Fossil hunters investigating the floor of a 385 million-year-old forest in an excavated upstate New York quarry found evidence of a complex ecosystem teeming with plant life. The journal Nature reported that excavation of the quarry in 2010 allowed researchers to study an intact portion of the forest floor complete with root systems. William Stein,…
The world’s first asteroid sample return mission is providing some stunning insights to the evolution of the primordial pieces of rock floating around in our solar system. But far from asteroids being quiet, peaceful objects drifting through space, analysis of the tiny dust samples from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Itokawa has shown they are…
Just as species are thought to have evolved over time, the individual molecules that form the basis of life also likely developed in response to natural selection, scientists say. Life on Earth first bloomed around 3.7 billion years ago, when chemical compounds in a “primordial soup” somehow sparked into life, scientists suspect. But what turned…
Unexpected new findings by a University of Maryland team of geochemists show that some portions of the Earth’s mantle formed when the planet was much smaller than it is now, and that some of this early-formed mantle survived Earth’s turbulent formation, including a collision with another planet-sized body that many scientists believe led to the…
Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today’s life-forms. Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun’s harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the…
Scientists hunting the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe, have decided to turn up the power in their Large Hadron Collider to try to prove its existence this year. The CERN research centre near Geneva wants to prove or disprove the existence of…
For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy. This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000…
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet. The major EU-funded initiative will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory…
For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet’s final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun. The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.
A hail of Martian meteorites crashed to Earth last July, and collectors and scientists around the world are snapping up the ultra-rare rocks for display and study. The meteorites fell in the Moroccan desert in July and were recovered a few months later. Scientists confirmed that the rocks are Martian, presumably blasted off the Red…