Human land use due to manufacturing, population, and agriculture changing the shape of earth itself has been termed the Anthropocene Epoch, but if less hyperbolic scientists of the future agree with that at all, they are likely to agree it started 4,000 years before cars were invented.

Significant global landcover change had occurred by then, so if a new epoch really did start, it was not in the 20th century, finds a new study by a large international team of archaeologists and environmental scientists behind the ArchaeoGLOBE project.

With fires happening in South America, the left has such dominance over social media in America they convinced the public that policies of right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil were to blame, while in Brazil the right's dominance of social media put him in power.

Northwestern University computer scientists say they can prove that WhatsApp use played a key role in the electoral process. Their analysis shows that the Brazilian right in 2018 did what the American left did in 2008; they used social media to beat their opponents in a way that left them baffled.

Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system but 550 light years away in the inconspicuous constellation of Lepus, underneath the bright Orion constellation, an exo-Io could be hidden at the exoplanet system WASP-49b. 

The possible exomoon would orbit a hot giant planet, which in turn would race once around its host star in less than three days. 

Theoretically, large amounts of sodium at an exoplanet could point to a hidden moon or ring of material, and ten years ago, researchers at Virginia calculated that such a compact system of three bodies: star, close-in giant planet and moon, can be stable over billions of years.  

“A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” the physicist Max Planck wrote.

In America, some groups tell us expiration dates on food are just a conservative guideline while other groups insist that if someone buys expired food the merchant should go to jail. In Europe it can be even more strange, they once tried to ban ugly fruit from being sold because it would likely be purchased by poor people,

If you are a believer in the precautionary principle over all, you buy armloads of organic food at the farmer's market on Saturday, ingest herbs and supplements to promote probiotic health, and religiously obey expiration dates, your refrigerator is probably where food goes to die.

If you believe in medieval accounts of wine harvest dates, Burgundy grapes are in crisis. A new look at dates of grape harvest from the last 664 years says wine grapes in Burgundy, eastern France, have been picked 13 days earlier on average since 1988 than they were in the previous six centuries, and that is due to the region's hotter and drier climate in recent years. 

How accurate that is beyond the last 30 years is unclear.