- Phoenix Landing Is Out Of This World: An ambitious effort to determine whether Mars' arctic region once harboured life has begun with the successful landing of NASA's Phoenix probe near the Red Planet's north pole.
- Phoenix Spacecraft Reports Good Health After Mars Landing: The landing ends a 422-million-mile journey from Earth and begins a three-month mission that will use instruments to taste and sniff the northern polar site's soil and ice.
- See How It Lands: A camera on a Mars-orbiting spacecraft caught an image of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute just before it descended onto the Red Planet’s northern plains.
- NASA Holds Breath For Phoenix Mars Lander's Touchdown: Phoenix is designed to dig into the cementlike layer of ice that researchers believe lies buried a few inches below the surface in the planet's polar regions, scanning for signs of past liquid water and organic compounds, the carbon-rich molecules that make life on Earth possible.
- Nasa Aims To Unveil Secrets Of Red Planet: The unmanned Phoenix spacecraft must complete a breathtaking sequence of manoeuvres after crashing into the planet's thin atmosphere at almost 13,000mph if it is to touch down on the icy ground intact.
- Were Meteorites The Origin Of Life On Earth?: A new study finds that a pair of chemical building blocks similar to those in genetic material was present in a meteorite before it fell to Earth.
- NASA Finds New Mineral In Comet Dust: The mineral, a manganese silicide named Brownleeite, was discovered within an interplanetary dust particle that appears to have originated from comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellerup.
- Life Cooked Up In Outer Space?: The odds are improving that life exists beyond Earth. A meteorite that formed billions of years ago and eventually crashed on Earth harbors two important components of RNA and DNA, the fundamental molecules of life.
- Green Reapers: Fledgling farmers in the Middle East treasured ornamentation as much as irrigation. These ancient villagers traveled great distances to obtain green stone for making beads and pendants that held special meaning for them in a brave new agricultural world.
- Diamonds On Demand: Lab-grown gemstones are now practically indistinguishable from mined diamonds. Scientists and engineers see a world of possibilities. Jewelers are less enthusiastic.
- Are Arctic Sea Ice Melts Causing Sea Levels To Rise?: Recent NASA photos showed the opening of the Northwest Passage and that a third of the Arctic's sea ice has melted in recent years. Are sea levels already starting to rise accordingly?
- Life's Raw Materials May Have Come From The Stars: Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin.
- Mysterious Mountain Dinosaur May Be New Species: A partial dinosaur skeleton from a remote British Columbia site is the first ever found in Canadian mountains and may represent a new species.
- Satellite Network To Predict Earthquakes: A future network of satellites orbiting the earth may be able to detect an impending earthquake by monitoring our planet's ionosphere.
- Technology Enrolled In Hunt For Life On Mars: A team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has created a device for use on the European ExoMars rover mission scheduled for launch in 2013.
- Sea Ice Melt Could Thaw Permafrost, Too: Scientists tracking a dramatic shrinkage in Arctic sea ice over the past few years have come to a worrisome conclusion: If the trend continues, it could speed up the melting of Arctic permafrost as well.
- From Planet To Plutoid: Pluto now has a family of its own, after astronomers have struggled for years to give it a place among its celestial brethren.
- Mountains Could Have Growth Spurts: Findings suggest that current theories about plate tectonics - the process that creates and moves continents, giving rise to mountain ranges - may need updating.
- Fossilized Burrows Suggest Lizard-like Creatures In Triassic Antarctica: For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods - land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages - in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago.
- Something's Shaking In Antarctica: Scientists have discovered massive, slow-motion "ice quakes" trembling twice a day through the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, an Alaska-sized swath of Antarctica.
- Monitoring Antarctic Ice Movement Is A Sticky Business: Scientists discover an important clue in predicting future consequences of climate change: the mechanism that moves ice streams.
- Tunguska, A Century Later: A century later, scientists are still debating the cause of the Tunguska blast. Through the years a variety of scenarios have been proposed, many of them involving the explosion of an unusual extraterrestrial object, everything from a small black hole or a chunk of antimatter to a UFO.
- New Geomorphological Index Created For Studying Active Tectonics: To build a hospital, nuclear power station or a large dam you need to know the possible earthquake risks of the terrain.
- Small Planet Discovered Orbiting Small Star: At three Earth masses, the planet, referred to as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, establishes a record for the lowest mass planet yet discovered.
- Melting Methane Thawed Frozen Planet: The rapid release of methane into the Earth's atmosphere 635 million years ago caused runaway global warming, and may happen again in the near future.
- Big Earthquakes Spark Jolts Worldwide: Until California's magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquake set off small jolts as far away as Yellowstone National Park, scientists did not believe large earthquakes sparked smaller tremors at distant locations.
- World's Fastest Growing Mud Volcano Is Collapsing: The world's fastest-growing mud volcano is collapsing and could subside to depths of more than 140 metres with consequences for the surrounding environment.
- Domain Of The Dead: Stonehenge served as an elite medieval cemetery for more than 500 years.
- Rocky Microbes Push Back Life's Origins: A rich mix of microbes living in partially submerged rocks provide new evidence that life on our planet had a much earlier start than previously thought.
- Australians Find A Mother Of A Fossil: The world's oldest mother and her baby have been found fossilised in north-western Australia, pushing the known record of live birth back by about 200 million years.
- Salty Mars Looking Bad for Life: New calculations suggest the Red Planet was too briny to harbor microbes.
- Mars Rover Eyes Hot Spring-Like Deposits: Deposits of near pure silica on Mars were formed by volcanic vapours or hot-spring-type events crossing through soil and could contain traces of past life.
