|
| METEORITES A RICH SOURCE FOR PRIMORDIAL SOUP |
| Washington, DC—The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generous helpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites. This result suggests that the early solar system was far richer in the organic building blocks of life than scientists had thought, and that fallout from space may have spiked Earth’s primordial broth. |
|
| Sandia supercomputers offer new explanation of Tunguska disaster |
| The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest. |
|
| DEVASTATING ANCIENT METEOR IMPACT OFF AUSTRALIA? |
| A massive dent hidden under the seabed off the north west coast of Australia could be evidence of a meteor impact responsible for the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, scientists say. |
|
| LOOK FORWARD TO A DARKER WORLD |
| It's official: the world is getting darker. Scientists now agree that as cloud cover and particles in the atmosphere increase, the amount of radiation reaching us from the Sun is falling. And although they are nervous about raising the idea, they think the effect may help protect us from global warming. |
|
| DISASTER MOVIE MAKES WAVES |
| But could the climate crash 'the day after tomorrow'? |
|
| DOOMSDAY POLAR FLIP TAKES 7000 YEARS |
| A reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, a rare but feared event due to the catastrophic effect it could have on human life, takes about 7000 years to complete, a U.S. scientist predicts. |
|
| DID CRACKING CONTINENT TRIGGER A DEEP FREEZE? |
| The break-up of a supercontinent may have caused a 'Snowball Earth'.
The Earth might have been sent into an ice age by the break-up of a supercontinent 750 million years ago, creating a global snowball. |
|
| METEORITE TOO EARLY TO KILL DINOSAURS |
| An ancient meteorite collision that created a vast crater off the coast of Mexico may not have triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to an international team of scientists. |
|
| CARBON DIOXIDE FERTILIZATION IS NEITHER BOON NOR BUST |
| Trees absorb more carbon dioxide when the amount in the atmosphere is higher, but the increase is unlikely to offset the higher levels of CO2, according to results from large-scale experiments conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and elsewhere. |
|
| ASTEROIDS MADE OUR WATERY WORLD |
| Oceans were formed after massive Moon-sized asteroids hit Earth, according to U.S. research. |
|
| ASTRONOMERS UNRAVEL A MYSTERY OF THE DARK AGES |
| Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago – a comet colliding with Earth. |
|
| WHAT CAN THE GENOMICS REVOLUTION TEACH US ABOUT GLOBAL CHANGE? |
| While the scientific community has made tremendous investments in sequencing and interpreting animal and plant genes for biomedical applications, many researchers are looking at genomics to help solve problems in agriculture, such as impacts of global change. |
|
| SOLAR CONTRIBUTION TO 'GLOBAL WARMING' PREDICTED TO DECREASE |
| Vascular disease pertains to the disorders that affect our arteries and veins. For the three most common types of vascular disease --carotid, aortic and peripheral – aging is a major risk factor. Recent studies suggest that pathological changes not only predispose the vasculature to disease but also impair compensatory adaptations to various stimuli including shear force and injury. Other studies have demonstrated a progressive increase in oxidative stress, activation of inflammatory mediators, and increasing endothelial dysfunction in both humans and animals. |
|
| GIANT MAMMALS CAUSE PREHISTORY RETHINK |
| Two of the world's lost prehistoric giants, a rhino-sized Australian marsupial and a buffalo-sized South American rodent, were the largest known mammals of their kind and much larger than previously thought, according to two new studies. |
|
| ANCIENT HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS EVEN OLDER |
| The world's highest mountains may be almost nine times older than previously believed, according to U.S. geologists. |
|
| ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE GREATER 1.4 BILLION YEARS AGO |
| Billions of years ago, there was a lot more greenhouse gas than today, and that was a good thing – else the Earth might be an icy ball. |
|
| METHANE ERUPTION BLAMED FOR MASS EXTINCTION |
| A massive explosion of colourless, odourless natural gas erupting from the ocean depths may have caused the worst mass extinction in the Earth's history some 251 million years ago, according to U.S. geologists. |
|
| PLANETARY TILT NOT A SPOILER FOR HABITATION |
| In B science fiction movies, a terrible force often pushes the Earth off its axis and spells disaster for all life on Earth. In reality, life would still be possible on Earth and any Earth-like planets if the axis tilt were greater than it is now, according to Penn State researchers. |
|
| ANCIENT SUPERFLOOD BROUGHT CLIMATE CHAOS |
| A catastrophic 'superflood' following the rupture of a massive glacier-dammed lake in Canada at the end of the Ice Age probably plunged the world into centuries of climatic chaos. |
|
| GRAVITY MAP SHOWS EARTH IS VERY LUMPY |
| Earth is a lumpy, squishy place - or so the newest, best-ever gravity map of the planet has revealed. |
|
| DEEP CARBON COULD TRIGGER MASS EXTINCTION |
| A vast reservoir of carbon is stashed beneath the Earth's crust and could be released by a major volcanic eruption, unleashing a mass extinction of the kind that last occurred 200 million years ago, German geologists report. |
|
