Ancient lunar ice indicates the moon's axis slowly shifted by 125 miles, or 6 degrees, over 1 billion years. Earth's moon now a member of solar system's exclusive 'true polar wander' club, which includes just a handful of other planetary bodies

Environment-modifying organisms drove Earth's first mass extinction, and could do it again today

Human-caused climate change, ocean acidification and species extinctions may eventually threaten the collapse of civilization, according to some scientists, while other people argue that for political or economic reasons we should allow industrial development to continue without restrictions.

A Virginia Tech geobiologist with collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found evidence in the fossil record that complex multicellularity appeared in living things about 600 million years ago – nearly 60 million years before skeletal animals appeared during a huge growth spurt of new life on Earth known as the Cambrian Explosion.

Up to half of the water on Earth is likely older than the solar system itself, University of Michigan astronomers theorize.

Stanley Miller, the chemist whose landmark experiment published in 1953 showed how some of the molecules of life could have formed on a young Earth, left behind boxes of experimental samples that he never analyzed. The first-ever analysis of some of Miller’s old samples has revealed another way that important molecules could have formed on early Earth.