- Life Reaches Deeper Beneath Seabed: Signs of life have been found at a record depth of 1.6 kilometres beneath the seabed. The discovery of microbes in searing hot sediments under the Atlantic seabed off Newfoundland, Canada, doubles the previous depth record of 842 metres.
- The Beginning of a Star's Explosive End: In a stroke of unprecedented good luck, an international team of astronomers has caught a stellar explosion called a supernova at the very beginning of the blast.
- Chinese Researchers Take Stock After Quake: Massive temblor may shift priorities for geologists, ecologists, and others.
- New Edition of Free Climate Change Booklet Available: The National Academies have released the 2008 edition of Understanding and Responding to Climate Change, a free booklet designed to give the public a comprehensive and easy-to-read analysis of findings and recommendations from our reports on climate change.
- Martian Canyons By A Trickle Or A Gush?: Geologists are re-evaluating valleys long interpreted as signs of a warm and wet early Mars.
- Is Indy Chasing A Fake?: As Indiana Jones races against time to find an ancient crystal skull in his new movie adventure, he should perhaps take a moment to check its authenticity.
- They're Fake Indy!: Two allegedly pre-Columbian crystal skulls turn out to be counterfeits.
- Death Toll May Climb In China Earthquake Aftermath: The Chinese government announced that the death toll from the devastating Sichuan Province earthquake could climb to more than 50,000 people. Nearly 20,000 have died to date, with an estimated 40,000 missing.
- Climate Clues In Ice: A kilometers-long ice core from Antarctica has recorded climate information for the past 800,000 years and has revealed a three millennia long period when carbon dioxide levels in the air were lower than any previously measured.
- Vast Chile Volcano Ash Cloud Partially Collapses: A towering cloud of hot ash, gas and molten rock spewed miles into the air by a volcano in southern Chile has partially collapsed, raising fears it could smother surrounding villages.
- Hot Climate Could Shut Down Plate Tectonics: A new study of possible links between climate and geophysics on Earth and similar planets finds that prolonged heating of the atmosphere can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet's crust to become locked in place.
- Chinese Quake Likely A Mega-Catastrophe: Researchers fear that the magnitude-7.9 earthquake that struck near the major city of Chengdu will easily be China's biggest killer since 1976's Tangshan quake, conservatively estimated to have taken 250,000 lives.
- From Bountiful to Barren: In a finding that may help scientists better predict the pace of climate change, new research shows how the Sahara Desert went from bountiful to bone-dry over a period of several thousand years.
- Iron 'Snow' Keeps Mercury's Magnetic Field: New scientific evidence suggests that deep inside the planet Mercury, iron "snow" forms and falls toward the center of the planet, much like snowflakes form in Earth's atmosphere and fall to the ground.
- Blame It on the Beetles: Voracious insects ruined a whole lot of dinosaur fossils.
- When Did Dinosaurs Go Extinct?: Scientists have pinpointed the date of the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary more precisely than ever with refinements to the argon-argon isotopic method of dating rocks and fossils.
- Earth Hums While Making 'Love' Waves: A subtle and mysterious global hum has been detected by seismologists studying records from earth's most boring seismic stations.
- Darwin's Theory Of Evolution Goes Online: The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online project makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free.
- Signs of Hidden Ocean Underneath Titan's Crust: Slippage in Titan's rotation suggests water between its surface and core, and a higher likelihood of ancient life on Saturn's biggest moon.
- Hopes Fade For Tanzanian Miners: About 65 miners are feared dead after rainfall triggered the collapse of mines in Tanzania, Africa, the source of tanzanite, a valuable blue gemstone found only in a small area near Arusha.
- Google Earth User Discovers Meteorite Crater: The discovery of a meteorite crater in Western Australia's Pilbara has sparked a huge search on the internet for similar geographical features.
- Cassini Tastes Organic Material At Saturn's Geyser Moon: The Cassini spacecraft tasted and sampled a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn's moon Enceladus during a close flyby.
- Enceladus Hints At The 'L' Word: The latest encounter between the Cassini spacecraft and Saturn's moon Enceladus has come tantalizingly close to revealing the second location in the solar system that could support life.
- Scientists Discover Clue To Delay Of Life On Earth: A deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.
- Fossil Sheds Light On The History Of Sex: A long, thin rope-like creature standing erect on the sea floor up to 570 million years ago has been identified as the first animal on Earth with the capacity for sexual rather than asexual reproduction.
- Rare Mummified Dinosaur Uncovered: Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.
- Exploring Mars: Icy Promethei Planum: Latest results from the Mars Advanced Radar for Ionosphere and Subsurface Sounding onboard Mars Express reveal the thickness of the Promethei Planum ice sheet in the Martian south polar region cap exceeds 3500 m.
- Do Meteors Create Life?: New and more varied life evolved in Earth's oceans in the wake of a 100+ meteorite impact during the Ordovician period.
- Whiffs From An Alien World: A 40-minute gaze with the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed methane - and water - in the atmosphere of HD 189733b.
- A Solar System That Looks Like Home: The Spitzer Space Telescope reveals a disk of gas and dust surrounding AA Tauri 450 light-years away bearing a close resemblance to our early solar system.
- The Next Ocean: Increasing carbon dioxide in the air is changing the pH of the ocean, which could mean very different communities of sea creatures.
- Peru Meteorite May Rewrite Rule Books: The object, which left a 15 metre crater, theoretically should have disintegrated in the atmosphere long before reaching the earth's surface.
- Ten Questions Shaping 21st-Century Earth Science Identified: These questions represent where the field stands, how it arrived at this point, and where it may be headed.
