How ocean chemistry helped life keep breathing - University of California, Riverside

It's one of the oldest questions humans have asked, and as far as we know, our planet is the only one that holds the answer. Earth is also the only planet we know of with plate tectonics, the slow-motion churn of its outer shell that recycles rock, reshapes continents and cycles the nutrients that could feed life. A new international study, published in Nature Geoscience and led by Dr. Hugo Moreira, a Royal Society university research fellow at the University of Portsmouth, is helping us better understand the origins of life by tracing the deep history of Earth's oxygen back billions of years, to a time when the planet and its atmosphere looked nothing like they do today.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Orcas are hunting great White Sharks around the world, scientists confirmThe killing of great whites by orcas has been reported in the waters of South Africa, California, and Australia, and the implications that the hunting behaviour would have on the marine ecosystem have been considered. In fact, it all started back on May 3, 2017, when the body of a female great white, weighing 1,100 kilograms, washed ashore in Gansbaai, close to Cape Town, with a deep gash through which its 90-kilogram liver had been extracted. Five more corpses of great whites appeared with similar wounds in the coming months, as claimed by shark biologist Alison Towner of Rhodes University. Two adult males, called Port and Starboard, who are supposed to be brothers judging by their dorsal fins that fold differently, were identified as the most probable perpetrators. The connection was officially established in 2022 based on video footage of a drone that caught three orcas chasing and biting a 3-meter great white off Mossel Bay. The sharks quickly disappeared from Dyer Island, one of the best places in the world to witness a great white.