea is that herds of mammoth-like animals roaming the Arctic would knock down trees, churn up soil, and compact snow, slowing the thaw of permafrost.

That frozen ground holds vast amounts of carbon, and if it melts, it could release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. While still highly experimental, researchers argue the effort could restore fragile ecosystems and buy the planet valuable time.

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Scotland’s ancient structures beneath the sea hint at journeys history never recorded.

Scotland’s drowned stone circles offer a unique window into Ice-Age human migration, revealing how early communities adapted to dramatic environmental changes. These underwater archaeological sites preserve traces of prehistoric settlements obscured by rising sea levels.

Analysis from institutions like the British Museum and National Museums Scotland shows these structures marked strategic locations and migration routes, illuminating the social and environmental dynamics of ancient Scotland during the Ice Age.

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Groundbreaking research suggests our cosmos may be nestled inside a black hole within a parent universe.

What if everything you know about reality is happening inside a massive black hole? It sounds like science fiction, but renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and his colleagues have proposed exactly that.

Their groundbreaking research suggests our entire universe could be the interior of a black hole within a much larger “parent universe.” This mind-bending theory is reshaping how scientists think about cosmic origins and our place in existence.

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Climate models show Earth’s future supercontinent may bring dramatic global extremes.

For as long as Earth has existed, its surface has been in motion. The continents we recognize today were once fused together into a single landmass called Pangaea, and geological forces are slowly steering them toward another reunion far in the future.

Scientists now use advanced climate and tectonic models to explore what that distant world might look like. Depending on how the continents merge, Earth could experience intense heat, prolonged ice ages, extreme seasonal swings, and radically altered ecosystems, reshaping the planet in ways that feel almost unrecognizable.

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A familiar planet turns out to be slightly stranger than the outlines we trusted for decades.

A planet as famous as Jupiter feels like it should be fully mapped by now. Its size is printed in textbooks, used in software, and treated as a fixed cosmic fact.

But Jupiter is not a solid surface with a clear edge. It is a spinning, windy ball of gas, and the “radius” depends on where you measure and what the atmosphere is doing.

Using newer data from NASA’s Juno mission, scientists have refined Jupiter’s shape at the 1-bar pressure level. The change is small, but it quietly forces a rethink of how we model what is happening inside the solar system’s giant.

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459 earthquakes deep in Earth’s mantle show quakes don’t just happen in the crust.

When most of us think about earthquakes, we picture cracks in the Earth’s crust. That’s where buildings shake and faults split open. The mantle, which sits below the crust, is much hotter and usually behaves more like thick taffy than brittle rock.

But scientists have now identified 459 earthquakes that didn’t start in the crust at all. They began deep in the mantle, below the boundary known as the Moho. That discovery is forcing researchers to rethink how stress builds and releases inside our planet.

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Astronomers say a distant world called HD 137010 b could sit on the edge of habitability despite its icy temperatures.

When people picture a potentially habitable planet, they imagine something warm and comfortably orbiting a star like our Sun. But researchers studying HD 137010 b are challenging that assumption in an intriguing way.

Located about 146 light-years from Earth, this exoplanet candidate appears to orbit a cooler, dimmer K-type star. It’s roughly Earth-sized and completes one orbit in about 355 days.

Although its estimated surface temperature is far colder than Earth’s, scientists say its position near the outer edge of the habitable zone means liquid water might still be possible under the right atmospheric conditions.

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He thought he’d found gold in the Australian bush. Instead, he was holding a relic from the birth of the solar system.

In 2015, David Hole was exploring Maryborough Regional Park in regional Victoria, Australia, carrying a metal detector through an area famous for historic gold discoveries. Prospectors have searched that land for more than a century, and large nuggets have been found there before.

When Hole uncovered a heavy reddish rock buried in yellow clay, he assumed he’d found something valuable. It looked dense, unusual, and promising.

For years, he tried to break it open. What he didn’t know was that the stubborn rock wasn’t hiding gold at all. It was a 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite.

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New calculations suggest the universe’s “end date” may be far sooner than scientists once estimated.

The universe isn’t ending tomorrow, but scientists are still arguing about its ultimate expiration date. For decades, the far-future story focused on black holes slowly evaporating over an almost unimaginable timescale.

Now a new line of research suggests the countdown might be shorter—not because the universe is in danger, but because more things may “evaporate” over time than we realized.

It’s still a number with dozens of zeros. But the shift changes how we picture the very last chapter of everything.

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A giant fossil shark in Arkansas is rewriting what we know about ancient oceans and life before dinosaurs.

When most people picture prehistoric seas, images of dinosaurs don’t immediately come to mind. But long before the age of dinosaurs, Earth’s oceans were ruled by other massive predators.

Recently, paleontologists uncovered fossil remains of an enormous ancient shark in what is now Arkansas. It lived around 300 million years ago, and its size and features are revealing new details about the ecosystems of deep time.

This wasn’t just a big fish; it was part of a world where sea levels, climates, and animal communities were very different from today’s oceans. The discovery gives scientists a rare snapshot of how life adapted in ancient waters long before familiar creatures emerged.

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