- The Great Flooding From Beneath The Sea: Plate tectonics drove Cretaceous seas onto land 80 million years ago.
- Bats Flew Before They Could Echolocate: The oldest known bat fossil, discovered in Wyoming, has wings like a modern bat but lacks adaptations for navigating by listening for high-pitched echoes.
- The Earth Has More Than One North Pole: There are at least seven different possible definitions of the "North Pole".
- Key To Life Before Its Origin On Earth?: Researchers studying carbonaceous chondrite meteorites have found that some of the possible abiotic precursors to the origin of life on Earth carry "handedness" in a larger number than previously thought.
- Dust Strongly Linked To Past Climate Shifts : The amount of dust entering the equatorial Pacific peaks sharply during repeated ice ages, then declines when climate warms.
- Enormous Jurassic Sea Predator Discovered In Norway: Archaeologists have discovered of one of the largest dinosaur-era marine reptiles ever found - an enormous predator known as a pliosaur estimated to be almost 50 feet long.
- Mystery Of The Antarctic Ice Sheet Solved?: Researchers have presented new temperature records using ancient foraminifera bearing sea floor mud recovered from Tanzania, East Africa.
- "Clean" Coal Power Plant Scuttled: The FutureGen power plant would have captured and stored all the greenhouse gases associated with burning coal as well as produce hydrogen fuel.
- Compost Can Turn Agricultural Soils Into A Carbon Sink: Applying organic fertilizers to agricultural land could contribute significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
- Giving Earth An Umbrella: Spraying millions of metric tons of sulfate particles into the atmosphere could reverse some human-caused global warming.
- Florida Gives Evolution A Thumbs-Up: The Florida Board of Education has approved new science standards that bestow the state's blessing upon the teaching of evolution for the first time in Florida's history.
- Ulysses Spacecraft Flies Over Sun's North Pole: The Ulysses spacecraft continues to go where no other spacecraft has gone before.
- Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up: Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland.
- The Secret Ingredient In Yellowstone's Travertine: Research at Yellowstone National Park's Mammoth Hot Springs provides evidence that microbes are key to hot springs mineralization.
- Fire Below The Ice: An active volcano could be warming the West Antarctic ice sheet.
- Earth's Plates May Take A Break: Time and tide may wait for no man, but ratios of the elements niobium and thorium and two isotopes of helium in ancient rocks suggest that continents occasionally do.
- Plowing The Ancient Seas: Recent sonar surveys off the southeastern coast of the United States have detected dozens of broad furrows on the seafloor - trenches that were carved by icebergs during the last ice age.
- Will Beetles Inherit The Earth?: There are approximately 350,000 species of beetles on Earth, and probably millions more yet to be discovered, accounting for about 25% of all known life forms on the planet.
- Red Planet Still Packs Surprises: Scientists find an active glacier and evidence of an unusual greenhouse effect.
- Long-Lost Relative Of Whales Found?: A group of paleontologists has identified what they believe is the closest relative of whales, dolphins, and porpoises--an extinct, raccoon-sized creature.
- Astronomers Monitor Asteroid to Pass Near Mars: Based on the latest analysis of 2007 WD5's trajectory employing archival imagery, the odds for the asteroid impacting Mars on are 1-in-25.
- Asteroid May Hit Mars: The newly discovered asteroid 2007 WD5 has a chance of hitting Mars on January 30th, according to preliminary calculations of its orbit.
- Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste: By burning away all the pesky carbon and other impurities, coal power plants produce heaps of radiation.
- Lessons From An Interglacial Past: Dramatic rise in ancient sea levels portends dire news for current climate crisis.
- Epoxi Spacecraft Retargeted To Comet Hartley 2: NASA has substituted Hartley 2 as Epoxi's destination after comet Boethin could not be found, possibly due to breaking up into pieces too small for detection.
- Giant Dinosaur Found In Iceblock: Palaeontologists working on top a frozen Antarctic mountain have extracted a rock and ice fossil popsicle encasing the remains of a massive, previously unknown dinosaur.
- Man Finds Park's 1,000th Diamond Of '07: Denis Tyrrell was walking past a hole he'd filled in while searching for gems at Crater of Diamonds State Park, when he saw a 3.48-carat sparkle.
- New Theory Of Origin Of Life Proposed: Life on Earth may have originated as the organic filling in a multilayer sandwich of mica sheets.
- Did Carbon Save Earth From A Deep Freeze?: Researchers are postulating that carbon in the ocean, dissolved from mineral deposits on the sea floor, has prevented Earth from becoming a giant snowball.
- Mummified Dinosaur Reveals Surprises: A partially mummified hadrosaur discovered by a teenager in North Dakota may be the most complete dinosaur ever found, with intact skin that shows evidence of stripes.
- Twisted Sister: Twin Planets Earth and Venus Were Separated at Birth: The bottom line: just be glad you live here.
- Massive Canadian Heavy Oil Reserves Could Be Exploited: Conventional light oil such as that in the North Sea or Saudi Arabia is running out and getting more expensive to extract. The pressure is on to find an efficient way of extracting heavy oil.
- Ocean Fertilization A Sterile Idea: Ocean fertilization, the process of adding iron or other nutrients to the ocean to cause large algal blooms, has been discredited as a possible solution to global warming.
- Signs Of Lightning On Venus: Given that lightning on Earth isn't shy about attracting attention, it might come as a surprise that the phenomenon has been hard to detect on Venus.
- Jade Earrings Open Door On Ancient Trade: One of the most extensive trade networks in the prehistoric world has been uncovered after mineral analysis determined the source of jade used in two types of earring.
