EarthDate

You’ve probably heard that black cars get hotter than white cars.

Scientists set out to measure the difference. They parked two otherwise identical cars in a sunny parking lot, and, sure enough, the white car’s interior stayed 17 degrees Fahrenheit ... more

There’s a common houseplant that in the wild can do what no other plant can.

It’s the staghorn fern.

It’s an epiphyte, meaning it doesn’t need soil but instead grows on a larger host plant and draws its nutrients from water and air.

But that’s not... more

Tiny mosses were the first land plants to evolve on Earth. But the first real plants, the big leafy kind, came on the scene 400 million years ago—200 million years before hardwood trees and flowering plants.

I’m talking about ferns.

They flourished... more

There’s a special place in South Africa called Border Cave where our ancestors already in modern human form lived continuously for nearly a quarter million years.

Excavating in the cave is like reading backward in a history book, finding evidence of... more

There’s one source that provides almost a third of the water for all US agriculture. It’s called the Ogallala aquifer, stretching under the Great Plains from South Dakota to northern Texas.

Once considered inexhaustible, we now understand its limits... more

Some very old oyster shells found in a cave have answered the eternal question, “who was the first person to eat that”?! Looks like it was a hungry South African, 164,000 years ago.

Today, we consume around 8 billion oysters a year. But they’re good... more

Only one ten thousandth of Earth’s total water supply is fresh water on the surface, to keep billions of humans and other animals alive. Good reason to conserve it—which also saves energy and money.

Water is heavy, so it takes energy to move it. The... more

It may surprise you to know that one of the most important minerals in history has been … potash.

Many centuries ago, humans discovered that if you took a pot, put in wood ash, boiled it then strained out the residue, you’d get potash—which had two ... more