I was about ten when my mom bought a Science News subscription for the Tusk. Week after week the thin, frequent, small format publication filled my desk, and ultimately the floor of my room. The rush of science coverage came so quickly I sometimes felt guilty as a little guy for not reading every article. […]

The Tusk is honored to maintain a digital acquaintance with distinguished Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, who in the 1970’s with Sir Fred Hoyle established — and to my mind proved — the theory of Panspermia. We had been corresponding concerning the jaw dropping recent genetic study, when NASA announced today’s press conference. I asked Dr. C […]

Panspermia 2013 The Tusk recieved an extraordinary paper recently and immediately pinged our digital acquaintance for commentary, world treasure: Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe. “Chandra, I hope you are well. A friend of the Comet Research Group\YDB team just sent around an announcement of the following discovery: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-gene-survey-reveals-facets-evolution.html A large-scale genetic comparison has discovered that 90% of […]

I had a blast last week joining the hosts of my favorite new podcast: Seven Ages Audio Journal. Like the Tusk, veteran podcaster Micah Hanks and his science bros Jason Pentrail and James Waldo attempt the difficult balance between hard science, responsible speculation and perhaps some entertainment. I think they recognized me as a “fellow […]

A friend sent me this paper from Dr. Martin Sweatman who gained international notoriety last year with a previous journal article linking the world’s most ancient temple, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, with the Younger Dryas Impact. The Tusk enjoyed that paper and was pleased to see Sweatman make a second contribution to our field; this […]

Paleolithic Extinctions and the Taurid Complex (2010) Centaurs as a Hazard to Civilization (2015) Excerpted from Wolbach et. al (2018)   Astronomical Hypothesis for the YDB Impact Event Regarding the probability of a swarm of cometary fragments hitting the Earth, Boslough et al. (2013) claimed that the YDB event is “statistically and physically impossible,” whereas Napier […]

The History Channel episode below and other great videos about our subject are available on the Tusk TV Playlist.

This week Rick Firestone shared a little known 2009 paper with the Tusk and some others. I was unaware of it and enjoyed reading it. The authors find a unique spike in fire at Akgol, Turkey ~13,000 years ago which they attribute to a horrendous inferno in a marsh, of all places. They cite Firestone […]

Did the Black-Mat Impact/Airburst Reach the Antarctic? Evidence from New Mountain Near the Taylor Glacier in the Dry Valley Mountains Journal of Geology, March 15, 2018 Detailed microscopic investigations of horizons in a surface paleosol, part of a pedostratigraphic stack of tills at New Mountain, Antarctica, dated to the middle Miocene climatic optimum event (ca. […]

Hear the British Library interview Dr. Baillie Jonny McAneney’s Tusk comment on his collaborator Mike Baillie’s paper: This is an important paper, but it is equally important to point out that scientific understanding has moved on in the decade or so since this was published. I have posted before on this site about the corrections […]

Papers #1 and #2 and Supplementary Materials Quick take at skeptic site NeuroLogica Tallboy – Widespread Panic (1997) The Tusk inaugurates our new look here by posting the most important paper in the peer-reviewed canon of the Comet Research Group since the original PNAS publication in 2007. It is truly a new day at the […]