5+ hour, 51+ min ago  (556+ words) Learn how recycled sewage may help turn moon and Mars soil into fertile ground for growing food in space. On the moon, the soil is as sharp as glass. On Mars, it's dusty, dry, and barren. Neither resembles the soft…...

4+ week, 9+ hour ago  (486+ words) Learn how physicists recreated the early universe's primordial soup, known as quark-gluon plasma, and discovered how it responds when particles race through it. Right after the Big Bang, the universe existed as an ultra-hot, ultra-dense fluid made of quarks and…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (410+ words) Learn how sulfur-based molecules essential to life may have formed before the first living systems appeared. Rather than being confined to rare, extreme environments, some of life's chemical building blocks may have been widespread under ordinary atmospheric conditions. Sulfur sits…...

3+ mon, 3+ week ago  (651+ words) Learn how tardigrades are able to tolerate extreme radiation with a unique protein that unwinds their DNA. Tardigrades, the microscopic animals popularly known as "water bears," have rightfully earned their reputation as the most sturdy organisms in the world. They're…...

4+ mon, 3+ week ago  (566+ words) Mushrooms can be a divisive food for some people, but our distant primate relatives would have a different opinion on the matter. Non-human primates are known for their love of fruit, leaves, and insects as snacks, but surprisingly, some of…...

5+ mon, 4+ day ago  (482+ words) It is a well-known fact that water and electricity do not mix, but new research suggests ice is a flexoelectric material " which, in layman's terms, means it can produce electricity. "We discovered that ice generates electric charge in response to…...

5+ mon, 1+ week ago  (657+ words) The smell of rain is known as petrichor, a term derived from petro " meaning rock " and ichor " meaning tenuous essence. The smell is generated from an oncoming rainstorm. However, if the ground is too wet and saturated already, the sent…...

5+ mon, 3+ week ago  (617+ words) Life runs on proteins, large chains of amino acids that keep our bodies functioning. Yet for decades, scientists have wondered how they were first created to set biological life in motion 4 billion years ago. Based on a recent experiment that…...

6+ mon, 3+ week ago  (709+ words) It's safe to say that our existence wouldn't be possible without molecules. Even beyond all the matter on Earth, molecules are what shaped the Universe into what it is today. But what was the first molecule to lay the foundation?...

6+ mon, 4+ week ago  (511+ words) Astronomers have detected precursors to the building blocks of life on the discs of V883 Orionis, a young star located 1,305 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion. Scientists writing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters warn that the evidence collected so far…...