Geologists and biologists are about to pierce one of the world’s youngest islands: tiny Surtsey, which was formed by a series of volcanic eruptions off Iceland’s southwestern coast between 1963 and 1967. Next month, the team plans to drill two holes into Surtsey’s heart, to explore how warm volcanic rock, cold seawater, and subterranean microbes interact.

If I had not looked past the headline of the press report on a new study, I would have just filed it under “It’s worse than we thought”. While technically correct, the story was misleading.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have slammed tech entrepreneur Elon Musk for apparently trying to scaremonger over AI.

Earlier this week, the South African-born billionaire said that authorities need to regulate AI now before it is too late.

We may be capable of finding microbes in space—but if we did, could we tell what they were and that they were alive?

Tech billionaire Elon Musk called on NASA to build a moon base during a space technology conference Wednesday.

Demis Hassabis knows a thing or two about artificial intelligence: he founded the London-based AI startup DeepMind, which was purchased by Google for $650 million back in 2014. Since then, his company has wiped the floor with humans at the complex game of Go and begun making steps towards crafting more general AIs.

The two gases that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies as being the instruments by which humanity is destroying of the biosphere are the two gases that give the biosphere life—carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water vapor (H₂O), i.e., humidity.

The ‘Real Proxy’ Temperature Record Hints Near-Global Cooling Has Begun

As a new scientific paper (Turney et al., 2017) indicates, the Southern Ocean encompasses 14{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Earth’s surface. And according to regional temperature measurements that have apparently not been subjected to warming “corrections” by data adjusters, the Southern Ocean has been cooling in recent decades.

A commentary appearing here at the Swiss Baseler Zeitung (BAZ) slams a recently published British paper on moss growth in Antarctica that gave the impression the south polar continent was greening up due to climate change.

The BAZ writes that the paper is an example of “how today science is manipulated and used for political purposes“.

A bag of moon dust from NASA’s Apollo 11 mission – which a woman bought for $995 in 2015 — sold for $1.8 million at a Sotheby’s auction this week following an intense court battle.

Managing lifestyle factors such as hearing loss, smoking, hypertension, and depression could prevent one-third of the world’s dementia cases, according to a report by the first Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention and Care.

Comedian Bill Nye “The Science Guy” said Wednesday that the climate change movement can only move forward once the older generation begins to die off.

The EPA has this graph on their website, showing that the worst US heat waves (by far) occurred during the 1930s.

Climate Change Indicators: High and Low Temperatures | Climate Change Indicators in the United States | US EPA

Researchers have found that the formation and breakup of supercontinents over hundreds of millions of years control volcanic carbon emissions.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is gaining near record amounts of ice this year. Very little melting has occurred this summer, which is about to start winding down.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

Dogs’ ability to communicate and interact with humans is one the most astonishing differences between them and their wild cousins, wolves. A new study published today in the journal Science Advances identifies genetic changes that are linked to dogs’ human-directed social behaviors and suggests there is a common underlying genetic basis for hypersocial behavior in both dogs and humans.