The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has uncovered signs that Mars once had a vast network of waterways, including a planet-spanning ocean in its northern hemisphere, and an extensive network of rivers that carved majestic canyons through the ancient Martian landscape. Using its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurfaceread more
Physicists with MIT and the University of Vienna have conducted an experiment that pretty much proves that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is real, and not the effect of a "loophole" that could be explained by classical physics. The experiments that were used in closing this loophole involved a combination of Earth-bound telescopes, 30,000 entangled pairs of entangled photons, and starlight nearly as old as the universe itself.
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A recent survey of the DNA of over 100,000 of the Earth’s animal species, including modern humans, has yielded a shocking result: 90 percent of all extant species arose at the same time, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, upending the assumption that most creatures would have reached their modern forms at different point throughout the planet’s history. The survey also found that genetic diversity between different species doesn’t increase over time–meaning modern humans haven’t diverged genetically over the course of our history from other species at all.
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A recent analysis of the fossils of ancient microorganisms from deep within Earth’s past have unveiled the presence of a surprising amount of biodiversity that flourished roughly 3.4 billion years ago, when the Earth was still a very young planet. The variety of metabolic processes that these early microorganisms used suggests that they needed time to evolve the diversity that the researchers discovered, meaning that life on Earth had to have started much, much earlier. And if life on Earth took hold that quickly in its history, what would prevent the multitude of other planets we’re discovering across the universe from forming their own lifeforms?
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