All Stories by Sid Perkins
- Earth
Asian sediments betray age of nearby desert
Grains of silt embedded in thick sediments of northwestern China may settle a debate about the age of the Taklimakan Desert.
- Paleontology
Sticky Subjects: Insights into ancient spider diet, kinship
Remnants of a spider web embedded in ancient amber suggest that some spiders' diets haven't changed much in millions of years.
- Paleontology
Ancient webbed masters
Newly unearthed fossils of a 110-million-year-old bolster the notion that all modern birds evolved from aquatic ancestors.
- Earth
Cleaning up pollution, whey down deep
Lab and field tests hint that dairy whey, a lactose-rich by-product of the dairy industry, could be used to clean up underground water supplies tainted by the solvent trichloroethylene.
- Earth
Subglacial lakes may not be isolated ecosystems
Large volumes of water may occasionally flow between the lakes that lie deep beneath Antarctica's kilometers-thick ice sheet.
- Paleontology
Amphibious Ancestors
Newly discovered fossils from Greenland, as well as a reexamination of those of previously known creatures, are providing researchers with additional insights into ancient vertebrates' move from water to land.
- Earth
Toxic Tides: Another reason to worry about hurricanes
The hurricanes that struck Florida in the summer of 2004 also may have triggered an intense, widespread, and long-lasting red tide that afflicted the state's west-central coast throughout 2005.
- Earth
Deep-sea action
Scientists using remotely operated vehicles have reported the first close-up observations of a deep undersea volcano during its eruption.
- Earth
Oil Booms: Whales don’t avoid noise of seismic exploration
Field tests in the Gulf of Mexico suggest that sperm whales there don't swim away from boats conducting seismic surveys of the seafloor, but the noise generated by such activity may be subtly affecting the whales' feeding behavior. With video.
- Paleontology
Remains may be an evolutionary relic
Fossils recently found in southwestern China may be of a lineage that originated long before the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity, when most major groups of animals first appeared in the fossil record.
- Earth
Three Gorges Dam is affecting ocean life
Oceanographic surveys suggest that China's Three Gorges Dam is already influencing biological productivity in the East China Sea, even though the structure is still under construction.
- Earth
Blast Survivors: Fragments of asteroid found in ancient crater
Pieces of an asteroid that blasted a 70-kilometer-wide crater in southern Africa millions of years ago may have been found intact inside the thick layer of once-molten rock that the impact left behind.
