Robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. At the start of the simulation, a biped ...

Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations. Computer scientists ...

Newly analyzed Arctic fossils show that marine ecosystems recovered astonishingly fast after the “great dying.” More than 30,000 teeth, bones, and other fossil fragments from a 249-million-year-old ...

When the Kinks' Ray Davies penned the tune 'Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,' the vanishing locomotives stood as nostalgic symbols of a simpler English life. But for a paleontologist, the replacement ...

Life changes over time. Of course, it does. We know this thanks to a wealth of converging evidence in the form of millions of fossils, clear genetic clues, and observations made out in the field and ...

Birds that dive underwater — such as penguins, loons and grebes — may be more likely to go extinct than their nondiving kin, a new study finds. Many water birds have evolved highly specialized bodies ...

Press releases are posted on Independent.com as a free community service. Environmental historian and author Daniel Lewis will deliver a free illustrated lecture based on his book Belonging on an ...

Artificial Intelligence, which has been advancing for decades, has exploded onto the scene recently, creating exciting and extraordinary use cases in every field from healthcare to manufacturing. Just ...

Did a collision with a giant asteroid or comet change the shape of life on Earth forever? It is widely agreed that such an object -- 10 kilometers across -- struck just off the coast of the Yucatan ...

This graph plots extinction rates of marine animal families over the last 600 million years. The shaded band indicates the normal range of extinction rates, known as "background extinction." The five ...