Bacteria and viruses are travelling the world on highways in the sky

Jag_cz/Shuttestock Microbes are the truly dominant group of lifeforms. These invisible pieces of biogenic matter have been running Earth’s affairs for billions of years. Plants and animals popped up as the by-products of microbial mergers relatively recently in our planet’s history. Understanding microbes is not easy. It took us someContinue Reading

Are the Earth's magnetic poles about to swap places? Strange anomaly gives reassuring clue

St Helena, where Earth's magnetic field behaves strangely. Umomos/Shutterstock Deep inside the Earth, liquid iron is flowing and generating the Earth’s magnetic field, which protects our atmosphere and satellites against harmful radiation from the Sun. This field changes over time, and also behaves differently in different parts of the world.Continue Reading

Coronavirus: how the pandemic has exposed AI’s limitations

AI has its limitations in a crisis. Shutterstock It should have been artificial intelligence’s moment in the sun. With billions of dollars of investment in recent years, AI has been touted as a solution to every conceivable problem. So when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, a multitude of AI models wereContinue Reading

New dinosaur discovery in Switzerland fills a gap in evolutionary history of sauropods

_Schleitheimia_ (left) and _Plateosaurus_ (above right). University of Utrecht, Author provided Dinosaurs were the dominant group of animals on Earth for over 150 million years. Long-necked, plant-eating sauropods such as Brontosaurus, Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus are probably among the most famous dinosaurs, in part thanks to their huge size and strangeContinue Reading