All Stories by Sid Perkins
- Space
Meteorites could have thickened primordial soup
New experiments show that extraterrestrial impacts that occurred early in our planet's history could have created the raw materials for life.
- Earth
Methane even escapes from freezing permafrost
An extended field season reveals that the autumn freeze in the arctic squeezes methane from some high-latitude wetland soils, a match even for summertime methane release.
- Earth
Unveiling hidden craters
Earth is regularly bombarded by small meteorites, but most of the resulting craters are hard to find. A team reports finding one such crater in the forests of west-central Alberta.
- Earth
Plate tectonics got an early start
The chemistry of minerals preserved in Australian rocks suggests tectonic activity for Earth’s earliest eon.
- Paleontology
Bacteria may play big role in forming fossils
Bacteria can build a biofilm that preserves a tissue's structure.
- Life
Mammoth genome approaching completion
Genetic material extracted from the hair of woolly mammoths has revealed new information about the extinct creatures, including how closely related they are to modern elephants.
- Earth
Subglacial lakes flood, glaciers speed up
Floods that occasionally surge from immense lakes trapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet can significantly affect the flow rate of overlying glaciers, a new study shows.
- Earth
Minerals evolved along with life
Turns out, the variety and number of minerals in the solar system and on Earth have increased through time, and some minerals exist because Earth has life.
- Chemistry
Blueprint to repel oil and water
The texture of surfaces could be designed so that both water and oil can bead up and thus flow off.
- Earth
Stalagmite is scribe for monsoons, society
Cave formation has recorded monsoon strength in China since the third century.
- Climate
Climate change stifling lemmings
Warmer winter temperatures are altering the snowpack, squelching the rodents’ population booms.
- Chemistry
Oldest evidence for complex life in doubt
Chemical biomarkers in ancient Australian rocks, once thought to be the oldest known evidence of complex life on Earth, may have infiltrated long after the sediments were laid down, new analyses suggest.
