Life may have gotten its start inland, inside ponds of volcanic condensate, not in the oceans. Modern life is more chemically compatible with conditions in venting geothermal fields, such as Yellowstone National Park, than in the ocean, even a primitive ocean, new analysis shows. The finding challenges a widely accepted theory that modern life began…
NASA has announced that astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope have found solid materials made out of Buckyballs in the star system XX Ophiuchi, which is 6,500 light years from Earth. This builds on some earlier findings, which detected Buckyballs in gaseous form in outer space. Buckyballs are probably one of the funnest molecules in…
It’s long been suspected that administering large amounts of antibiotics to livestock promotes antibiotic resistance. Now a new study describes how a particularly nasty strain of MRSA—the CC398 strain found primarily in pigs but also in cattle and poultry—likely did that. Sequencing the genomes of 88 closely-related strains of S. aureus, the researchers found the…
If seismic activity on Mars is recent, and it can be traced to a volcano, it could mean that there is a source of heat to melt ice and provide potential habitats for simple forms of life.
After the furies of birth, the mature cosmos now evolves more slowly. Stars will continue to form for as long as another 100 trillion years (about 10,000 times the present age of the universe), which leaves plenty of time for slow-building cosmic phenomena to occur. Check out Scientific American’s cosmic timeline.
For more than 500 years, the Maya kings ruled the New World’s richest and most advanced civilization. But then, around 800 C.E., the Maya empire began to collapse and its kings soon disappeared; by 1000 C.E., most of its great cities and temples lay in ruins. What happened? In recent years, scientists have increasingly blamed…
Back in the day of the first mammals, horses started out the size of house cats, weighing about 8 pounds and standing only a few inches tall. Then they got even littler, a direct result of the warm temperatures that characterized the Eocene era. Only when Earth cooled down a bit did the beasts get…
Neutrinos which appeared to have undermined a basic law of the universe by exceeding the speed of light might have done so even faster than first thought – or might not have done it at all, said scientists at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. Tests on the equipment used in their experiment had led…
At last, a member of the celebrated sirtuin family of proteins has been shown to extend lifespan in mammals — although it’s not the one that has received the most attention and financial investment. Sirtuin genes and the proteins they encode have intrigued many researchers who study aging ever since they were first linked to…
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is often invoked outside the realm of physics to describe how the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, or to point out that there’s a limit to how well we can ever really understand the universe. While the subtleties of the uncertainty principle are often lost on nonphysicists,…