- Cow-like Dinosaur Sucked Up Plants: Palaeontologists have unveiled a 110-million-year old African dinosaur with a mouth that sucked up plants like a vacuum cleaner and had almost translucent skull bones.
- Earliest Birds Acted More Like Turkeys Than Cuckoos: Comparing the claw curvatures of Mesozoic and modern birds provides new evidence that the evolutionary ancestors of modern birds made their livings primarily on the ground rather than in trees.
- Big Chunk Of The Universe Is Missing - Again: Not only has a large chunk of the universe thought to have been found in 2002 apparently gone missing again but it is taking some friends with it.
- Three New Exo-planets Discovered: The Wide Angle Search for Planets team of planet-hunting astronomers have announced the discovery of three new planets.
- Dark Matter Not A Done Deal?: Supposed "smoking-gun" observation for dark matter may be explained by modified gravity.
- Obscure Glider Proves To Be Primate's Closest Cousin: The flying lemur's name is a misnomer: It's neither a true lemur, nor can it fly. Nonetheless, this squirrel-sized native of Southeast Asian rain forests has just glided into the limelight.
- Fossil Sparks: New finds ignite the never-ending controversy over ape and human evolution.
- Clay That Kills: A fistful of slimy green clay may be just what the doctor ordered. Researchers studying a special type of French clay found that it smothers a diverse array of bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant strains and a particularly nasty pathogen that causes skin ulcers.
- Man Nearly Tosses 4.38 Carat Diamond: Chad Johnson has found about 80 diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park since moving to Murfreesboro in February, but the former Iowa resident nearly threw away his largest find yet.
- 3.92 Carat Diamond Found In Arkansas: A Wisconsin man digging with his fiancee at the Arkansas Crater of Diamonds State Park found the white stone, but the rock will go into his collection because his betrothed already has a ring.
- Mixing It Up in the Early Solar System: Scientists baffled when the Stardust spacecraft returned minerals from icy comet Wild 2 that formed at more than 1400°C.
- Digging the Scene: Paleontologists have unearthed an ancient, sediment-filled burrow that holds remains of the creatures that dug it. The find is the first indisputable evidence that some dinosaurs maintained an underground lifestyle for at least part of their lives.
- Pluto-bound Spacecraft Sees Changes In Jupiter System: The voyage of the New Horizons probe through the Jupiter system provided a bird’s-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft.
- How Do Artists Portray Exoplanets They've Never Seen?: How realistic are images of planets around other stars - and should they be?
- Ancient African Megadroughts May Have Driven Human Evolution -- Out Of Africa: From 135,000 to 90,000 years ago tropical Africa had megadroughts more extreme and widespread than any previously known for that region, according to new research.
- Though Colder Than Earth, Saturn's Moon Titan Is "Tropical" In Nature: If space travelers ever visit Saturn's largest moon, they will find a tropical world where temperatures plunge to minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit, methane rains from the sky and dunes of ice or tar cover the planet's most arid regions.
- The Arnold Schwarzenegger of Duck-Billed Dinosaurs Discovered: The newest dinosaur species to emerge from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had some serious bite.
- Cave Records Provide Clues To Climate Change: Growing inside the caves of the tropical Pacific island of Borneo are some of the keys to understanding how the Earth's climate suddenly changed - several times - over the last 25,000 years.
- In Hot Water: Ice Age Defrosted By Warming Ocean, Not Rise In CO2: Warmer waters in the deep Pacific triggered the end of the last ice age, preceding the rise in greenhouse gas levels.
- Oxygen Probably Present 50 To 100 Million Years Earlier Than First Believed: Two multinational teams of scientists are reporting that traces of oxygen appeared in Earth's atmosphere 50 to 100 million years before the "Great Oxidation Event" between 2.3 and 2.4 billion years ago.
- When Bivalves Ruled The World: Before the worst mass extinction of life in Earth's history -- 252 million years ago -- ocean life was diverse and clam-like organisms called brachiopods dominated. After the calamity, when little else existed, a different kind of clam-like organism, called a bivalve, took over.
- Looking For Life In And Under Antarctic Ice: Prior to approximately 10 years ago, no one thought that life could exist beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, which can be more than two miles thick in places, because conditions were believed to be too extreme. Now there is hope.
- Breathing Space For Oxygen: Terrestrial volcanoes appear to have contributed to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere more than 2 billion years ago. The atmospheric shift, which allowed life to flourish, had long been attributed to ancient bacteria.
- Coral Reefs Losing Ground Throughout the Pacific: Surveys of coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean reveal that the critical marine ecosystems are disappearing at a rapid clip, outpacing even rainforests.
- New Kenyan Fossils Challenge Established Views On Early Evolution Of Humans: Two new fossils cast fresh light on a little understood and important period of human prehistory at the dawn of our own genus, Homo.
- Phoenix Spacecraft Heads For Polar Region Of Mars: NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission has blasted off, aiming for a May 25, 2008 arrival at the Red Planet and a close-up examination of the surface of the northern polar region.
- Crystals In Meteorite Reveal Clues To Early Solar System Evolution: Scientists employ an ion microprobe to study zircons in eucrites, providing a snapshot of the early solar system and clues to the early evolution of Earth’s mantle and core.
- Planet Discovered Orbiting A Giant Red Star: The new discovery is helping astronomers to understand what will happen to the planets in our solar system when our Sun becomes a red-giant star.
- "Extinct" Reef-Forming Glass Sponges Discovered Off Washington State Coast: The species of glass sponges capable of building reefs were formerly thought extinct for 100 million years.
