Science Glance
Scientists have used a powerful new technique to prove that some tiny crystals found in Western Australia are indeed the oldest known materials formed on Earth. Back in 2001, scientists reported that one of the zircon crystals was about 4.4 billion years old — so old that not everyone believed it.
"There have been challenges, because nothing in science goes without being questioned. It always has to be proven," says , a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The crystals formed just tens of millions of years after an early proto-Earth was melted by a violent impact with a Mars-sized object. The crash created the moon and turned our young planet into a red ball of molten rock.
Scientists say evidence of an African environment inhabited by an ancient ape species provides insights into the early diversification of the ape-human lineage.
A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the .
A fossil of a giant marine reptile known as an ichthyosaur may show evidence of the oldest live reptilian birth ever seen, U.S. paleontologists say.
NASA says its Chandra X-ray Observatory has revisited a galaxy 12 million light years from Earth with a giant jet blasting away from a supermassive black hole.
In a step that has implications for stem cell research, human biology and the treatment of disease, researchers in Japan and at Harvard University have managed to turn adult cells back into flexible stem cells without changing their DNA.
The Kennedy Space Center is going to be the testing site for a top-secret Air Force space plane. Boeing - the contractor working on the spacecraft - announced Friday that it will be converting a former space shuttle building for the X-37B orbital test vehicle program.
