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Writer Fuel: Mount Roraima – A Floating Island Lost in Time

Mount Roraima, Venezuela - deposit photos

Mount Roraima is a plateau with near-vertical sides that sits on the triple border point between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. The plateau is often encircled by a ring of clouds, which makes the summit look like an island floating in the sky. The mountain towers 9,219 feet (2,810 meters) above the surrounding savanna, jutting out … Read more

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Writer Fuel? Did a Supernova Kickstart Evolution in Africa?

supernova - deposit photos

Radiation from an exploding star may have had a profound effect on the evolution of life on Earth, a new study suggests. About 2.5 million years ago, the viruses infecting fish in Africa”s Lake Tanganyika underwent a mysterious and rapid explosion in diversity. Yet the exact cause of this change has remained a mystery. Now, … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Intelligent Life May Be Much More Likely Than Originally Thought, New Model Suggests

alien - deposit photos

The emergence of human life may not have been as improbable as scientists once thought, a new model suggests. The finding increases the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the researchers say. Previously, scientists assumed that for human life to emerge on Earth, it needed to pass through a series of “hard steps” … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Which Came First, Viruses or Bacteria?

virus bacteria deposit photos

Scientists estimate that the earliest biological entities began to appear on Earth more than 4 billion years ago. “There was a sort of primordial soup from which certain organic molecules were formed. These were precursors to RNA and DNA,” carbon-containing molecules which combined and organized themselves into a sequence of biological reactions, said computational biologist … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Have There Ever Been Human Giants?

Robert Wadlow - Deposit Photos

Humans have shared stories about giants for thousands of years, from the cyclopes of Greek mythology to the biblical Goliath. But are these just tall tales, or have giant humans really walked this Earth? If you consider a nearly 9-foot-tall human a giant, then yes. Robert Wadlow, the tallest person on record, grew to 8 … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Why Humans Don’t Have Tails

illustration of a boy in a ringtailed cat costume - deposit photos

Approximately 25 million years ago, an ancestor of both humans and apes genetically diverged from monkeys and lost its tail. No one had identified the genetic mutation responsible for this dramatic change in our physiology — until now. In a new study published Wednesday (Feb. 28) in the journal Nature, researchers identified a unique DNA … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Algorithm Reveals 188 New Types of CRISPR

scientist removes a snippet of DNA from a double helix - deposit photos - CRISPR

Scientists have unearthed 188 previously unknown types of CRISPR systems buried in the genomes of simple microorganisms. Best known as a powerful gene-editing tool, CRISPR actually comes from an inbuilt defense system found in bacteria and simple microbes called archaea. CRISPR systems include pairs of “molecular scissors” called Cas enzymes, which allow microbes to cut … Read more

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Writer Fuel: We’re All Jellyfish

Comb Jellyfish - Deposit Photos

After decades of debate, scientists believe they have identified the most recent ancestor of the sister to all animals via the novel use of an analytical technique. The finding settles a central question about the evolution of the entire tree of animal life. All animal life is descended from a single common ancestor — a … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Did UV Radiation Cause a Mass Extinction Event on Earth?

Seymouria from the Early Permian Period - deposit photos

A lethal pulse of ultraviolet (UV) radiation may have played a role in Earth’s biggest mass extinction event, fossilized pollen grains reveal. Pollen that dates to the time of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, roughly 250 million years ago, produced “sunscreen” compounds that shielded against harmful UV-B radiation, the analysis found. At that time, approximately … Read more

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Writer Fuel: Is This the Ancestor of Us All?

Asgard archaeon - Image credit: © Thiago Rodrigues-Oliveira, Univ. Wien

Ancient microbes whose existence predates the rise of nucleus-carrying cells on Earth may hold the secrets to how such complex cells first came to be. Now, for the first time, scientists have grown a large enough quantity of these microbes in the lab to study their internal structure in detail, Science reported. Researchers grew an … Read more