- Coelacanth Fossil Sheds Light On Fin-to-Limb Evolution: A 400 million-year-old fossil of a coelacanth fin, the first finding of its kind, fills a shrinking evolutionary gap between fins and limbs.
- Of Cosmic Rays And Dangerous Days: Researchers may have uncovered the reason why Earth's biodiversity mysteriously plummets periodically. They have found that a rollercoaster-like wobble in the sun's orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy regularly moves Earth closer to a source of dangerous intergalactic cosmic rays.
- No Sardines For Pterosaurs: New physical and mathematical modelling refutes suggestions that extinct pterosaurs gathered their food by 'skimming' the surface of the ocean with their beaks.
- Saturn's Old Moon Iapetus Retains Its Youthful Figure: Saturn's distinctive moon Iapetus is cryogenically frozen in the equivalent of its teenage years. The moon has retained the youthful figure and bulging waistline it sported more than three billion years ago.
- Catastrophic Flooding Changed The Course Of British History: A catastrophic megaflood separated Britain from France hundreds of thousands of years ago.
- Saturn's Sixtieth Moon Discovered: Scientists have recently discovered that the planet Saturn is turning 60 - not years, but moons.
- Rise Of Dinosaurs In Late Triassic More Gradual Than Once Thought: Fossils discovered in the oft-painted arroyos of northern New Mexico show for the first time that dinosaurs and their non-dinosaur ancestors lived side by side for tens of millions of years, disproving the notion that dinosaurs rapidly replaced their supposedly outmoded predecessors.
- Glaciers And Ice Caps To Dominate Sea Level Rise This Century: Ice loss from glaciers and ice caps is expected to cause more global sea rise during this century than the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
- Science Museums Adapt in Struggle against Creationist Revisionism: Institutions step up fight against attacks on theory of evolution.
- Geologists Witness Unique Volcanic Mudflow In Action In New Zealand: Volcanologist Sarah Fagents had an amazing opportunity to study volcanic hazards first hand, when a volcanic mudflow broke through the banks of a volcanic lake at Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand.
- Saturn's Moon Hyperion Is Porous Like A Sponge: A new analysis of data from the Cassini spacecraft indicates that Saturn's highly cratered moon Hyperion is truly spongelike.
- Pioneering 3D View Of Near-Earth Magnetic 'Dance': Scientists have obtained the first-ever 3D picture of interconnected magnetic 'dances' in near-Earth space, known as magnetic reconnection events.
- New Undersea Images Challenge Prevailing Ideas About The Antarctic Ice Sheet: Using echo-sounding equipment to create images and maps of areas below the ocean floor, researchers have begun to unravel a new story about the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
- A Gemstone's Wild Ride: How diamonds erupt from deep within Earth.
- Lunar "UFO"s May Be Volcanic Belches: Mysterious lunar flashes match up geographically with puffs of radon gas.
- No More Black Holes?: A new hypothesis suggests the weirdest objects in the universe don't exist.
- How Radioactivity Keeps You Dry: Volcanic hot spots in Earth's crust like the one underlying Yellowstone National Park could be helping to keep North America from sinking.
- Bad News for Dinos Was Good News for Mammals: A new exhaustive fossil analysis says mammals originated after the demise of dinosaurs, but the debate continues...
- Computer Models Suggest Planetary And Extrasolar Planet Atmospheres: The world is abuzz with the discovery of an extrasolar, Earth-like planet around the star Gliese 581 that is relatively close to our Earth at 20 light years away in the constellation Libra.
- Looking Inside A Dune For Its Boom: Probing of booming sand dunes reveals a natural amplifier.
- Two More Active Moons Around Saturn: Saturn’s moons Tethys and Dione are flinging great streams of particles into space. The discovery suggests the possibility of some sort of geological activity, perhaps even volcanic, on these icy worlds.
- Scientists Simulate Effects Of Blowing Mars Dust: Gusting winds and the pulsating exhaust plumes from the Phoenix Mars Lander's descent engines could complicate NASA's forthcoming efforts to sample frozen soil from the surface of Mars.
- Middleman Fixes Center Of The Earth: A geoscientist has pinpointed the motion of the center of the Earth to within 1 millimeter - about the thickness of a dime - per year.
- Pluto's Bad Year Continues: The recently demoted dwarf planet Pluto is smaller and weighs less than its newfound neighbor Eris.
- Big and Birdlike: Chinese Dinosaur Was 3.5 Meters Tall: Paleontologists have unearthed the remains of an immense, fast-growing dinosaur whose body proportions don't match those predicted by the evolutionary trends that characterize its more diminutive kin.
- Gigantoraptor: It's a Bird, It's a Dinosaur, It's a Mystery: It may or may not have had feathers but it certainly had a toothless beak and stood more than 16 feet tall.
- Mars Probably Once Had A Huge Ocean: UC Berkeley geophycists are providing strong evidence that Mars once had an ocean.
- CT Scan Reveals Ancient Long-necked Gliding Reptile: The fossilized bones of a previously unknown, 220 million-year-old long-necked, gliding reptile may remain forever embedded in stone, but thanks to an industrial-size CT scanner, the bone structure and behavior of these small creatures are now known.
- New Earth or Planetary Hothouse?: Scientists disagree over the habitability of a planet orbiting a distant red dwarf.
- Are Plants Really Villains in Climate Change?: New research disputes the widely publicized claim that they emit loads of methane.
- Massive Transiting Planet With 31-hour Year Found Around Distant Star: An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey have announced the discovery of their third planet, TrES-3, in the constellation Hercules.
