Atoms and the Miracle of Life
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China Sets Up U.S. Conflict By Ruling Out New Climate ‘Regime’
China, India, South Africa and Brazil said a climate deal planned for 2020 won’t be a “new regime,” threatening confrontation with the U.S. which wants to eliminate a firewall between developed and developing nations. The four nations reined in expectations for the Durban Platform, a mandate agreed last December at United Nations treaty talks in…
How Order Arises From the Random Motion of Particles in the Cosmos
One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth. The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases…
Newfound “Tatooine” Alien Planet Bodes Well for E.T. Search
The discovery of the first alien planet with two suns — like the “Star Wars” world Tatooine — residing in its parent star’s habitable zone is good news for the search for life beyond Earth, scientists say. The planet, known as Kepler-47c, is a gas giant and therefore probably not suitable for life as we…
Astrophysicists Observe How Black Holes Are Fueled
By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, a method that has yielded an unprecedented amount of data for such observations. The resolution at which they…
Fossil Pushes Back Date of Land-Animal Debut
A foot buried beneath Scottish soil for at least 345 million years pushes back the timeline for the appearance of the first four-legged creatures that spent their lives on dry land. The specimen, 20 million years older than any known five-toed fossil, is just 10 millimeters across and comes from an unknown species. It’s one…
Polar Bears, Brown Bears Interbreed to Cope With Climate Change
Polar and brown bears diverged between 4 million and 5 million years ago, but they continued to interbreed when the climate warmed. Now, there is evidence that it is happening again.