I write about life sciences, health and the environment. My first book "The Genesis Quest" is about how life on Earth began and is out now
Transformer review: Could Krebs cycle play a part in consciousness?
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.
Climate crisis: what lessons can we learn from the last great cooling-off period?
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
People visited Stonehenge site thousands of years before it was built
Archaeological work at Blick Mead, a site near Stonehenge, reveals that people were visiting the site thousands of years before the monument was built
A small Irish community survived a millennium of plagues and famines
Analysis of pollen preserved in peat at Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills reveals the resilience of a rural community through environmental changes
'Impossible' chemistry may reveal origins of life on Earth
Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life
Ancient Chilean tsunami scared local people away for 1000 years
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
Fate of buried Java Man revealed in unseen notes from Homo erectus dig
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
Ancient Britons rapidly evolved to cope with lack of sunlight
The DNA of people who lived in Great Britain thousands of years ago has markers of natural selection at work – and the driving force seems to have been a shortage of vitamin D
Some of the earliest complex animals were fossilised in a river delta
The Cambrian animals preserved at the Chengjiang fossil site in China lived in a shallow sea close to a river delta – a changeable environment that might have driven rapid evolution
Family tree of extinct apes reveals our early evolutionary history
A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins
A new reference human genome could reflect our species’ true diversity
A new project to read DNA from a large number of people has launched, with the aim of sequencing the “pangenome”, a version of the genome that reflects the full genetic diversity of our species
A 6-metre-long crocodile relative lived in China during the Bronze Age
A large species of gharial, an animal closely related to crocodiles, roamed China 3000 years ago, but was probably driven extinct by humans
BBC Earth: What is the point of saving endangered species?
It will cost billions of dollars to save all the world's threatened species. What's in it for us?
Geese may have been the first birds to be domesticated 7000 years ago
Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in what is now China, according to a study of preserved goose bones
Burst of animal evolution altered chemical make-up of Earth's mantle
The Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago saw a huge variety of animals evolve – and also led to carbon being buried in the seabed and ultimately carried into the planet’s mantle