Mainstream science has done its best to debunk the notion, but a belief in a world-changing series of prehistoric impacts continues to gain momentum.
In 2007, a group of researchers, led by a nuclear physicist named Richard Firestone, announced an astonishing discovery. They had uncovered evidence, they said, that 12,900 years ago, a comet — or possibly a whole fleet of comets — struck Earth and changed the course of history. For the preceding two and a half million years, through the Pleistocene Epoch, the planet's climate fluctuated between frozen stretches, called glacials, and warm interglacials. At that time, Earth was warming again, and the ice sheets that covered much of North America, Europe and Asia were in retreat. Mammoths, steppe bison, wild horses and other enormous mammals still wandered the Americas, pursued by bands of humans wielding spears with fluted stone blades. Suddenly, somewhere over the Upper Midwest — an explosion.

Presenting their claim in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top scientific journal, the researchers took the sober tone characteristic of such publications. But in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, a book published around the same time, two of the researchers described the scene more vividly. The impact caused the ground to shake and the sky to glow, they wrote. A hail of tiny molten particles sank into flesh and set forests ablaze. Soot blotted out the sun. Earth's magnetic field wavered, and living things were bombarded by cosmic rays, confounding the navigational senses of turtles and porpoises, which beached themselves en masse. Addled birds plummeted from the sky.

Most disastrous of all, the impact shattered the ice dam holding back Lake Agassiz, a vast expanse of glacial meltwater that stretched across Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The lake cascaded into the Atlantic Ocean, where the freshwater pooled over the denser seawater, disrupting the convection current carrying warm water north from the tropics. The Northern Hemisphere plunged back into full-glacial cold.

For decades, scientists had puzzled over the cause of this rapid climatic reversal, which they marked by, among other things, the reappearance in southerly fossil deposits of tundra plants. These included the wildflower Dryas integrifolia, which gives the 1,200-year time span its name: the Younger Dryas. Here was an explanation: The impact caused the sudden cooling, the Firestone team argued, and contributed to the demise of the mammoths, steppe bison and other large Pleistocene mammals, along with the people who pursued them.

Last year, paleontologists discovered the fossil of a 39-million-year-old extinct whale in Peru that appeared to defy the limits of vertebrate size.

The team behind the lucky find estimated Perucetus colossus' body mass to be somewhere between 85 and 340 tonnes. But at 17 to 20 meters in length (around 56 to 65 feet), this would have made the animal impossibly dense, argue paleontologists Ryosuke Motani and Nicholas Pyenson, who were not involved in the initial discovery.

"It would have been a job for the whale to stay at the surface, or even to leave the sea bottom - it would have required continuous swimming against gravity to do anything in the water," says Motani from the University of California Davis.

Nematodes found in the highly radioactive zone showed no signs of DNA damage

A team of American researchers has found that the DNA of a common worm species appears to be immune to damage from chronic radiation in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The area has been off-limits to humans since the 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown.

New York University (NYU) biology Professor Matthew Rockman and postdoctoral associate Sophia Tintori visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) in 2019 and gathered samples of a nematode worm species called Oscheius tipulae.

"These worms live everywhere, and they live quickly, so they go through dozens of generations of evolution while a typical vertebrate is still putting on its shoes," Rockman said in the press release announcing the results of the study this week.

It would be a game-changer if all members of a basketball team could see out of each other's eyes in addition to their own. A research duo at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute has found evidence that this kind of collective sensing occurs in close-knit groups of African weakly electric fish, also known as elephantnose fish. This instantaneous sharing of sensory intelligence could help the fish locate food, friends and foes.

"In engineering it is common that groups of emitters and receivers work together to improve sensing, for example in sonar and radar. We showed that something similar may be happening in groups of fish that sense their environment using electrical pulses. These fish seem to 'see' much better in small groups," said Nathaniel Sawtell, PhD, a principal investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute and a professor of neuroscience at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

A number of countries have been jostling to return humans to the Moon, with Moscow and Beijing teaming up in 2022 to sign a memorandum of understanding on joint exploration of the celestial body. The sides also pledged to work together to build a base there by the 2030s.

