The vast majority of earth’s species are microorganisms. Recent advances in measuring and visualizing microbial diversity in nature have prompted a new era of microbial research, one that builds on the foundations of well established plant and animal biodiversity research. SFI External Professor Jessica Green discusses how explorations of microbial biodiversity in the indoor environment may radically change thinking about sustainability, human health, and well being.

UNM has been conducting field studies at Chaco since 2004 with the goal of improving our understanding of socioeconomic organization and change during the Bonito Phase (ca. AD 850 to 1150). Our initial focus was re-opening trenches originally excavated in the 1920s at Pueblo Bonito in order to obtain new geoarchaeological data on water channels and possible canals. That original research has expanded to include the discovery of cacao associated with special ceramics and the development of...

It is now too late to prevent serious effects for our society from climate change and fossil fuel depletion. But there are still many ways to prepare for future problems, and thereby achieve the best possible future. Dennis Meadows, co-author of the 1972 report, Limits to Growth, will summarize some recent research on the timing and the magnitude of future growth limits, and he will sketch out some initiatives that can usefully be taken now at the state and regional level. The lecture is...

The decline and abandonment of many key cities in the Southern Maya Lowlands around A.D. 800 has long attracted scholarly and public attention. While archaeologists now understand – contrary to previous thought – that Maya civilization did not collapse at this time, as a number of Maya cities continued to thrive up until the 16th century Spanish Conquest, the causes of the relatively rapid demise of cities such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan remain of great interest. New archaeological,...

During the greatest biodiversity crisis in the history of life some 250 million years ago, over 90% of all the species in the oceans died off in just a few hundred thousand years. Douglas Erwin, author of the new book Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago discusses his research in China, South Africa and the western US in search of the causes and consequences of this great mass extinction.

Scientists were shocked at the recent discovery of a miniature human species (LB 1, Homo floresiensis) that lived a mere 18,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores.

We live in a post-Darwinian world, and it is no longer possible to conceive of life without some reference to Darwin's theories.

It is now generally agreed that human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are very likely to cause global warming. This will have serious consequences in the next fifty to one hundred years.

If the theory of evolution successfully explains the nature of the earth's biosphere can this theory be applied to the universe?

Many researchers have supposed that the emergence of life hinged on a sequence of improbable events, at the same time as they have taken for granted the ability of life on earth to persist indefinitely and to "freeze in" the consequences of early accidents. Smith argues that there is ample evidence for a different interpretation: the emergence of life was an inevitable outcome of geochemistry on the early earth, and the same forces responsible for emergence have continued to support the...

Scientific advances of the past century have led to improvements in most peoples' lives, in both developed and developing worlds.