The scalding-hot sea that supposedly covered the early Earth may in fact never have existed, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers who analyzed isotope ratios in 3.4 billion-year-old ocean floor rocks. Their findings suggest that the early ocean was much more temperate and that, as a result, life likely diversified and spread across the globe much sooner in Earth’s history than has been generally theorized.
JUST months – that’s how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated. Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or “Big Freeze”. It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.
Contrary to preconceived notions, the atmosphere and the oceans were perhaps not formed from vapors emitted during intense volcanism at the dawning of our planet. Francis Albarède of the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre (CNRS / ENS Lyon / Université Claude Bernard) suggests that water was not part of the Earth’s initial inventory but stems from the turbulence caused in the outer Solar System by giant planets. Ice-covered asteroids thus reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets.
Think of a dinosaur and what may come to mind is a large, lumbering animal with four legs, a long neck, a tiny head and tail. Now a new species helps to explain how this iconic dino body shape evolved. The new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, belongs to the Sauropodomorpha, a group that includes the ancestors of sauropods — gigantic, four-legged herbivores — but not the sauropods themselves. The largest animals that ever walked the earth were sauropodomorphs.
Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission. ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.
Were dinosaurs “warm-blooded” like present-day mammals and birds, or “cold-blooded” like present day lizards? The implications of this simple-sounding question go beyond deciding whether or not you’d snuggle up to a dinosaur on a cold winter’s evening. In a study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded.
Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent. In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal.
Giant robots are best suited for Terminator-scale tasks. To measure the sea’s tiniest inhabitants, oceanographers will need to build a new type of robot. Ocean-going robots are quite common, used mainly to measure large-scale processes such as tidal patterns and the chemical make-up of the ocean. But to study critical nursery habitats for fish and track harmful algae blooms, Jules Jaffe and Peter Franks are designing something different.
What’s causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser’s fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it. The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet’s gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.
NASA scientists have reproduced uracil, a key component of the hereditary material, RNA. The uracil was created by exposing an ice sample containing the molecule pyrimidine to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions. The research may help astrobiologists understand how molecules for the origin of life were first made. Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles.
A young star observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope appears to be home to a wild — and young — planetary system that shares some of the frenetic dynamics thought to have shaped the early years of our own solar system. The Spitzer observations suggest young planets circling the star are disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.
Recently excavated Mayan murals are giving archaeologists a rare look into the lives of ordinary ancient Maya. The murals were uncovered during the excavation of a pyramid mound structure at the ancient Maya site of Calakmul, Mexico (near the border with Guatemala) and are described in the Nov. 9 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Outer space, a place of enormous distances: for more than 30 years, unmanned spacecraft have journeyed to learn more about the depths of space, its planets and the nature of interplanetary space. Now, billions of kilometres from Earth, space probes are entering areas never before explored by humankind.
A new Russian room that doubles as a docking port for the International Space Station is ready for a planned Tuesday launch toward the orbiting laboratory. The new Mini-Research Module 2, called Poisk (Russian for “Explore”), is due to blast off atop a Soyuz rocket at 9:22 a.m. ET Tuesday from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Pale and snub-nosed with long arms and curving claws, an “alien” discovered in September had five teenagers thinking they’d had a close encounter in a Panama creek. “I was in the river and I felt something grabbing my legs,” one of the boys told the local television program Telemetro Reporta a few days after the sighting in the Cerro Azul region of Panama City.
Four years after its first solar sail ended up in the ocean instead of orbit, the Planetary Society announced Monday that by the end of 2010 it will try again to launch a spacecraft that will be propelled by the subtle pressure of sunlight. LightSail-1 is envisioned as the first of a trio of solar sail craft in a project boosted by an anonymous $1 million donation, according to the space advocacy organization co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
A previously undiscovered asteroid came within 14,000 km of Earth last week, and astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before closest approach. On Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST a 7 meter asteroid, now called 2009 VA, came only about 2 Earth radii from impacting our home planet. This is the third-closest known non-impacting Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid.
