Earth Sciences

Earth's tectonic elevator hauls ancient buried microbes back to the seafloor to revive and spread

In subduction zones, the sites of the world's largest earthquakes, tectonic activity may generate a "pump" that transports long-buried subseafloor microbes back toward the seafloor, according to research presented at the ...

Environment

Wildfires used to 'go to sleep' at night. Climate change is turning them into prime burning hours

Burning time for North American wildfires is going into overtime. Flames are lasting later into the night and starting earlier in the morning because human-caused climate change is extending the hotter and drier conditions ...

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Tech Xplore

Cutting calories to slow aging—without compromising health

Restricting calorie intake in species such as mice, rhesus monkeys, and fruit flies has been shown to extend their lifespans. In some cases, these animals not only live longer, but are also free of disease. But when pushed ...

Kinship interlocks: How the rich stay rich

How do some wealthy families remain in the upper class for many generations, while other rich families do not? That is the question author Shay O'Brien (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) tackles in the sociological study ...

A nanoscale robotic cleaner can hunt, capture and remove bacteria

Tiny robots—around 50 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair—open up fascinating possibilities: they enable the controlled manipulation of objects far too small for human hands. This brings us closer to a long-standing ...

'Poor man's Majoranas' can be used as quantum spin probes

A Majorana fermion is a particle that would be identical to its antiparticle. Such an object has not yet been found. However, certain solid materials exhibit analogous behavior as if Majorana fermions were present through ...

The time capsule in the salt flat

There is a place in northern Chile, 3,500 meters above sea level in the Andean Altiplano, where almost nothing survives. The Salar de Pajonales is a salt flat of savage extremes temperatures swinging from −23°C to 26°C, solar ...

The world's waste mountain is rising at an alarming rate

The world is struggling to deal with ever-growing quantities of waste. A new World Bank Group report, What a Waste 3.0, shows that more than 2.6 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste (which includes rubbish from households, ...

The moon that tipped a planet

Neptune is the solar system's most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single ...

Black hole mergers test the limits of general relativity

General relativity stands as one of the bedrock theories in modern physics. Its strange view of relative time and space has been confirmed by countless experimental and observational tests, from rotational frame dragging ...