The mysterious common ancestor of all life on Earth may have been more complex than before thought—a sophisticated organism with an intricate structure, scientists now suggest.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has detected several simple carbon-based organic compounds on Mars, but it remains unclear whether they were formed via Earthly contamination or whether they contain only elements indigenous to the planet. Speaking at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Curiosity mission leaders also said that the compound perchlorate—identified previously…
Emily Baldwin, deputy editor of Astronomy Now magazine, said the asteroid, which is known as 2005 YU55, posed no threat. She told the Sunday Times: “It is a great opportunity to make close-up, detailed observations. Studies of asteroids are important not only to learn about the potential threat an impact may have on Earth but also…
Diplomats and activists from around the world are meeting in Rio de Janeiro to talk about how the planet’s growing population can live better lives without damaging the environment. The Rio+20 meeting marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio, a watershed meeting to address topics as diverse as climate change…
A cricket song last heard 165 million years ago has been played again. To reconstruct the sound, paleontologists compared microscopic wing structures of fossil Archaboilus musicus, a Jurassic ancestor of modern crickets, to contemporary wings. Crickets sing — or, technically, “stridulate” — by rubbing together the ridged edges of their wings. From noises generated by…
A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star. The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither…
A pair of mathematicians have proposed a unified theory of dark matter and dark energy that alters Einstein’s equations describing the fundamentals of gravity. The researchers suggest the law of energy and momentum conservation in spacetime is valid only when normal matter, dark matter and dark energy are all taken into account. For normal matter…