Science

A scientific paper published in 1985 was the first to report a burgeoning hole in Earth’s stratospheric ozone over Antarctica. Scientists determined the cause to be ozone-depleting substances – long-lived artificial halogen compounds. Although the ozone-destroying effects of these...

A Southwest Research Institute team developed a new geochemical model that reveals that carbon dioxide (CO2) from within Enceladus, an ocean-harboring moon of Saturn, may be controlled by chemical reactions at its seafloor. Studying the plume of gases and...

15,000 years ago, some water froze atop the Tibetan Plateau and became part of a glacier. While humans were busy domesticating dogs, the ice entrapped millions of microscopic organisms per square inch. The research uncovered 33 viruses, including 28...

New insights into how microbial life was quickly re-established following the mass extinction of the dinosaurs have been detailed for the first time by Curtin University-led research. The research, published in Geology, analysed biomarkers, also known as molecular fossils, found...

The Jagiellonian University has in its collection a fragment of the Murchison meteorite, which has recently been confirmed to contain the oldest known material on Earth: particles of cosmic dust created before the formation of the Solar System. In...

Astronomy (MPIA) participating has detected a propagating heat wave near a massive protostar. It confirms the scenario that such objects grow in bursts. This wave became visible by observing naturally generated microwave lasers, whose spatial arrangement changed unexpectedly rapid. Although...

Deep within Earth, swirling liquid iron generates our planet’s protective magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is vital for life on Earth’s surface: it shields the planet from harmful solar wind and cosmic rays from the sun. Given...

Curtin University scientists have discovered Earth’s oldest asteroid strike occurred at Yarrabubba, in outback Western Australia, and coincided with the end of a global deep freeze known as a Snowball Earth. The research, published in the leading journal Nature Communications,...

Recent research finds that repeated flooding events have a cumulative effect on the structural integrity of earthen levees, suggesting that the increase in extreme weather events associated with climate change could pose significant challenges for the nation’s aging levee...

A hitherto unknown antibiotic-resistant bacteria species, in the same family as E. coli and Salmonella spp., has been found and classified in Sweden. The proposed taxonomic name of the species -- the first of the new genus -- is...