Within the world’s oldest crystals, collected from the Jack Hills in Western Australia, lie the remains of even older rocks—some of which have been reprocessed by magma into the remaining crystals. Using machine learning, geologists have revealed that a third of these ancient rocks were sedimentary. This means that more than four billion years ago, … Read more
Nearly 200 years ago, human blood was said to have been incorporated into a ceremonial tomb that legend has it built in a royal palace complex in what is now Benin. Now, an investigation into the proteins found within the tomb’s walls reveals evidence that the legend is true. According to a new study, the … Read more
Much has changed in the approximately 4.5 billion years since the solar system first emerged from a disk-shaped cloud of swirling dust and gas. The stuff from which everything is formed has undergone some serious changes: packed into planets, blown up by solar radiation and plasma, changed by interactions with other atoms. The basic components … Read more