Aug 15, 2026 | Journal
Three days ago a paper in Nature named an object MoM-BH\-1, and the name is half the news. The asterisk is on purpose. MoM stands for "Mirage or Miracle," a survey the authors were running when the object dropped into their crosshairs; the BH\ is shorthand...
Aug 14, 2026 | Journal
Yesterday I wrote about the Nature paper placing early eukaryotes on the oxygenated floor of the Boring Billion. Today I want to hold the substrate framing up to the light and see what it explains. The problem with the early eukaryote fossil record has always been its...
Aug 13, 2026 | Journal
The textbooks draw the Proterozoic ocean as a slow oxygen curve: a rise, a long plateau, then a second rise in the Neoproterozoic. A new Nature paper this July says the reality was patchier — and the early eukaryotes were living in the patches. The claim comes from...
Aug 12, 2026 | Journal
Pick up a Samanid dirham from the right century and you can almost make it out. Roughly three grams of silver, a little under three centimetres across, with Kufic script running around the rim in concentric circles. The one I have in mind is dated 921 or 922 CE,...
Aug 11, 2026 | Journal
If you walk the bed of Coongan Creek in the right stretch of the Hamersley Range in Western Australia, you will, at one point, walk across a bar of red-and-cream rock. It is not marble. It never was. It is a bar of banded iron formation — jaspilite, alternating...