| DINOSAURS DOOMED EVEN BEFORE IMPACT: SCIENTISTS |
| The dinosaurs were probably heading for extinction even before an asteroid strike wiped them out 65 million years ago, argue New Zealand scientists. |
|
| LEAF FALL IN ANCIENT POLAR FORESTS STILL A MYSTERY |
| Explorers in the 1800s discovered through fossils that deciduous forests once covered the poles, but researchers still do not know why leaf-dropping trees were preferred over evergreens. |
|
| ANOTHER METEOR STRIKE BLAMED FOR EXTINCTIONS |
| A large meteorite collided 380 million years ago into what is now the Moroccan desert and may have caused one of the five known mass extinctions of life on Earth, researchers report. |
|
| GLOBAL GARDEN GROWS GREENER |
| A NASA-Department of Energy jointly funded study concludes the Earth has been greening over the past 20 years. As climate changed, plants found it easier to grow. |
|
| ANCIENT DUNG REVEALS A PICTURE OF THE PAST |
| The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. |
|
| SCIENTISTS FIND EVIDENCE FOR CRUCIAL ROOT IN THE HISTORY OF PLANT EVOLUTION |
| If ancient plants had not migrated from the shallow seas of early Earth to the barren land of the continents, life as we know it might never have emerged. And now it appears this massive floral colonization may have been spurred by a single genetic mutation that allowed primitive plants to make lignin, a chemical process that leads to the formation of a cell wall. |
|
| PINE TREES MAY HELP CREATE SMOG, ACID RAIN |
| Rather than being a global warming solution, pine trees may be inducing smog and acid rain by releasing vast amounts of nitrogen oxide into the air, researchers have discovered. |
|
| LONG-LOST RECORDS CONFIRM RISING SEA LEVEL |
| The discovery of 160 year old records in the archives of the Royal Society, London, has given scientists further evidence that Australian sea levels are rising. |
|
| UMASS STUDY RECONSIDERS FORMATION OF ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET |
| Findings detailed in Jan. 16 issue of Nature; greenhouse gases implicated
A study by University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Robert DeConto posits an alternative theory regarding why Antarctica suddenly became glaciated 34 million years ago. |
|
| 'THE END OF THE WORLD' HAS ALREADY BEGUN, UW SCIENTISTS SAY |
| In its 4.5 billion years, Earth has evolved from its hot, violent birth to the celebrated watery blue planet that stands out in pictures from space. But in a new book, two noted University of Washington astrobiologists say the planet already has begun the long process of devolving into a burned-out cinder, eventually to be swallowed by the sun. |
|
| DINOSAURS EXPERIENCED CLIMATE CHANGES BEFORE K-T COLLISION |
| Climate change had little to do with the demise of the dinosaurs, but the last million years before their extinction had a complex pattern of warming and cooling events that are important to our understanding of the end of their reign, according to geologists. |
|
| POLAR BEAR HEADED FOR EXTINCTION, SAYS UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA SCIENTIST |
| Unless the pace of global warming is abated, polar bears could disappear within 100 years, says a University of Alberta expert in Arctic ecosystems. |
|
| TUNGUSKA-TYPE IMPACTS LESS COMMON THAN THOUGHT |
| Smaller asteroid impacts, such as the famed Tunguska event that devastated Siberia early last century, are less likely than previously thought, Canadian and American astronomers have found. |
|
| SATELLITES REVEAL A MYSTERY OF LARGE CHANGE IN EARTH'S GRAVITY FIELD |
| Satellite data since 1998 indicates the bulge in the Earth's gravity field at the equator is growing, and scientists think that the ocean may hold the answer to the mystery of how the changes in the trend of Earth's gravity are occurring. |
|
| COSMIC RAYS LINKED TO GLOBAL WARMING |
| Researchers studying global warming have often been confounded by the differences between observed increases in surface-level temperatures and unchanging low-atmosphere temperatures. Because of this discrepancy, some have argued that global warming is unproven, suggesting instead that true warming should show uniformly elevated temperatures from the surface through the atmosphere. Researchers have proposed a theory that changes in cloud cover could help explain the puzzling phenomenon, but none-until now-have come up with an argument that could account for the varying heat profiles. |
|
| GEOLOGIST’S DISCOVERY MAY UNLOCK SECRETS TO START OF LIFE ON EARTH. SCIENTIST CONTINUES TO BUILD CASE FOR ORIGIN OF PLATE TECTONICS. |
| A Saint Louis University geologist has unearthed further evidence in his mounting case that shifting of the continents -- and perhaps life on Earth -- began much earlier than many scientists believe. |
|
| NOAH'S FLOOD HYPOTHESIS MAY NOT HOLD WATER. RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE PROFESSOR PART OF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH GROUP REFUTING POPULAR THEORY. |
| In 1996, marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman published a scientifically popular hypothesis, titled Noah's Flood Hypothesis. The researchers presented evidence of a bursting flood about 7,500 years ago in what is now the Black Sea. This, some say, supports the biblical story of Noah and the flood. |
|
| 100,000-YEAR CLIMATE PATTERN LINKED TO SUN'S MAGNETIC CYCLES |
| Thanks to new calculations by a Dartmouth geochemist, scientists are now looking at the earth's climate history in a new light.
