Silica aerogel could make Mars habitable

People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing ...

Early Earth's air weighed less than half of today's atmosphere

The idea that the young Earth had a thicker atmosphere turns out to be wrong. New research from the University of Washington uses bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old rocks to show that air at that time exerted at most ...

New transitory form of silica observed

A Carnegie-led team was able to discover five new forms of silica under extreme pressures at room temperature. Their findings are published by Nature Communications.

Pressure transforms a semiconductor into a new state of matter

(Phys.org) —By applying pressure to a semiconductor, researchers have been able to transform a semiconductor into a "topological insulator" (TI), an intriguing state of matter in which a material's interior is insulating ...

Magnesium oxide: From Earth to super-Earth

The mantles of Earth and other rocky planets are rich in magnesium and oxygen. Due to its simplicity, the mineral magnesium oxide is a good model for studying the nature of planetary interiors. New work from a team led by ...

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