- Soils Offer New Hope As Carbon Sink: The huge potential of agricultural soils to reduce greenhouse gases and increase production at the same time has been reinforced by new research findings at NSW Department of Primary Industries' Wollongbar Agricultural Institute in Australia.
- Outcasts Of The Milky Way: Our galaxy may teem with rogue giant planets that were ejected from young solar systems. The number of homeless planets drifting through interstellar space may actually exceed the number of planets orbiting stars.
- Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did A Comet Blow Up Over Eastern Canada?: Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell.
- New Creation Museum Mostly Illustrates That Creationists Have Lots Of Cash : The guy who developed the Jaws and King Kong rides at Universal Studios is behind the new Creation Museum, just south of Cincinnati. Now Cincinnati will be known for something other than race riots...
- A Gloomy Mars Warms Up: For the past 30 years, NASA scientists have been using high-tech satellite equipment to study features on the face of Mars. It appears a slight change in the planet’s surface luster has caused its temperature to rise.
- Violent Past: Young Sun Withstood A Supernova Blast: A big bully pummeled the infant solar system, first by blasting it with a massive wind, then by exploding nearby, driving shock waves into the fledgling solar system and irrevocably altering its chemistry.
- Archaea In Hot Springs Use Ammonia For Energy: May Shed Light On Early Evolution: Discovered in the late 1970s, archaea are one of the three main branches on the tree of life, with bacteria and eukaryotes such as plants and animals on the other two branches. But scientists are just now gaining a fuller understanding of what archaea do to make a living.
- Rare Footprints Of Infant Dinosaur Discovered: The fossil footprints represent the first hatchling Stegosaurus footprints ever found.
- Dinosaurs Charge Upstream: Discovery of ancient footprints suggests predators could swim hard.
- Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence Of Wetter Past: A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.
- Densest, Hottest, Darkest: It's a pretty good bet that even the crew of the Starship Enterprise wouldn't have had a category for HD 149026b. The planet is among the densest yet discovered, and new research shows it's by far the hottest and blackest. If the latest discoveries are any indication, lots of surprises await astronomers searching for alien worlds.
- New Fossil Tying Humans, Apes And Monkeys Is Full Of Surprises: A surprisingly complete fossil skull of an ancient relative of humans, apes and monkeys bears striking evidence that our remote ancestor was less mentally advanced than expected by about 29 million years ago.
- NASA Mission Explores World's Deepest Sinkhole: The Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) mission will use a 2.5-meter-diameter submarine to map the sinkhole's shape, obtain water samples and return core samples from the cenote walls. In the process, DEPTHX will test technologies and methods that might be useful in other underwater missions, including the long-term possibility of exploring the oceans hidden under the icy crust of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.
- Oceanic 'Twilight Zone' of Microscopic Creatures Hinders Carbon Sequestration: A marine "snow" of dead plants, animals and other waste does not necessarily make it to the ocean floor to be buried for millennia.
- Climate Catastrophes In The Solar System: Earth sits between two worlds that have been devastated by climate catastrophes. In the effort to combat global warming, our neighbours can provide valuable insights into the way climate catastrophes affect planets.
- Instruments To Dig Deep In Space: Researchers to develop a probe for future planetary rovers that will help scientists study the history of the solar system by examining the properties of layers of material beneath the surface of the moon, Mars, comets and other planetary bodies.
- All Wet? Astronomers Claim Discovery Of Earth-like Planet: One of two newly discovered exoplanets is nearly the size of Earth and resides in a habitable zone around its star, raising the possibility of liquid water, the stuff of life as we know it.
- Extraordinary Antarctic Ice Core Will Help Scientists Study Global Warming: A remarkable new core was extracted during the recent Antarctic summer from record-setting drilling depths 4,214 feet below the sea floor beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, the Earth's largest floating ice body.
- Ancient Rainforest Rises Again: 300-million-year-old jungle found in Illinois coal mine may give clues to major extinction.
- Was T. Rex Really King Of The Lizards, Or Just A Big, Carnivorous Chicken?: Researchers analyze protein from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone.
- Tyrannosaurus Rex Protein Fragments Discovered, Sequenced: Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.
- Strange But True: Earth Is Not Round: It may seem round when viewed from space, but our planet is actually a bumpy spheroid.
- Careful Where You Plant That Tree: Putting a tree in the wrong location could warm, rather than cool, Earth.
- Alien Water Find Iffy: An astronomer using data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope claims he has found the first evidence of water on a planet outside our solar system.
- Dust Clouds In Cosmic Cycle: It has been a mystery for astronomers how certain dying stars have their colossal quantities of material blown out into the universe and shrink into objects called "white dwarves."
- Earth's Core-Mantle Boundary: Now In High Resolution Images: High-resolution images can now be used to reveal unexpected details of the Earth's internal structure. Researchers adapted technology developed for near-surface exploration of reservoirs of oil and gas to image the core-mantle boundary.
- Searching For The Grandest Asteroid Tour: Asteroids are Earth's closest celestial neighbors, sometimes passing closer to Earth than even the Moon. And yet, to date, only two spacecraft have ever remained in proximity to one of these bodies.
- A Darker, Hotter Mars: Slight variations in the hue of the Red Planet appear to drive the martian climate. The color changes alter Mars's reflectivity, or albedo, and could be responsible for a curious increase in the planet's temperature in recent years.
- New Round in Snowball Fight: The debate over whether Earth ever became a giant ice ball has heated up again.
- Planting The Mammalian Supertree: New genetic evidence suggests that the rise of modern mammals on the planet, such as this mammoth, might not have been directly connected to the demise of the dinosaurs.
