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3 Billion-Year-Old Sulfur-Eating Microbes May Be the Oldest Fossils Ever Found

What's the News: Geologists have found fossils of microorganisms from 3.4 billion years ago, which may be the oldest fossils ever uncovered. Since these microbes date from a time when Earth's atmosphere was still oxygen-free, astrobiologists could look ...

How to Turn a Frog Egg Into a Robot's Artificial Nose

That's because e-noses use quartz rods designed to vibrate at a different frequency when they bind to a target substance. But this is not a foolproof system, as subtly different substances with similar molecular weights may bind to the rod, producing a ...

Earth Raised up Its Magnetic Shield Early, Protecting Water and Emerging Life

Here we are drinking coffee and tweeting and otherwise going about our lives, generally not giving much thought to the protection that the Earth's magnetic field affords us from the solar wind. But that magnetic field is crucial for our existence. Now ...

Date of Birth for "Peking Man" Gets Pushed Back 200000 Years

For the new study, published in Nature, researchers used a dating method that relies on the impact of cosmic rays on aluminum and beryllium isotopes in minute quartz grains. The isotopes decay at a known rate when they're exposed to cosmic radiation on ...