Category: Related Articles
LC11C. Stay Current—Climate and Human Evolution
Staying current for Chapter 11 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-06-18. When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere. By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times. Excerpt: Our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — are confined to a belt of Central African forests. But humans have spread across every continent, even remote islands. Our […]
LC10C. Stay Current—The Ice Ages
Staying current for Chapter 10 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-02-25. Why ice ages lost their cool. By Science Advisor. Excerpt: About 2.7 million years ago, Earth’s climate had a personality crisis. Before then, ice ages waxed and waned in long, predictable cycles tied to Earth’s orbit, tens of thousands of years at a […]
LC9C. Stay Current—What Happened to the Dinosaurs?
Staying current for Chapter 9 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-02-04. Space dust reveals rapid evolution after dino-killing asteroid. By Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science. Excerpt: About 66 million years ago, a 14-kilometer-wide asteroid careened into southeastern Mexico, eviscerating forests, nonavian dinosaurs, and nearly everything in between. The impact and the apocalyptic winter that followed […]
LC8C. Stay Current—Highs and Lows Over the Past 750 Million Years
Staying current for Chapter 8 See non-chronological resources (bottom of this page) { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-07-15. Molecular fossils offer first glimpse of how life survived Snowball Earth. By Elise Cutts, Science. Excerpt: Several times in Earth’s history, the planet froze over. Ice blanketed the world from pole to equator, and temperatures plummeted as […]
LC7C. Stay Current—Earth’s Shifting Crust
Stay current for chapter 7 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-01-16. Survival on the move. By Science Advisor. Excerpt: Scientists suspected that the arrangement of continents and islands—a concept called paleogeography—might have played an important role in past mass extinctions. To find out, a team combined analyses of more than 325,000 fossil invertebrates with […]
LC6C. Stay Current—How and When Did Complex Life Begin?
Stay current for chapter 6 { Life and Climate Contents } Understanding Evolution – a one-stop source for information on evolution. 2019-11-14. Alien genes from bacteria helped plants conquer the land. By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. 2024-11-13. Best evidence yet that “Snowball Earth” saw ice cover the entire globe. By Evrim Yazgin, COSMOS. Excerpt: More than 700 million […]
LC5C. Stay Current—The Origin of Our Oxygen-Rich Atmosphere
Stay current for chapter 5 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-04-08. Bacteria ‘breathed’ oxygen nearly a billion years before it became abundant. By ScinecAdviser. Excerpt: Aerobic respiration—using oxygen to power the process of producing cellular fuel—was a huge development for life on Earth. After some microbes figured out photosynthesis, levels of oxygen in the […]
LC4C. Stay Current—The Beginning of Life on Earth
Stay current for chapter 4 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-02-12. Boosting origin of life theory, RNA comes close to copying itself. By Robert F. Service, Science. Excerpt: …many scientists think RNA molecules were the star players in the origin of life. By both storing genetic information and copying themselves, they might have touched […]
LC3C. Stay Current—How Do Scientists Play the Dating Game?
Stay current for chapter 3 { Life and Climate Contents } 2009 June 7. Early rocks to reveal their ages. By Jennifer Carpenter, BBC News. Excerpt: A new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth’s continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago. The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks. By […]
LC2C. Stay Current—Where Does Earth’s Atmosphere Come From?
Staying current with chapter 2 { Life and Climate Contents } 2016-05-09. Earth’s ancient atmosphere was half as thick as it is today. By Roland Pease, Science. Excerpt: …very little is known about how thick Earth’s ancient atmosphere once was. Now, a new study suggests that Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago was between a quarter to […]