Today, Mars is a cold, dry planet covered in dust, but scientists believe it looked very different billions of years ago, with a much thicker atmosphere, flowing rivers and lakes, and possibly even conditions that could have supported life. Over time, Mars lost most of that protective atmosphere, the planet cooled, and its water either…
Scientists working on Alpine glacier (AI-generated image) Scientists drilled 33 feet into ice and recovered a 2,000-year climate record, a frozen capsule that can reveal how the atmosphere breathed long before modern measurements.High on the Weißseespitze glacier in the eastern Alps, an international research team extracted an ice core barely 33 feet long that preserves…
Since the first planet beyond our solar system was confirmed in the 1990s, astronomers have gone on to catalogue more than 6,000 exoplanets, yet not a single moon orbiting any of them has ever been confirmed. That long, frustrating gap in the search for exomoons may have just gotten stranger rather than simpler. While studying…
Deep beneath the Pilbara region of Western Australia lies some of the oldest and best preserved crust anywhere on the planet, and it has just revealed something unexpected about Earth’s earliest history. Volcanic rocks dating back 3.1 billion years show chemical signs that surface water had already travelled deep into the planet’s interior at that…
Honeybees have long depended entirely on flower pollen for a group of essential fats called sterols, nutrients they cannot produce inside their own bodies and cannot get from any other natural food source. As climate change and modern farming reduce the variety of flowers available to bees, access to these sterols has become increasingly scarce,…
Image(s): Smithsonian Gardens Magnolia trees are admired around the world for their large, fragrant flowers, but they also preserve one of the oldest evolutionary stories in the plant kingdom. Long before bees, butterflies or many modern flowering plants appeared, magnolias were already blooming across prehistoric landscapes. Fossil evidence suggests the ancestors of modern magnolias evolved…
The Great Barrier Reef near the Whitsunday, Australia, region is viewed from the air (AP photo) Scientists have completed the first comprehensive survey of the microscopic life living in the open waters of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. They have uncovered hundreds of bacterial species which were not know previously and hundreds of thousands of viruses.The…
Image Credit: Shutterstock The Earth revolves in a cosmic system which is surrounded by billions of asteroids often referred to as ‘fossils’ of our solar system. While these rocks are rich in resources, they represent a significant threat to humanity. In response, China has developed an ambitious planetary defence strategy that aims to do more…
Two scientists can notice the exact same odd result in a failed experiment and walk away from it completely differently. One sees a ruined sample, clears it off the bench, and moves on to the next attempt. The other stops, looks closer, and asks what could have caused something that was never supposed to happen….
At just 16 years old, Canadian student Evan Budz has developed an autonomous AI-powered robot turtle that could help scientists tackle one of the world’s fastest-growing environmental problems: microplastic pollution. Inspired by the graceful swimming of a snapping turtle he encountered during a family camping trip, Budz spent nearly 4,000 hours designing and refining a…
