New fossil findings discovered by scientists at UC Santa Barbara challenge prevailing views about the effects of "Snowball Earth" glaciations on life, according to an article in the June issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. By analyzing microfossils in rocks from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the authors have challenged the view that has been generally assumed to be correct for the ...

NASA`s rover project team is using the Spirit rover and other spacecraft at Mars to begin developing the best maneuvers for extracting Spirit from the soft Martian ground where it has become embedded. A diagnostic test on May 16 provided favorable indications about Spirit`s left middle wheel. The possibility of the wheel being jammed was one factor in the rover team`s May 7 decision to tempor...

The bombardment of Earth nearly 4 billion years ago by asteroids as large as Kansas would not have had the firepower to extinguish potential early life on the planet and may even have given it a boost, says a new University of Colorado at Boulder study. Impact evidence from lunar samples, meteorites and the pockmarked surfaces of the inner planets paints a picture of a violent environment in the s...

A new explanation for the cause of changes in the chemical makeup of the oceans through recent Earth history is put forward in a paper published in Nature. Scientists from the Universities of Southampton and Bristol suggest that adjustments in ocean chemistry through recent geological time are driven by variations in the intensity of chemical breakdown of continental rocks by rain and ground water...

Comets have always fascinated us. In early cultures, a mysterious appearance of a comet could symbolize a deity`s displeasure with humankind or mean a sure failure in battle, at least for one side. Now Tel Aviv University research adds a new twist to that fascination: comets might have provided the elements for the emergence of life on our planet. While investigating the chemical make-up of comets...

You may want to thank David French in advance. Because, in the event that a comet or asteroid comes hurtling toward Earth, he may be the guy responsible for saving the entire planet. French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, has determined a way to effectively divert asteroids and other threatening objects from impacting Earth by attaching a long tet...

Studying satellite radar data from ESA’s Envisat and the Italian Space Agency’s COSMO-SkyMed, scientists have begun analysing the movement of Earth during and after the 6.3 earthquake that shook the medieval town of L’Aquila in central Italy on 6 April 2009. Scientists from Italy’s Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell’ Ambiente (IREA-CNR) and the Istituto...

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center in Milwaukee have just made the very expensive and promising area of protein research more accessible to scientists worldwide. They have developed a set of free tools called ViPDAC (virtual proteomics data analysis cluster), to be used in combination with Amazon`s inexpensive "cloud computing" service...

Thirty-four-million years ago, Earth changed profoundly. What happened, and how were Earth`s animals, plants, oceans, and climate affected? Focusing on the end of the Eocene epoch and the Eocene-Oligocene transition, a critical but very brief interval in Earth`s history, GSA`s latest Special Paper provides new answers to these questions. According to the book`s editors, Christian Koeberl of the Un...

The Earth`s original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the "Great Oxidation Event." The cause of this event has puzzled scientists, but researchers writing in Nature have found indications in ancient sedimentary rocks that it may have been linked to a drop in the leve...