Planet Earth, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 31, 2004

Fool's Gold Preserves Skin and Hair Fossils

Dentists use gold inlays to save rotting teeth. Nature uses the fool's variety to save rotting flesh. Commonly known as fool's gold, pyrite deposits have preserved the soft tissues, such as hair and skin, of animals that died 500 million years ago in the Chengjiang sediments of China. Unlike most...

Oct 31, 2004

El Nino Now Blamed for Practically Everything

El Nino, that warm-water weather spawner off the coast of South America, has long been been blamed for severe weather in many parts of the Americas. Today scientists said it affects rain patterns throughout the world. Mapping yearly changes in rainfall around the globe, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)...

Oct 31, 2004

New Stamps Highlight Cool Clouds

See all the stamps below The United States Postal Service (USPS) recently issued 15 new stamps with clouds as the theme, all in the interest of science education. The stamps were created to promote National Stamp Collecting month in October, but beyond philatelic interests, officials figured they would be a...

Oct 31, 2004

'Green' Car Sets Speed Record

The idea that an environmentally friendly automobile has to be small and timid may change as a space-age prototype reaches 196 mph (315 km/h), setting a new record for this type of vehicle. The sleek LeMans prototype-style car ran on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and was lubricated with sunflower oil....

Oct 31, 2004

Explorer Calls Route to South Pole 'Terrible' Idea

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) _ New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest and the first to drive a vehicle to the South Pole, described a U.S. highway to the pole as terrible.'' Work on the 1,020-mile ice highway'' from the Antarctic coast south of New...

Sep 30, 2004

Gulf's 'Dead Zone' Less of a Mystery

HOUSTON (AP) -- The oxygen-depleted dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, long a subject of scrutiny by scientists, is only now becoming less of a mystery. Known by fishermen south of the Mississippi River for more than a century, the area gained scientific recognition in the 1970s but became...

Sep 30, 2004

Group Warns on Consumption of Earth's Resources

GENEVA (AP) -- Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitats for farmland and over-exploitation of the oceans are destroying Earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group WWF warned in a new report Thursday. The biggest consumers of nonrenewable natural resources are the...

Sep 30, 2004

Oct. 31: A Bad Day for Freezing Drizzle and Flying

Today is an anniversary of sorts for the Denver International Airport. It's not a celebration of the installation's long-delayed opening back in 1995, however, but a studied observance of a recurring bad weather system and the damage it has wrought over the last two years. Heavy freezing drizzle on Oct....

Dec 31, 2003

The New Nature: Cities as Designer Ecosystems

PHOENIX, AZ - Urban and suburban growth has exploded in the Valley of the Sun over the past five decades, creating a playground for the rich, an attractive oasis for families, and a brand new ecosystem for plants, animals and the humans who interact with it all. If ecosystem and...

Dec 31, 2003

Ancient Sunken Islands Found Off California

Sandy beaches are plentiful along the California coast, but not many are found below the ocean. Scientists just added three to the list. What were once volcanic islands off the coast of California now sit at the bottom of sea. With the help of a robotic submersible, a team of...

Dec 31, 2003

Billion Dollar Disasters: A Chronology of U.S. Events

How good is your weather memory? In what year did the so-called Storm of the Century sweep the country and pound the entire Eastern Seaboard? How many tornadoes struck the Midwest in a record-setting one-week period of May, 2003? And do you remember the thousands of deaths caused by heat...

Nov 30, 2005

Rare December Hurricane Caps Record Year

Hurricane season may be officially over, but nature is paying no attention. Overnight, a tropical storm named Epsilon turned into a hurricane out in the Atlantic. Update: Still a Hurricane 2 p.m. ET Monday, Epsilon is the 14th Atlantic-basin hurricane of the record-setting 2005 season, which started June 1 and...

Nov 30, 2005

World's Tallest Building Possibly Causing Earthquakes

TAIPEI, Taiwan - The weight of the world's tallest skyscraper -- specially built to withstand Taiwan's frequent earthquakes -- could be causing a rise in the number of tremors beneath it, a professor from the island wrote in a scientific journal. Lin Cheng-horng, an earthquake specialist at the National Taiwan...

Nov 30, 2005

When Humans and Chimps Split

A new study of genes in humans and chimpanzees pins down with greater accuracy when the two species split from one. The evolutionary divergence occurred between 5 million and 7 million years ago, an estimate that improves on the previous range of 3 million to 13 million years in the...

Nov 30, 2005

Study: Guppies Have Menopause, Too

For female guppies, there's more to life than making babies. A new study finds that guppies experience menopause just like humans and other animals. The study is the first demonstration of menopause in fish and raises the question of why some female animals live beyond their fertile years at all....