The last common ancestor of all living things did not just suddenly appear on Earth roughly 4.2 billion years ago. Some of its genes came from an even older and more mysterious source… “While the last universal common ancestor is the most ancient organism we can study with evolutionary methods,” explains biologist Aaron Goldman from
For countless ages, a small chunk of ice and dust traveled alone through interstellar space, like a sealed bottle drifting across a vast cosmic sea. This summer, that traveler entered our solar system and received the name 3I/ATLAS, becoming only the third confirmed interstellar comet ever observed. When researchers at Auburn University aimed NASA’s Neil
In 1966, the Soviet Union made history when its Luna 9 mission placed the first object built by humans on the surface of the Moon, broadcasting imagery back to Earth following its successful soft landing. Despite the safe touchdown of Luna 9’s lander capsule, some questions have lingered about the Soviet spacecraft’s historic mission: namely,
Footprints found in White Sands, New Mexico, are challenging everything we thought we knew about the first humans in North America. These prints, preserved in ancient mud, date back over 20,000 years, suggesting that humans were walking across the continent far earlier than scientists had believed, during the last Ice Age, no less. For a
Physicists’ top theory about the nature of the universe may be wrong, a new study of strangely warped light suggests. The new research looked into three leading theories of dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up most of the universe and provides structure to most galaxies, though we still don’t know exactly what it
The origins of the building blocks of life may be even more widespread than we realized, as per a new discovery from the asteroid sample NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission brought back to Earth from the space rock Bennu. At least 14 of the 20 amino acids used by life on Earth, and 19 other amino acids
Marteijn, J. A., Lans, H., Vermeulen, W. & Hoeijmakers, J. H. Understanding nucleotide excision repair and its roles in cancer and ageing. Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 15, 465–481 (2014). Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar Spivak, G. Nucleotide excision repair in humans. DNA Repair 36, 13–18 (2015). Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar Hoeijmakers,
A Vulcan Centaur rocket launched a pair of space surveillance satellites for the U.S. military early Thursday morning (Feb. 12). The Vulcan Centaur lifted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 4:22 a.m. EST (0922 GMT), kicking off the USSF-87 mission for the U.S. Space Force (USSF). Liftoff of the USSF-87
Pad 40 has been the primary Falcon 9 launch site for most of the rocket’s history, while Pad 39A provided a location for crew launches and an augmentation to support SpaceX’s growing launch cadence. But there are signs the Falcon 9 launch cadence, which reached 165 missions last year, may be peaking as the company
Mars‘s water disappeared somewhere, but scientists have been disagreeing for years about where exactly it went. Data from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity, along with orbiting satellites such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ExoMars, have shown that Mars used to be a wet world with an active hydrodynamic cycle. Obviously, it isn’t anymore, but