When studying Earth’s past, researchers want to understand how nutrients like nitrogen cycled and the impact biology had on them. Scientists rely on ancient rock, soil, fossils, and marine sediment to understand the world that used to be. Approximately 2.5 billion years ago, oxygenic photosynthesis, the form of…
How does a cell stay alive? How do molecules in a cell “know” how to react with one another? Does this chemistry become more complex over time, and if so, why? In Dr. Betül Kacar’s lab at Harvard University, scientists look for answers. In order to understand how a complex communication system…
All life on Earth survives because of the sun. Plants use a process called photosynthesis to transfer energy from the Sun’s rays into the sugars that build their stems and leaves. Animals either eat the plants directly, or eat other animals that have eaten plants. Countless other organisms, like bacteria, algae, and…
1992 First exoplanet to orbit a main sequence star is discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan. The first confirmed exoplanet is a ‘hot Jupiter’ which takes 4.2-day to go around its sun. 51Pegasi b. 2005 New Zealand’s Grant Christie and Jenny McCormick discover the second planet found by gravitational…
Astrobiology is asking three fundamental questions: 1. What is life? 2. Are we alone out there? 3. What is the future of humankind? “Are we alone?” is probably the most debated out of the three. Science fiction fans know it and scientists know it. Do we believe in aliens? And do we really wish to find them? It…
So far, we cannot be sure that this question has been properly answered. Even so, NASA has proposed that life be taken as a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. If we have a mind for science, we might then ask – is this consistent with basic principles? The life chemistry we…
My research interests are centered on the evolutionary relationships among species of seahorse and pipefish in the family Syngnathidae through morphological study and DNA sequencing. This entails collecting and observing fish for study via scuba diving and photography in shallow inshore water in which the underwater…
New research by NOAA Fisheries has revealed the opah, or moonfish, as the first fully warm-blooded fish that circulates heated blood throughout its body much like mammals and birds, giving it a competitive advantage in the cold ocean depths. The silvery fish, roughly the size of a large automobile tire, is known from…
A new international study casts doubt on the leading theory of what causes ice ages around the world — changes in the way the Earth orbits the sun. The researchers found that glacier movement in the Southern Hemisphere is influenced primarily by sea surface temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than…
For more than 250 million years, four-limbed land animals known as tetrapods have repeatedly conquered the Earth’s oceans. These creatures–such as plesiosaurs, penguins and sea turtles–descended from separate groups of terrestrial vertebrates that convergently evolved to thrive in aquatic…
