What Science’s Worst Hoaxes Can Teach Us to The Seven Ages of Earth

Planet Earth Edition

Today’s stories include These Tsunami Detectives Search for Ancient Disasters to The Amazing Ways Electricity in Your Body Shapes You and Your Health, and more.

From Piltdown Man to anti-vaxxers, What science’s worst hoaxes can teach us--Covid disinformation prompts Royal Society to consider ways of countering forgeries and falsehoods, reports The Guardian.

Something different at the center of our planet. What’s Inside Earth’s Inner Core? Seismic Waves Reveal an Innermost Core.--Shaking from large earthquakes provides hints about something different at the center of the planet, reports The New York Times.

Why we seem to be alone in the Universe remains a mystery: The Fermi paradox was created by geniuses during a strange debate over lunch--The Fermi paradox (along with the subsequent Drake equation) is so difficult that even brilliant thinkers can make little dent in it, reports Big Think. 

These Tsunami Detectives Search for Ancient Disasters--reports The Smithsonian: "A boulder weighing more than 40 tons sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive outlier got here lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below. Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast—a wall of water 20 meters high.”

The amazing ways electricity in your body shapes you and your health--Your cells crackle with electric signals that guide embryonic development and heal wounds. If we can learn to tweak this “bioelectric code”, we might be able to prevent cancer and even grow new limbs, reports New Scientist.

This Tiny Welsh Island Is Europe’s First Dark Sky Sanctuary--Ynys Enlli joins 16 other sites of its kind across the world, reports Margaret Osborne for The Smithsonian. The island, which is 1.5 miles long and half a mile wide, has only two year-round residents and about a dozen during the summers.

US Government Has Been Dancing Around UFOs for 75 Years reports The Washington Post. " In recent years, a growing number of sightings of aircraft defying the laws of physics has belatedly prompted a federal effort to collect and analyze data. But the damage done by Grudge and Bluebook — what the US director of national intelligence recently described as “sociocultural stigmas” — has made that task difficult."

How octopus DNA suggests that Antarctica will melt again--Two populations that are geographically separated today once mated a very long time ago, reports Big Think.

Evolution Turns These Knobs to Make a Hummingbird Hyperquick and a Cavefish Sluggishly Slow--By tuning the enzymes that control the breakdown or storage of sugars, hummingbirds and cavefish adapt their metabolism to meet the demands of the vastly different environments in which they live, reports Scientific American.

The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories--A new book argues Flat Earth beliefs provide a guide to conspiratorial thinking, reports Ars Technica.

The Seven-Ages of Earth as Seen Through the Continental Lens--The 4.5-billion-year record contained in Earth’s continental crust reveals a seven-phase evolution, from an initial magma ocean to the present-day environment in which we live, reports EOS.org.

Evolution of Uniquely Human DNA Was a Delicate Balancing Act, reports SciTechDaily. "Many alterations to the genomes of early humans had opposing effects, likely due to a delicate balance between enhanced cognitive abilities and an increased risk of psychiatric disorders."

Homo sapiens may have brought archery to Europe about 54,000 years ago--Small stone points could have felled prey only as tips of arrows shot from bows, reports Science News.