Skeptophilia

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the spike in atmospheric oxygen concentration -- by some estimates, rising to 35% -- during the Carboni...

About 183 million years ago -- during the Toarcian Age , one of the subdivisions of the early Jurassic Period -- there was a sudden and puzz...

Ever heard of the Bruneau-Jarbridge event ? If not, it's unsurprising; neither had I.  Plus, it happened twelve million years ago, durin...

If I had to vote for the single weirdest place in the Solar System, my choice would be Jupiter's moon Io . Io is the innermost and third...

By anyone's standards, Jupiter's moon Io is a strange place.  It is by far the most geologically-active body in the Solar System, w...

Even though in general I don't think synchronicity Means Anything, there's no doubt that it can be pretty peculiar. For example, it ...

The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine. We are evolved to look for correlations, probably because those correlations can be awfully us...

Yesterday's post, in which I skated backward through geologic time into the deep past, alluded to a few really bad times the Earth has b...

One of the most puzzling and fascinating questions in evolutionary biology is what kicked off the Cambrian Explosion . One striking thing ...

As a diversion from less cheerful subjects like what is currently happening in Washington, D. C., today we will consider: the Gates of Hell....