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…
New evidence supports the idea that a huge space rock collided with our planet about 13,000 years ago and broke up in Earth’s atmosphere, a new study suggests. This impact would have been powerful enough to melt the ground, and could have killed off many large mammals and humans. It may even have set off…
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is asking the public to join in its hunt for signals from intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. Anyone can register on the new website, SETI Live, to help analyze data from SETI’s radio telescope devoted to scanning the heavens for signals from E.T. The public will…
Some Scandinavian trees survived the last Ice Age, challenging a widely held notion that they were killed off by the huge ice sheet that covered the region. Modern trees in Scandinavia were thought to descend from species that migrated north when the ice melted 9,000 years ago, but research suggests some conifers survived on mountain…
Astronomers have managed to detect the telltale fingerprints of organic life on Earth using a new technique that examines sunlight reflected onto the moon by our planet. The so-called “earthshine” observations may pave the way for a similar tool to help spot signs of alien life in the universe, scientists say. While the existence of…
Our Milky Way galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets that ramble through space instead of being locked in orbit around a star, a new study suggests. These “nomad planets” could be surprisingly common in our bustling galaxy, according to researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. The study predicts that there…
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…
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.
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…