Why is the Earth blue?

Seen from space, the Earth is blue. The Earth has been blue for over 4 billion years because of the liquid water on its surface. How has the Earth managed to sustain liquid water on its surface for such a long time?

Searching beyond seismology for earthquake precursors

To predict when earthquakes are likely to occur, seismologists often use statistics to monitor how clusters of seismic activity evolve over time. However, this approach often fails to anticipate the time and magnitude of ...

Slow start of plate tectonics despite a hot early Earth

Writing in PNAS, scientists from Cologne university present important new constraints showing that plate tectonics started relatively slow, although the early Earth's interior was much hotter than today.

Secret of Australia's volcanoes revealed in new study

Australia's east coast is littered with the remnants of hundreds of volcanoes—the most recent just a few thousand years old—and scientists have been at a loss to explain why so many eruptions have occurred over the past ...

Trapping nanoparticles with optical tweezers

By exploiting a particular property of light diffraction at the interface between a glass and a liquid, researchers have demonstrated the first optical tweezers capable of trapping nanoscale particles.

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