How Humans Became Masters of the Earth

 Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts thinks that fluctuations in the environment in which our ancestors lived were responsible. Our ancestors responded by becoming more versatile through a suite of changes that included an ability to modify our environment. Potts' theory is known as the variability selection hypothesis.

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Ghost Ship Sinks Off Alaska Coast

 Japanese fishing vessel drifted unmanned at sea since the 2011 dreaded Fukushima earthquake and tsunami sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska after the U.S. Coast Guard fired at the so-called ghost ship on Thursday ,April 5,2012. It was considered a navigational hazard, as it was located in busy shipping lanes near the Dixon Entrance in Southeast Alaska. It isn't sure why the vessel is being called a "ghost ship," perhaps the term was coined  due to the fact it has been drifted at sea unmanned and without power.

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Carbon Dioxide and the End of Last Ice Age

The circumstances that ended the last ice age, somewhere between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, have been unclear. In particular, scientists aren't sure how carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, played into the giant melt.

New research indicates it did in fact help drive this prehistoric episode of global warming, even though it did not kick it off. A change in the Earth's orbit likely started of the melt, setting off a chain of events, according to the researchers.

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Dwarf Galaxies Provide New Insights On Dark Matter

There's more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this "dark matter" really is. Many scientists think it's likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it.

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Earthly Mounds Shaped Like Animals

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Some Corals Like It Hot

 A team of international scientists working in the central Pacific has discovered that coral which has survived heat stress in the past is more likely to survive it in the future.The study, published March 30 in the journal PLoS ONE, paves the way towards an important road map on the impacts of ocean warming, and will help scientists identify the habitats and locations where coral reefs are more likely to adapt to climate change.

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