Spider silk is renowned for its lightweight yet stronger-than-steel fibers, and now scientists are finding a new use for the fine, strong thread: as an artificial muscle. Scientists at the University of Akron have developed two new ways to apply spider silk, and normal silk from silkworms, to artificial muscles. If refined and commercialized, scientists say the silk could be used in everything from robotics to microchip systems.
The brightest lights in the universe often come from the blackest pits of deep space. Black holes, so named because even light cannot escape their gravitational grasp, can only be sensed through their tug on other matter. While black holes themselves are invisible, the regions around them are reigned by powerful magnetic and gravitational forces that create some of the most luminous radiation ever seen.
In soft sandstone on a New Zealand beach lie a series of very heavy footprints — the first evidence of dinosaur activity on the island. The prints were probably made by large, plant-eating sauropods between 6 and 18 feet long, creatures that would have weighed several tons. The discovery was made by geologist Dr Greg Browne a decade ago. Browne made public his find only when he was certain of the dinosaur link, work that required several years of study.
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers. Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have officially agreed to combine their efforts in the exploration and study of Mars. The heads of both agencies, NASA administrator Charles Boden and ESA director-general Jean-Jacques Dordain signed an agreement that officially binds the two agencies together for upcoming orbiter and rover missions.
TO ANCIENT Romans the Phlegraean Fields hosted the entrance to Hades. In modern times it is better known as the site of a “supercolossal” volcanic eruption 39,000 years ago. Will we see the next disaster coming? That’s one of the questions an ambitious drilling project hopes to answer by sinking boreholes into Campi Flegrei, as the giant collapsed volcanic crater is now called. Starting as early as next month, the Campi Flegrei Deep Drilling Project is planning to drill seven holes in the region.
A NASA spacecraft gliding over the battered surface of Mercury for the second time this year has revealed more previously unseen real estate on the innermost planet. The probe also has produced several science firsts and is returning hundreds of new photos and measurements of the planet’s surface, atmosphere and magnetic field.
The Cassini spacecraft has weathered the Monday, Nov. 2, flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus in good health and has been sending images and data of the encounter back to Earth. Cassini had approached Enceladus more closely before, but this passage took the spacecraft on its deepest plunge yet through the heart of the plume shooting out from the south polar region. Scientists are eagerly sifting through the results.
The extraordinary story of the world’s first suicide bombers – the Japanese kamikazes. From April 1945, as the Allies fought battle after bloody battle in the Pacific, an increasingly desperate Japanese High Command ordered thousands of pilots to dive and crash into enemy ships. Using archive and interviews, ‘The Day of the Kamikaze’ explores how, during the battle for Okinawa, thousands of young Japanese men were persuaded to sacrifice their lives. Surviving Kamikaze pilots describe how they were persuaded to sign up to almost certain death, and Allied sailors relive the horror of facing the daily suicide tactic for the first time.
We are currently the only human species alive, but as recently as 24,000 years ago another one walked the earth — the Neanderthals. These extinct humans were the closest relatives we had, and tantalizing new hints from researchers suggest that we might have been intimately close indeed. The mystery of whether Neanderthals and us had sex might be solved if the entire Neanderthal genome is reported soon as expected. The matter of why they died and we succeeded, however, remains an open question.
The end of the world is near—December 21, 2012, to be exact—according to theories based on a purported ancient Maya prediction and fanned by the marketing machine behind the soon-to-be-released 2012 movie. But could humankind really meet its end in 2012—drowned in apocalyptic floods, walloped by a secret planet, seared by an angry sun, or thrown overboard by speeding continents?
The scalding-hot sea that supposedly covered the early Earth may in fact never have existed, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers who analyzed isotope ratios in 3.4 billion-year-old ocean floor rocks. Their findings suggest that the early ocean was much more temperate and that, as a result, life likely diversified and spread across the globe much sooner in Earth’s history than has been generally theorized.
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