Meteorite bombardment may have made Earth more habitable

(PhysOrg.com) -- Large bombardments of meteorites approximately four billion years ago could have helped to make the early Earth and Mars more habitable for life by modifying their atmospheres, suggests the results of a paper ...

Pluto's 'heart' sheds light on a possible buried ocean

Ever since NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, evidence has been mounting that the dwarf planet may have a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell. Now, by modeling the impact dynamics that created a massive ...

The search for molecular oxygen among cosmic oxygen atoms

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe (after hydrogen and helium) and of course it is important: all known life forms require liquid water and its oxygen content. For over thirty years, astronomers have ...

Predicting Arctic sea ice loss

(PhysOrg.com) -- Arctic clouds are strongly tied to Arctic sea ice loss. To find the strength of those ties, a team led by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory tested a prominent climate model with observed ...

Seeing inside superfog

While prescribed fires are common tools in wildland management, a combination of smoke and fog, known as superfog, has in some cases crossed over major roadways, leading to multicar pileups and fatalities in visibility of ...

Remote assessment of avalanche risk

In cooperation with a Swiss research team, geographers of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have developed a novel measuring system relying on two different physical methods that promises to enhance forecasting ...

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