This article in the on-line magazine The Conversation explains how, beginning with the collision of India with Asia 20 mya, followed by the opening of the Great Rift Valley, the climate and landscape of East Africa changed from flat wet … Continue reading
Yearly Archives: 2013
Earth is unique in several important ways: It is the only planet where life is known Granite has been discovered nowhere except on Earth Granite now forms the continents of Earth The first minute fragments of rocks (zircons) were formed inside … Continue reading
181 scientists have worked on the paper issued on 20 March which, following extensive analysis of the data obtained from the Planck Satellite, have concluded that: The simplest inflationary models have passed an exacting test with the Planck data The full … Continue reading
The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins. Planck is a European Space Agency mission. NASA contributed mission-enabling … Continue reading
It looks very much like we have “a” Higgs boson No more Higgs-like, Higgs-ish or even Higgsy boson. The CMS and ATLAS collaborations, the two large experiments operating at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, have now gathered sufficient … Continue reading
NASA will host a news conference at 8 a.m. PDT (11 a.m. EDT) Thursday, March 21, to discuss the first cosmology results from Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation. The briefing will be held at NASA … Continue reading
You live in the universe, but do you really understand what the universe is like, where you are within it, or how you got here? If you can show that you understand the basic facts about where you are and … Continue reading
One Day Universe on 21 September 2013 will be a 13.7-hour celebration of science from the Big Bang to the Anthropocene, one hour for each billion years of history. It will involve over 20 speakers presenting Big History to an … Continue reading
Sixty years after James Watson and Francis Crick established that DNA forms a double helix, a quadruple-stranded DNA helix has turned up. Quadruple helices that intertwine four, rather than two, DNA strands had been made in the laboratory, but were … Continue reading
Animals evolved gradually, from the lowly sponge to the menagerie of tentacled, winged and brainy creatures that inhabit Earth today. This idea makes such intuitive sense that biologists are now stunned by genome-sequencing data suggesting that the sponges were preceded … Continue reading