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Life in the Time of the Great Dying

Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who have pinpointed the exact date of the largest mass extinction to ever occur on earth. The end-Permian mass [...]

Why the Apes Aren’t Going to Rise

The new film The Rise of the Planet of the Apes—a title with way too many prepositions—asks us to accept an absurd premise: James Franco as a genius neuroscientist. Oh, and it also expects us to accept the possibility that apes could become super-smart, enabling them to overthrow humanity as the dominant species on the planet, leading [...]