Earth
Radioactive Hot Spots on Earth’s Beaches May Have Sparked Life
We've heard about life being created in a puddle of primordial chemical soup, sparked by lightning strikes, or organic molecules…
Magnetic “Ropes” Connect the Northern Lights to the Solar Wind
This discovery comes just in time to light up Christmas: new observations of the Northern Lights – a spectacular phenomenon…
Cancer Rates Rise and Fall with Cosmic Rays
Cancer is a mysterious and complicated disease, with many different types and causes. Researchers are still trying to track down…
Earth Had Oxygen Earlier Than Believed
Take a nice deep breath, fill your lungs with oxygen. You can thank the plants for that. Scientists had originally…
Earth’s Iron Building Blocks
The iron meteorites whizzing around the Solar System are probably remnants of objects that helped form the Earth and the…
What If We Burn Everything?
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a detailed model of the Earth's climate over the next few…
The Ends of the Earth
Pamela Conrad is an astrobiologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She recently gave a lecture explaining how to searching cold…
History of the Earth’s Atmosphere Written in Rocks
Geologists have built up a suite of tools and techniques that let them peer back in time to watch the…
Low Oxygen Accelerated the Great Dying
The biggest mass extinction in the Earth's history happened approximately 250 million years ago. During the "Great Dying", more than…
Did Volcanoes Cause the Great Dying?
Something wiped out most of the life on Earth 250 million years ago. Evidence has been building that it was…