TEDTalk Tuesday: A New Idea on Mass Extinctions

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This week's TEDTALKTUESDAY covers mass extinctions. Popularly, these are known to be caused by impact events from comets or asteroids, but today's speaker advances a different idea: that some mass extinctions of the past have been caused by life on the Earth itself.

Enjoy!

PETERWARD

Talk title: Earth's Mass Extinctions (video runtime: 19:42)

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Peter Ward

Wiki bio

About this talk

Asteroid strikes get all the coverage, but "Medea Hypothesis" author Peter Ward argues that most of Earth's mass extinctions were caused by lowly bacteria. The culprit, a poison called hydrogen sulfide, may have an interesting application in medicine.