Author: Ben Michaels

The keen interest in knowing whether there is water on the moon has helped inspire several recent lunar missions, partly to see if life is possible, but also because any realistic chance of colonizing becomes less feasible. While liquid water cannot endure at the Moon’s  harsh surface, ice is believed to have survived at the Moon’s poles where it is eternally cold. But now there is evidence that there is perhaps a significant amount of water deep in the lunar interior in the layer between the crust and outer core. Researchers Ralph E. Milliken and Shuai Li at Brown University, have...

A new study may turn the answer of where did life begin upside down. Previous studies and experimentation have suggested simple organic molecules are the building blocks of life and could have been synthesized in the atmosphere of early Earth and rained down into the oceans. A new study paper by Tara Djokic, a Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales Sydney, focuses on stromatolites that were discovered there in the 1970s and represent the oldest evidence that there were living organisms on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Stromatolites are sheet-like sedimentary rocks, that were originally formed...

Some of the best dramatic moments in the movie Jurassic Park were seeing a Tyrannosaurus rex trying to chase down speeding vehicles. In reality, there have been great disagreements among paleontologists whether T. rex was really a fearsome hunter or more an opportunistic scavenger. A University of Manchester study headed by biomechanics expert William Sellers and paleontologist Phil Manning in 2007, used a powerful supercomputer to calculate the running speeds of five meat-eating dinosaurs that varied in size. The study believed to be the most accurate ever produced at the time involved feeding information about the skeletal and muscular...