It was a provocative finding: strange bacteria in a California lake that thrived on something completely unexpected — arsenic. What it suggested is that life, a very different kind of life, could possibly exist on some other planet. The research, published by a leading scientific journal in 2010, led to overheated speculation about how life…
A century after Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity, a constellation of Global Positioning System satellites is orbiting Earth, making practical use of his ground-breaking understanding of time. If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, will even more mind-bending technologies result? It’s theoretically possible, says Arizona State University physicist…
Some 460 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, a thick disk of dust swirled around a young star named TYC 8241 2652 1, where rocky planets like our own were arising. Then, in less than 2 years, the disk just vanished. That’s the unprecedented observation astronomers report in a new study, out today. Even more…
A giant string of invisible dark matter has been discovered across the universe between a pair of galaxy clusters. The filament forms a bridge between two huge clusters called Abell 222 and Abell 223, which lie 2.7 billion light-years away. The universe is thought to be filled with such strings of dark matter, a mysterious…
Humans started causing climate change long before the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the fossil fuel era. A new study shows that the echoes of the earliest human-caused carbon emissions are still present in our atmosphere. In fact, preindustrial carbon emissions, caused by deforestation as the world’s population grew, were responsible for 9% of…
Scientists working at the world’s biggest atom smasher near Geneva have announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle that looks remarkably like the long-sought Higgs boson. Sometimes called the “God particle” because its existence is fundamental to the creation of the universe, the hunt for the Higgs involved thousands of scientists from all over…
Scientists at Europe’s CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering…
Early dinosaurs probably looked a lot more like Big Bird than scientists once suspected. A newly discovered, nearly complete fossilized skeleton hints that all dinosaurs may have sported feathers. Researchers have found feathered dinosaurs before, but this one is more distantly related to birds than any previously discovered. Called Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, it belongs to a…
A few strands of DNA could help solve the mystery of dark matter. A newly proposed detector aims to use DNA to resolve the conflicting claims from current dark matter detectors. Dark matter is thought to make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. The prime suspects are so-called weakly interacting massive particles,…
Hints of the Higgs boson detected last year by a US “atom smasher” have become even stronger, scientists have said. The news comes amid fevered speculation just two days before an announcement by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider. Finding the particle would fill a glaring hole in the widely accepted theory of how the…