- Tatooine's Twin Suns Not So Far Fetched: Astronomers have found evidence that even tightly orbiting binary stars could be harboring planets.
- Man's Earliest Direct Ancestors Looked More Apelike Than Previously Believed: A computer-generated reconstruction shows a 1.9 million-year-old skull belonging to Homo rudolfensis, the earliest member of the human genus, with a surprisingly small brain and distinctly protruding jaw, features commonly associated with more apelike members of the hominid family living as much as three million years ago.
- Modeling Faults: Predicting Earthquakes: Factoring in crustal strength changes along the San Andreas Fault would improve the predictive models that researchers use to understand the likelihood and intensity of earthquakes there.
- Dino Families Dug In: Move over mama bear; dinosaurs just joined the ranks of animals with dens. The 2-meter-long Oryctodromeus may have raised its young in tunnels. The discovery of the 95-million-year-old burrow and skeletons could challenge long-held ideas about dinosaurs, including notions about their eventual extinction.
- Young and Restless: Ancient Earth Shows Moving Crust: The oldest rocks in the world show that Earth's shifting crust began its tectonic movements almost 4 billion years ago.
- This Was World's Warmest Recorded Winter: This has been the world's warmest winter since record-keeping began more than a century ago.
- RNA Enzyme Structure Offers A Glimpse Into The Origins Of Life: Researchers have determined the three-dimensional structure of an RNA enzyme, or "ribozyme," that carries out a fundamental reaction required to make new RNA molecules. Their results provide insight into what may have been the first self-replicating molecule to arise billions of years ago.
- Mars' South Pole Ice Deep And Wide: New measurements of Mars' south polar region indicate extensive frozen water. The polar region contains enough frozen water to cover the whole planet in a liquid layer approximately 36 feet deep.
- Arctic Sea Ice Decline May Trigger Climate Change Cascade: Arctic sea ice that has been dwindling for several decades may have reached a tipping point that could trigger a cascade of climate change reaching into Earth's temperate regions.
- Discovering Exactly Where The Northern Lights Originate: Instruments known as solid-state telescopes have delivered their first data on how charged particles in the solar wind interact with Earth's magnetic field to shape the planet's magnetosphere.
- High On Speciation: Harsh conditions at Earth's upper latitudes help create new creatures.
- Icy Disaster In The Kuiper Belt: Ancient smashup could alter theories about space weathering, evolution of solar system.
- A Lag Before Dying: Massive extinctions may take longer than previously believed.
- Spiky Oddball Prowled Ocean Half Billion Years Ago: A spectacularly quirky creature with long, curved spines protruding from its armored body prowled the ocean floor half a billion years ago near the dawn of complex life forms on Earth.
- NASA's Robotic Sub Readies For Dive Into Earth's Deepest Sinkhole: An underwater robot, shaped like a flattened orange, maneuvered untethered and autonomously within a 115-meter-deep sinkhole during tests this month in Mexico, a prelude to its mission to probe the mysterious nether reaches of the world's deepest sinkhole.
- Peruvian Citadel Is Site Of Earliest Ancient Solar Observatory In The Americas: Archeologists have identified an ancient solar observatory at Chankillo, Peru as the oldest in the Americas with alignments covering the entire solar year.
- Earth's Crust Missing In Mid-Atlantic: Scientists have discovered a large area thousands of square kilometres in extent in the middle of the Atlantic where the Earth’s crust appears to be missing. Instead, the mantle - the deep interior of the Earth, normally covered by crust many kilometres thick - is exposed on the seafloor, 3000m below the surface.
- Yellowstone's Quiet Power: A 17-year University of Utah study of ground movements shows that the power of the huge volcanic hotspot beneath Yellowstone National Park is much greater than previously thought during times when the giant volcano is slumbering.
- Glaciers Not On Simple, Upward Trend Of Melting: Two of Greenland's largest glaciers shrank dramatically and dumped twice as much ice into the sea during a period of less than a year between 2004 and 2005. And then, less than two years later, they returned to near their previous rates of discharge.
- Water Mysteriously Absent from Extrasolar Planets' Atmospheres: For the first time, telescopes have captured the light spectra emitted directly from planets outside of our solar system. Contrary to predictions, they show no signs of water and other simple compounds; dark clouds or haze may hide them.
- The Mysterious Case Of Columbus's Silver Ore: New research reveals that Silver-bearing ore found at the settlement founded by Christopher Columbus's second expedition was not mined in the Americas.
- Meeting the Asteroid Threat: Astronomers can now tell us which rocks could hit earth, but so far there's no way to prevent a collision .
- Titan's Dark Mirror: What can Saturn's largest moon tell us about our own planet's future? Quite a lot, apparently.
- Peruvian Glacier May Vanish In 5 Years: When glaciologist Lonnie Thompson returns to Peru's Qori Kalis glacier early this summer, he expects to find that half of the ice he saw during his visit there last year has vanished. His observations that suggest that the entire glacier may likely be gone within the next five years, providing possibly the clearest evidence so far of global climate change.
- Hunting Martian Fossils Best Bet For Locating Mars Life: Hunting for traces of life on Mars calls for two radically different strategies. Of the two, with today's exploration technology we can most easily look for evidence for past life, preserved as fossil "biosignatures" in old rocks.
- Chimpanzee Stone Age: Working along a riverbank in a West African rain forest, researchers have uncovered remnants from a chimpanzee stone age that started at least 4,300 years ago. The finds constitute the only evidence yet detected of prehistoric ape behavior.
