In three stars far, far away, one of the rarest elements known to man has been spotted, improving our understanding about how heavy elements are created, bolstering evidence that a rare type of supernova may have been responsible for their creation. Tellurium — a brittle and toxic semiconducting metal — has for the first time…
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…
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…
Trace elements in stars may influence the evolution of habitable zones around them where life as we know it might dwell. Stars are made nearly entirely from hydrogen and helium gas. Still, traces of heavier elements — which astronomers call metals, even if they are not what one normally think of as metals — can…
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…
The first plants to appear on earth 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages by causing a reduction in atmospheric carbon, British researchers said. Scientists say the first plants to grow on land, the ancestors of mosses that grow today, had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and the world’s…
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…
Fundamental particles are the building blocks of matter, and, apparently, come in many more flavors than the basic few that make up the atoms we’re familiar with. Flavor is the name scientists give to different versions of the same type of particle. For instance, quarks (which make up the protons and neutrons inside atoms) come…
What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers. Stephen Hawking may have famously declared that “Philosophy is dead.” but philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin disagrees. Maudlin, whose…