Given the same raw materials, Mars would have been a better host for life to arise than Earth, which some scientists believe was too flooded for the chemistry of life to gain a toehold. Without at least occasional dry land, the chemistry needed to get life started doesn’t work very well because the molecules to…
In celebration of 1,000 days in orbit, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team released two beautiful videos of our moon, one a fiery drama showing the moon’s tough evolution and another touring its most interesting sites. The historical montage takes you from the moon’s earliest days, through the massive south pole splat that formed the South…
What are the options when a scientist faces a problem with no obvious solution? That is the dilemma astronomers have faced over the last few decades as they took a census of cosmic matter and motion. Mapping the beautiful pinwheel arcs of spiral galaxies, they found the constituent stars moving far too fast to be…
Scientists in China have found what may be a new species of human. Fossils show a group of people with similarities to and differences from modern humans.
Russian and South Korea scientists have teamed up to recreate a woolly mammoth – a prehistoric creature that last walked the earth some 4,500 years ago. The teams aim to get to work on thawed remains of the extinct mammal recovered after global warming thawed Siberia’s permafrost. The mammoth’s tissues are to be cloned by…
Two new horned dinosaurs have been named based on fossils collected from Alberta, Canada. Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni are new species from the Leptoceratopsidae horned dinosaur family. The herbivores lived during the Late Cretaceous, between 75 to 83 million years ago. The specimens are described in Cretaceous Research. “These dinosaurs fill important gaps in…
Neutrinos produced by a nuclear reactor in China are changing from one flavour to another more rapidly than expected. The result means physicists could soon explain why the universe is filled with matter instead of featureless radiation. Neutrinos and antineutrinos each come in three flavours: electron, muon and tau. As they fly through space, these…
Nationwide, gardeners have been experimenting with their newly assigned plant hardiness zones, a guide provided by the USDA that maps how well a plant will survive winter temperatures in a certain region. The map divides regions into different growing zones based on the average lowest temperature. Since the 1960s, growers have used it as a…
The antimatter version of the hydrogen atom could soon finally give up its secrets. Scientists expect that antihydrogen will have exactly the same properties as hydrogen; but after 80 years, the test is only just becoming possible. Every particle has an antiparticle, which is identical in every respect except that it has opposite charge. The…
Researchers have deciphered the genetic code of the gorilla – the last of the Great Ape genuses to be sequenced and, after chimps, gorillas are the closest living relative of humans. Understanding these genetic catalogues, from our closest living relatives, can reveal much about our evolutionary path — such as when we diverged from our…