- Shaken, Volcanoes Stir to Life: Like a dark storm cloud on the horizon, an earthquake can be a harbinger of bad news. A new study provides the strongest evidence yet that quakes can trigger volcanic activity.
- Final Report: Humans Caused Global Warming: For the first time, a panel of climate experts has confirmed that global warming is occurring and that it is "very likely" (90 percent certain) man-made. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a working group of some 3,000 delegates from 113 countries, issued its final report on the state of climate change - and the findings are grim.
- A Spark in the Sand: It's hard to believe that something as ephemeral as lightning could be frozen in time for thousands of years. But that's just what happens with fulgurites--glassy, hollow tubes that form when lightning melts sand.
- Earth-shattering Proof Of Continents On The Move: Africa is being torn apart. And as Ethiopia's rift valley grows slowly wider, an international team of scientists is taking a unique opportunity to plot the progress of continents on the move.
- Digging Deeper for Martian Life: NASA's sextet of Mars landers and rovers may have missed signs of life for over three decades because they're not looking far enough beneath the red planet's surface.
- Hubble Loses an Eye: The main camera aboard NASA's orbiting Hubble Space Telescope has conked out, and its loss could delay or cancel much of the work currently proposed for the aging scope.
- Dinosaur Double-Decker: The first functional biplane took off more than 100 million years before the Wright brothers puttered over Kittyhawk, North Carolina.
- Dude, That's Deep: A big answer to U.S. energy woes lies far below the surface of the ground according to a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology report. The 2-year study found that a reasonable investment in geothermal energy research could eventually yield enough power to fuel 25 million homes.
- Going Under Down Under: Early People At Fault In Australian Extinctions: A lengthy, newly compiled fossil record of Australian mammals bolsters the notion that humanity's arrival on the island continent led to the extinction of many large creatures there.
- Peering Into The Poles' Majestic Light Shows: NASA is poised to launch five identical space probes - the largest number of spacecraft ever attempted by the agency on a single rocket - to solve a decades-long mystery about the origin of magnetic storms that turn the green, shimmering curtains of the Earth's Northern and Southern Lights into colorful, dancing light shows.
- New Horizons Spacecraft En Route To Pluto Prepares For Jupiter Encounter: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is on the doorstep of the solar system's largest planet. The spacecraft will study and swing past Jupiter, increasing speed on its voyage toward Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and beyond.
- New NASA Orbiter Sees Details Of 1997 Pathfinder Site: The high-resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the 1997 landing site of Mars Pathfinder, revealing new details of hardware on the surface and the geology of the region.
- Big Melt Threatens India's Water: The massive glaciers of the Himalayas, which hold one of Earth's largest reserves of snow and ice, have dwindled by one-fifth in the past 4 decades.
- New Clues From An Old Skull: Fossil sheds light on human migration out of Africa.
- Earliest Evidence Of Modern Humans In Europe Discovered: Modern humans who first arose in Africa had moved into Europe as far back as about 45,000 years ago.
- Scientists Solve The Mystery Of Life-Sustaining Nitrogen Cycle: Scientists finally fix the locations where nitrogen transformations critical to life on Earth occur.
- Is There Anybody Out There?: Astronomers probe the heavens in search of a planet like our own.
- Earth's Strongest Winds Wouldn't Even Be A Breeze On These Planets: New measurements for three planets outside our solar system indicate their temperatures remain fairly constant -- and blazing hot -- from day to night, even though it is likely one side of each planet always faces its sun.
- Geologists Discover Origin Of Earth's Mysterious Black Diamonds: If indeed "a diamond is forever," the most primitive origins of Earth's so-called black diamonds were in deep, universal time, geologists have discovered. Black diamonds came from none other than interstellar space.
- Superbubble Of Supernova Remnants Caught In Act Of Forming: A superbubble in space, caught in the act of forming, can help scientists better understand the life and death of massive stars.
- New Stars Shed Light On The Past: A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows N90, one of the star-forming regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The rich populations of infant stars found here enable astronomers to examine star forming processes in an environment that is very different from that in our own.
- Hobbits In Space: Astronomers discover diminutive galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
- Eavesdropping On The Universe: New radio facility could detect Earth-like civilizations around 1,000 nearest stars.
- Missed Opportunity On Mars?: The 1976 Viking landers may have destroyed Martian microbes.
- Chemistry Of Volcanic Fallout Reveals Secrets Of Past Eruptions: Scientists have developed a method to determine the influence of past volcanic eruptions on climate and the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, and significantly reduce uncertainty in models of future climate change.
- Researchers Use Volcanic Eruption as Climate Lab: When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it left a trail of evidence in the skies that is helping scientists decipher the workings of the global climate.
- Black Hole Boldly Goes Where No Black Hole Has Gone Before: Astronomers have found a black hole where few thought they could ever exist, inside a globular star cluster. The finding has broad implications for the dynamics of stars clusters and also for the existence of a still-speculative new class of black holes called 'intermediate-mass' black holes.
- X-ray Evidence Supports Possible New Class Of Supernova: Evidence for a significant new class of supernova has been found with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton.
- Stellar Bang With A New Twist: A possible new type of supernova might turn cosmic evolution theory on its ear.
- Rocky Finding: Evidence Of Extrasolar Asteroid Belt: Astronomers have obtained some of the best evidence yet for an asteroid belt beyond the solar system.
- Moon River: Titan's Polar Surface Dotted with Lakes of Methane: Saturn's mysterious moon Titan revealed another of its secrets during a recent Cassini flyby: 75 lakelike areas near the northern pole.
- NASA Mars Team Teaches Old Rovers New Tricks To Kick Off Year Four: The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers.
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