Billions of years ago, an extinction occurred that dwarfed the event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Its history is written in Canadian rocks and show Earth lost nearly 75 percent of its plant and animal species.

But it had a benefit for us. The die-off of microorganisms that shaped the Earth's atmosphere paved the way for larger animals to thrive.

Given the current coronavirus pandemic, the third of the last 17 years, not to mention annual flu and the other infectious diseases we face, it may seem that microbes are unstoppable, but even when biology on Earth was comprised entirely of microbes, they still had enormous die-off events.

How to detect life before complex life even existed

When a drop of liquid evaporates, solids are left behind in a pattern that depends on what the liquid is, what solids are in it and the environmental conditions.

You may have seen a 'coffee ring' when overflow deposits solids along the edge of the puddle as it evaporates. The same things happen with other beverages. Stuart Williams and colleagues previously found that drops of diluted American whiskeys -- but not their Scotch or Canadian counterparts -- formed webbed patterns when dried on a glass surface, and there were hints that the pattern was distinctive for different brands of whiskey.

Clinical trials in the modern regulatory environment are so expensive that many companies with a product that is going into a phase III clinical trial will just sell out to a Big Pharma company that can afford it. It's a necessary, yet somehow despised, business. Academics have claimed bias in clinical studies conducted by industry sponsors.

Why are some prostate cancers are more aggressive and result in death when others can be treated? The answer could mean more optimal treatment; aggressive forms could still get the full treatment while less harmful forms can get a less damaging approach.

The US Army has developed a quantum sensor that can detect communication signals over the entire radio frequency spectrum, from 0 to 100 GHz, using a single antenna. That is currently impossible with a traditional receiver system, and would require multiple systems of individual antennas, amplifiers and other components.

A new study claims the recent form of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes the COVID-19 disease remains far longer in aerosol form than other experiments showed and up to 3 days on some surfaces.

The study says the virus is detectable for up to three hours in aerosols, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two days on plastic and stainless steel. This is far longer than other studies of viruses in aerosols, which found them for 45 minutes.