All Stories by Sid Perkins
- Anthropology
Isotopes reveal sources of ancient timbers
Isotopic analysis of architectural timbers from ancient dwellings in the U.S. Southwest has shown from which distant forests the massive logs came.
- Earth
Dust, the Thermostat
Analyses suggest that dust has profound, complex, and far-reaching effects on the planet's climate.
- Earth
Quantum physics explains core anomaly
Scientists have used the principles of quantum physics to answer the long-standing puzzle of why seismic waves travel at different speeds in different directions across Earth's inner core.
- Earth
Himalayas may be due for big temblors
Scientists say that a narrow region that rims the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau could be the spawning grounds for large earthquakes that could threaten millions in southern Asia in the decades to come.
- Earth
Scientists spy sixth undersea-vent ecology
A new group of hydrothermal vents found in the Indian Ocean are populated by communities of organisms that differ significantly from other such groups of vent systems.
- Earth
Antarctic sediments muddy climate debate
Ocean-floor sediments drilled from Antarctic regions recently covered by ice shelves suggest that those shelves were much younger than scientists had previously thought.
- Paleontology
New fossil sheds light on dinosaurs’ diet
Vestiges of soft tissue preserved in a 70-million-year-old Mongolian fossil suggest that some dinosaurs could have strained small bits of food from the water and mud of streams and ponds, just like some modern aquatic birds do.
- Paleontology
Completing a titan by getting a head
When paleontologists unearthed the skeleton of a 70-million-year-old titanosaur in Madagascar in the late 1990s, they also recovered something that had been missing from previous such finds: a skull that matched the body.
- Paleontology
That’s no footprint, it’s got no toes
The impressions near Isona, Spain, long thought to be fossilized dinosaur footprints may actually record the feeding behavior of stingrays.
- Earth
L.A. moves, but not in the way expected
Researchers monitoring small ground motions along faults in Southern California ended up detecting an altogether different phenomenon: the rise and fall of the ground as local governments pump billions of gallons of water into and out of the region's aquifers.
- Earth
Sahara to get hotter, drier, smaller
By the end of this century, the world's hottest desert will be even hotter, drier, and smaller than it is now, according to an international team of climate modelers.
- Earth
Resetting a clock from Earth’s rocks
Better measurements of one of the rates of radioactive decay used to date extremely old rocks open up the possibility that Earth may have had a crust as many as 200 million years earlier than previously thought.