Russia and China are mulling jointly building a lunar nuclear power plant, Yuri Borisov, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, said on Tuesday.

"Today we are seriously considering a project ... somewhere at the turn of 2033-2035 ... to deliver and install a power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues," Borisov said during a lecture at the World Youth Festival.

Astrophilosophy. Exotheology. Whitehead.

Andrew Davis is the program director for the Center for Process Studies. A philosopher and theologian, his latest work is on the metaphysics of exo-life. Today on MindMatters we discuss his work on science, religion, and what the impact of the discovery of ET life would mean for philosophy, and a general philosophical framework that would make sense of it.

We also discuss the opening up of public and academic interest in the topic of UFOs and non-human intelligences, David Ray Griffin's work and parapsychology, humans as an exemplification of what the universe does, the morphological and ontological templates that life may take elsewhere, the ontology of possibilities, shared commonalities that might allow for communication with ET forms of life, the mind of God, and more.


Running Time: 01:18:49

Download: MP3 — 108 MB

It's been over 153 years since Darwin's "warm little pond" letter to Joseph Hooker, his tentative hope to close the final gap in his naturalistic origins story. Despite numerous well-funded approaches by leading teams around the world, propped up by media hype, none have shown real progress. After coacervates, spark-discharge tubes, proteinoid microspheres, the RNA world, hydrothermal vents, astrobiology programs, and the rest of the circus, research into the origin of life by unguided natural processes seems further behind than it did in Darwin's day. The time has come for a confession, a reassessment, an overhaul, a paradigm shift, humility, and a collective restart.

Where is this stated? Not just in the ID literature, nor in a lecture by James Tour — although of course they both do say it. But in Nature. Are you listening, "Professor Dave"?

Yes, Nature, that magazine started by Norman Lockyer in 1869 to promote Darwin's naturalistic views, has had to face judgment day. Researchers have learned a lot of facts about molecules, but "Findings can be true but irrelevant," the authors warn.

Electric vehicles may release more pollution than petrol-powered vehicles, according to a report that has recently resurfaced.

The study, which was published in 2022 but has begun circulating again after being cited in a WSJ op-ed, found that brakes and tires release 1,850 times more particulate matter compared to modern exhaust pipes which have filters that reduce emissions.

It found that EVs are 30 percent heavier on average than petrol-powered vehicles, which causes the brakes and tire treads to wear out faster than standard cars and releases tiny, often toxic particles into the atmosphere.

Hesham Rakha, a professor at Virginia Tech told Dailymail.com that the study is only 'partially correct' because even though EVs are heavier, their tires will emit more microplastics into the air, but this could also be true for sedans versus SUVs.

Rakha said it is very challenging to determine the difference between the amount of microplastics emitted from EV tire treads and petrol-powered vehicles because you have to separate the microplastics that are already in the air from other sources with what's coming off the tires.

Rakha and his team at Virginia Tech are in the process of conducting field tests to determine how much microplastics are emitting from EV and petrol cars by using traffic simulators that will mimic an urban setting.

Scientists have discovered in Antarctic ice a strange link between past levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and centuries-long global pandemics, reminding us of just how easily humans - or the lack thereof - can shape planet Earth.

Bubbles of air encased in ancient ice are like teensy time capsules, trapping tiny samples of gases from atmospheres thousands or even millions of years ago.

The best records for the past 2,000 years come from just two ice cores that have greatly influenced modeling studies of climate and carbon cycles in the Common Era: the Law Dome, an Antarctic ice 'hill'; and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice cores.

Result reveals for the first time how some cephalopods determine sex.

Researchers have found the oldest known sex chromosome in animals — the octopus Z chromosome — which first evolved in an ancient ancestor of octopuses around 380 million years ago. The findings¹ answer a long-standing question about how sexual development is directed in the group of sea creatures that includes octopuses and squid.

"We stumbled upon probably the oldest animal sex chromosome known to date," says evolutionary geneticist Andrew Kern at the University of Oregon in Eugene. "Sex determination in cephalopods, such as squids and octopi, was a mystery — we found the first evidence that genes are in any way involved."