There is a vast menagerie of potentially habitable worlds in the cosmos, which means the universe could be home to a diversity of life beyond what we can imagine. Creatures built on silicon rather than carbon, or organisms ...
Astrobiology
Jan 23, 2024
0
24
The devastating tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011 set off a series of events which have long fascinated scientists like me. It was so powerful that it caused 5 million tons of debris to wash into the Pacific—1.5 million ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 18, 2023
0
10
An international team of ecologists, life scientists, conservationists and biologists has found that humans prey on approximately one-third of all vertebrate species in existence. In their study, reported in the journal Communications ...
The world's oceans, which have absorbed most of the excess heat caused by humanity's carbon pollution, continued to see record-breaking temperatures last year, according to research published Wednesday.
Earth Sciences
Jan 11, 2023
11
851
Here's a thorny problem: What if life doesn't always appear on planets that can support it? What if we find more and more exoplanets and determine that some of them are habitable? What if we also determine that life hasn't ...
Astrobiology
Dec 21, 2022
6
87
Some 250 million years ago—long before dinosaurs roamed the earth—global warming and acid oceans caused by the rapid volcanic emission of the Siberian Traps led to the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which resulted ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 3, 2022
0
136
With about one-third of the world's corals currently under threat of extinction due to climate change, Curtin researchers have made the encouraging discovery of a "lost" species of coral that had been hidden for more than ...
Plants & Animals
May 5, 2022
0
124
When holding a right hand in front of a mirror, one can see a reflected image of a left hand and vice versa. In 1848, Louis Pasteur discovered that organic molecules are much like our hands: they come in mirror-image pairs ...
Analytical Chemistry
Apr 26, 2022
0
80
The Atacama Desert stretches along Chile's Pacific coast over 100,000 square kilometers. It is one of the most arid places in the world. Annual precipitation averages 0.5 mm, which is less than for the Death Valley in California.
Planetary Sciences
Nov 30, 2021
0
29
A group of ancient amphibians called temnospondyls evolved stiffer spinal columns to adapt to aquatic life, contrary to previous hypotheses, according to a study published June 9, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE ...
Evolution
Jun 9, 2021
0
20