Mukul Sharma, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth, examined existing sets of geophysical data and noticed something remarkable: the sun's magnetic activity is varying in 100,000-year cycles, a much longer time span than previously thought, and this solar activity, in turn, may likely cause the 100,000-year climate cycles on earth. This research helps scientists understand past climate trends and prepare for future ones. |
|
| STUDY OF DUST IN ICE CORES SHOWS VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS INTERFERE WITH THE EFFECT OF SUNSPOTS ON GLOBAL CLIMATE |
| University at Buffalo scientists working with ice cores have solved a mystery surrounding sunspots and their effect on climate that has puzzled scientists since they began studying the phenomenon. |
|
| NEW WAVE SUPERCOMPUTERS CATCH BIG WAVES |
| The new wave in computing - super-fast machines churning out three-dimensional models viewable in high-tech, immersive theaters - may teach us more about the big waves that sometimes threaten people who live near the seashore. |
|
| NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS EVIDENCE FOR EARLIEST LIFE ON EARTH. U.S. AND SWEDISH SCIENTISTS SUGGEST A NON-BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN FOR CARBON IN ANCIENT ROCKS. |
| New geological and geochemical data call into question recent claims for fossil life on Earth greater than 3.8 billion years ago, say researchers from The George Washington University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History in the May 24 issue of the journal Science. Such claims have been based on interpreting the sensitive biochemical behaviour of carbon, the principal element of life, and its relationship with the rocks in which the carbon is found. |
|
| NEW REPORT EXPLAINS ICE-AGE MYSTERY |
| University of California researchers have solved a longstanding mystery for scientists trying to understand how Earth's climate can quickly shift between cold and warm modes. |
|
| SCIENTISTS PUSH BACK PRIMATE ORIGINS FROM 65 MILLION TO 85 MILLION YEARS AGO. FIELD MUSEUM SCIENTIST CHALLENGES ACCEPTED THEORIES, DATING METHODS. |
| New research that accounts for gaps in the fossil record challenges traditional methods of interpreting fossils and constructing evolutionary trees. Applying a new statistical approach to primates demonstrates that this group-from which humans developed-originated 85 million years ago (Mya) rather than 65 Mya, as is widely accepted. |
|
| UCLA SCIENTISTS, COLLEAGUES SUBSTANTIATE BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF EARLIEST FOSSILS |
| UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf and colleagues have substantiated the biological origin of the earliest known cellular fossils, which are 3.5 billion years old. The research is published in the March 7 issue of the journal Nature. |
|
| CATACLYSM 3.9 BILLION YEARS AGO WAS CAUSED BY ASTEROIDS, NOT COMETS, RESEARCHERS SAY |
| The bombardment that resurfaced the Earth 3.9 billion years ago was produced by asteroids, not comets, according to David Kring of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Barbara Cohen, formerly at the UA and now with the University of Hawaii. Their findings appear today in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union. |
|
| A REFINED APPROACH TO MEASURING TIME OFFERS CLUES TO EARTH'S BEGINNINGS |
| Researchers using refined techniques to study minerals from meteorites now believe it took about 20 million years for the Earth to coalesce from the materials already gathered around our sun as the solar system. Recent estimates had pegged the interval closer to 50 million years. |
|
| UNDERGRAD FINDS CLUES TO 400- MILLION-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY |
| Steven Porter, a Johns Hopkins University senior from Cherry Hill, N.J., has conducted original research that adds new and potentially decisive evidence to a debate about the identity of one of the first organisms to make the epochal leap from the sea to dry land approximately 400 million years ago. |
|
| MOON A CHIP OFF THE EARTH BLOCK |
| The Moon probably formed after a Mars-sized object collided with a fully-formed Earth, new computer simulations suggest.
The calculations, presented by Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz, provide the most sophisticated scenario yet of the Moon's birth. |
|
| COMETS AND METEORITES ARE THE FIRST GENETICS ON THE EARTH |
| Russian scientists have produced a new vision of the hypothesis put forward by researchers from the Berkley University and National Laboratory. According to it, meteorite bombardment could have played a key role in life evolution on the Earth. |
|
| THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THE OCEAN WAS BOILING |
| At one time the temperature of the Sun was much lower than now. However, geologic evidence shows that even then,
in the first billion years of the Earth's existence, its oceans did not freeze. |
|
