Earth froze over 717 million years ago. Ice crept down from the poles to the equator, and the dark subglacial seas suffocated without sunlight to power photosynthesis. Earth became an unrecognizable, ...

Part biography and part scientific detective story, this debut by British science journalist Walker (a features editor for New Scientist) tells the story of Paul Hoffman, the brilliant, cantankerous ...

Signs of a global catastrophe about 680 million years ago, known as Snowball Earth, have been found in the DNA of living bacteria in the oceans. Their genomes show that they nearly died out around ...