Michael Marshall

In this overview of science trends and breakthrough predictions at 5, 10 and 25 years, Michael Marshall discusses the state of play in the fields of synthetic biology, origin of life, infectious diseases and solar radiation modification

Redrawing the geological timeline of Earth’s first billion years is casting new light on whether life emerged on land or in the oceans

In a special section on the ocean economy & biodiversity, Michael Marshall looks at a philanthropic project to make corals resilient to climate change (p4-7) and at a new generation of business startups aiming to reshape the ocean economy (p12-16)

On a visit to see ancient cave art in Spain, Michael Marshall explores why it's so hard to calculate the age of early human artworks and whether other hominins might also have created art

Researchers are learning more about how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus stifles smell — and how they might revive it

The story of the emergence of mammals is told with elan in a clear, engaging book – with a nasty sting in the tale for us humans

Who were the Anglo-Saxons? Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts's informed, sophisticated new take digs deep to re-examine their true origins

A mysterious extinction about 540 million years ago may have been caused when early animals began competing against one another

If we want to understand the nature of life, we have to think about the flow of energy and matter. So argues biochemist and writer Nick Lane in his new book Transformer.

The ‘little ice age’ of the 14th to the 19th centuries brought cold winters to Europe and unusual weather globally. Studying how humans adapted could be valuable

Archaeological work at Blick Mead, a site near Stonehenge, reveals that people were visiting the site thousands of years before the monument was built

Analysis of pollen preserved in peat at Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills reveals the resilience of a rural community through environmental changes

Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life

A tsunami 3800 years ago devastated the coastline of Chile and encouraged hunter-gatherers to move inland, where they stayed for the next 1000 years

One of the first excavations to find extinct human remains took place on Java in the 1890s, and the original documentation reveals details about the mudflow that encased the fossils there