Von allen Unbekannten in der Wissenschaft dürfte das außerirdische Leben das größte sein. Trotz erstaunlicher Fortschritte in der Astronomie und Planetenwissenschaft bleiben außerirdische Lebensformen – ob mikrobiell und schleimig, belebt und umherspringend oder hochtechnologisch und weltraumfahrend – mutmaßlich. Das bedeutet nicht, dass sie es nicht sind ein würdiges Thema, über das man ein Buch schreiben könnte.
Valerie Hsiung
Der Beitrag von Earth’s Last Word (A abergläubisches Gedicht) erschien zuerst auf The Nation.
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The world’s largest ape vanished from Earth more than 100,000 years earlier than once thought, pushed to extinction as the environment around it shifted, researchers report January 10 in Nature.
The new extinction date comes from new analyses of fossils of Gigantopithecus blacki, as well as on the sediments of about a dozen caves in southern China where the ape once dwelled. Instead of dying out around 100,000 years ago, the ape was driven to extinction between 295,000
About 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object smashed into the young Earth, spraying debris that coalesced to form the moon, many scientists think. Some remnants of that object, called Theia, exist today as large amounts of dense material sitting atop Earth’s core, researchers propose November 1 in Nature.
In recent years, geophysicists have discovered continent-sized zones of rock at the base of Earth’s mantle where seismic waves travel abnormally slowly, suggesting the rock there is denser than the
A long-ago reshuffling of the giant planets in our solar system may have been instrumental in giving Earth its moon.
For decades, planetary scientists have hypothesized that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were born much closer to the sun and that gravitational interactions among those planets jolted them into their contemporary trajectories (SN: 5/10/22). But the timing of that “giant planet orbital instability” has been tricky to nail down.
Now, an analysis of meteorite data suggests that the
The Antarctic is turning from a fridge for the world – keeping temperatures down – to ‘a radiator’, scientists warned yesterday.
Ice on land and sea in the Antarctic would normally reflect the sun’s rays back into space, but as water forms ponds and lakes on Antarctica, this absorbs heat.
Professor Martin Siegert said the South Pole continent ‘is an enormous, vast white surface…it does an enormous job for the planet in terms of a lot of solar radiation bounced
Microtektites found in Caribbean may shed light on tektite origin — Science News, August 11, 1973
Though their origin remains a mystery to scientists, huge strewn fields of tektites have been found in widely separated areas of the world…. Microtektites have now been found in the Caribbean, and the characteristics of these newly found specimens may ultimately shed some light on the question of tektite origin….
Some believe that the tektites come from the moon. They feel that tektites
Mongolia will deepen cooperation with Washington to mine rare earths, the country’s Prime Minister L. Oyun-Erdene said on a visit to Washington on Wednesday (2 August), but he warned that a “new Cold War” between the US and China would harm the global economy.
Mongolia has extensive deposits of rare earths and copper, which are vital for high tech applications including defense equipment and for President Joe Biden’s efforts to electrify the auto market to help stave off climate change.
Matt York/AP
Wildfires raged in Canada and in 10 countries around the Mediterranean. Heat waves blanketed much of North America, Europe, and Asia. Each day from July 3 to July 6 set records for Earth’s hottest day ever. Now, the World Meteorological Organization and Copernicus, a European Union climate observation agency, have announced that July is “extremely likely” to be the hottest month
