Scientists have long believed that comets and, or a type of very primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites were the sources of early Earth's volatile elements—which include hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon—and ...
Space Exploration
Jul 12, 2012
32
5
A 100 kilometre-wide crater has been found in Greenland, the result of a massive asteroid or comet impact a billion years before any other known collision on Earth.
Space Exploration
Jun 28, 2012
4
0
On the periodic table of the elements, iron and magnesium are far apart. But new evidence suggests that 3 billion years ago, iron did the chemical work now done by magnesium in helping RNA fold and function properly.
Biochemistry
May 31, 2012
3
0
Researchers at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center in Harima, Japan, have clarified for the first time how chromatin in archaea, one of the three evolutionary branches of organisms in nature, binds to DNA. The results offer valuable ...
Biochemistry
Mar 7, 2012
0
0
Unexpected new findings by a University of Maryland team of geochemists show that some portions of the Earth's mantle (the rocky layer between Earth's metallic core and crust) formed when the planet was much smaller than ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 18, 2012
6
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Many versions of early Earth history offer visions of a hot melting mix of materials which would have resulted, after cooling, in a smooth blend of ingredients, much a like a cake after beating and baking. ...
To deal with the faint young Sun paradox, researchers are taking a fresh look at an old idea: that the Sun started out larger and more luminous than we thought.
Astronomy
Feb 14, 2012
13
0
Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers who have adapted a three-dimensional, general circulation model of Earth's climate to a time some 2.8 billion years ago when the sun was significantly fainter than present think ...
Earth Sciences
Dec 5, 2011
7
0
The appearance of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere probably did not occur as a single event, but as a long series of starts and stops, according to an international team of researchers who investigated rock cores from the ...
Earth Sciences
Dec 1, 2011
0
0
Scientists in the New York Center for Astrobiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have used the oldest minerals on Earth to reconstruct the atmospheric conditions present on Earth very soon after its birth. The findings, ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 30, 2011
1
0
