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Ceres is dotted with bright patches of salt, and each one is a kind of receipt. Salt like that is left behind when briny liquid reaches the surface and the water evaporates. Whatever was dissolved in…
Cosmologists have used a large simulation of how galaxies form to estimate where in the universe planets have the best chance of staying habitable, and they report that the Milky Way of today is…
Researchers led from Tohoku University have built a computer model of where formaldehyde (H₂CO) would have landed on the surface of early Mars, and it puts about ten times the global average over the…
Chemists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have made pyridine, a ring of five carbon atoms and one nitrogen, inside laboratory ice built to imitate the frozen coatings of interstellar dust grains.…
A chemist who wants to know what is dissolved in a jar of seawater has to take the sample apart first: separate the salts, concentrate each one, then put it in front of an instrument on its own. On…
A NASA-funded team has found an amoeba in a hot spring in California's Lassen Volcanic National Park that reproduces at 63 °C (145 °F), hotter than any organism with a cell nucleus had been recorded…
Researchers at Northern Arizona University and the University of Bristol have proposed a way to estimate how far life could have evolved on a distant planet without observing any life there. Their…
Researchers at Florida State University's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory have used the world's highest-field mass spectrometer and single-molecule atomic…
Freeze a bucket of seawater and the salt does not freeze with it. Ice crystals grow out of nearly pure water and shove everything dissolved (salt, minerals, whatever organic molecules happen to be…
MIT researchers report that three short peptides stayed intact for weeks in a solution of about 98 percent sulfuric acid and folded into a defined three-dimensional shape instead of breaking down.…
A gold-coated copper plate, chilled to 10 kelvin and sitting in an ultra-high vacuum, makes a serviceable stand-in for a grain of interstellar dust. Freeze the right gases onto it, warm it slowly,…
Microbes carried to the Moon on astronauts and their equipment could stay alive in shaded ground around the lunar south pole, NASA scientists report in a modeling study published Aug. 19 in Science…