Deep Time

How an Earth science outsider finally put the Pangea puzzle together

8 minutes

A journey from the Himalayas to the edge of our cosmic horizon in space and time

7 minutes

The plodding photon, or how the speed of light looks sluggish on a galactic scale

45 minutes

The missing fossils matter as much as the ones we have found

Adrian Currie & Derek Turner

Welcome to Terra Sapiens

Humans have been altering Earth for millennia, but only now are we wise to what we’re doing. How will we use that wisdom?

David Grinspoon

What say you, dinosaur?

Did Neanderthals speak? Did dinosaurs roar? And when did birds begin to sing? The soundscape of deep time is coming back

Alex Riley

Laws or comets?

Does history unfold randomly and by chance, or are there underlying patterns and deep connections between its parts?

Walter Alvarez

How the face of a distant star reveals our place in the cosmos

Rachael Roettenbacher

How multicoloured side-blotched lizards put game theory into evolutionary action

3 minutes

It might be our placid nocturnal companion, but the Moon has a turbulent past

3 minutes

A science without time

From past to present, into the future: the flow of time is central to human experience. Why isn’t it central to physics?

Gene Tracy

Where do minds belong?

Intelligence could have been moving back and forth between biological beings and machine receptacles for aeons

Caleb Scharf

A tyrannosaur of one’s own

Dinosaur collecting isn't just for museums any more – film stars and sheikhs do it too. What drives a man to covet big bones?

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Our existence is both cosmically trivial and linked to everything that ever was

7 minutes

Light dawns

Light travels at around 300,000 km per second. Why not faster? Why not slower? A new theory inches us closer to an answer

Sidney Perkowitz

Origins

Paleogenetics is helping to solve the great mystery of prehistory: how did humans spread out over the earth?

Jacob Mikanowski

Last hominin standing

Was human evolution inevitable, or do we owe our existence to a once-in-a-universe stroke of luck?

Dan Falk

In the beginning

Cosmology has been on a long, hot streak, racking up one imaginative and scientific triumph after another. Is it over?

Ross Andersen

Written in stone

In the race for geology’s highest accolade – a ‘golden spike’ – do advocates of the Anthropocene sell their ideas short?

James Westcott

Save the Universe

It is only a matter of time before our Universe goes black, cold and dies. Must this be the end of the road for life?

Michael Hanlon

How scientists at the ALMA telescope in Chile decode the secrets of the cosmos

4 minutes

Mineral fodder

We may think we are the first organisms to remake the planet, but life has been transforming the earth for aeons

Robert Hazen

Acid trap

Earth’s oceans are beginning to warm and turn acidic, endangering plankton and the entire marine food chain

Peter Brannen