Extraterrestrial dust may have caused or intensified an ice age and increased marine diversity a half a billion years ago.

The new sites suggest that human adaptation to harsh environments could have happened earlier or faster than thought.

Cable news junkies, take heart: if you love wall-to-wall coverage of hurricanes, wildfires and superstorms, your future viewing schedules will be jam-packed.

Researchers at the AAAS Annual Meeting said that wild weather events like Superstorm Sandy and the severe Texas drought are the new normal in North America, as human-driven climate change has made these events more intense and more frequent.

Consider these facts:

AAAS has named Richard B. Alley as the recipient of the 2012 AAAS Public Engagement with Science Award, recognizing “his decades-long, broad-based and exceptionally effective efforts communicating the best of climate science to excite the interests of the general public and policymakers.”