Chaos. Nonlinear Dynamics

The chemistry of the cosmos today is not what it used to be. The stars and planets and interstellar gas around us are laced with carbon, oxygen, and many other elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - the only substances to have existed for a few hundred million years after the big bang.

Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago.

The moon is shrinking ever so slightly, but there is no cause for alarm, according to a new study that has discovered a clutch of previously unseen faults on the lunar surface from photos taken by a NASA probe.

Climate scientists have cracked the mystery of why Antarctic sea ice has managed to grow despite global warming—but the results suggest the trend may rapidly reverse, a new study says.

Kamil crater, at only about 150 feet wide and 50 feet deep, may not break any size records–but what the Egyptian crater lacks in range it makes up for with cleanliness. In an paper published yesterday in Science, researchers say that its “pristine” impact, spotted in 2009 during a Google Earth survey, makes the crater an ideal model to understand similar impacts.

For a quick summary of the last 25 million years in human brain evolution, just watch how our brains change between infancy and adulthood. Over its first few decades, the human cerebral cortex — the brain’s wrinkled outer tissue — evolves in ways that parallel its evolution since we last shared a common ancestor with macaque monkeys.

The intensity of hurricanes follows a simple mathematical law – a finding that could help us predict how they will respond to climate change. Alvaro Corral of the Centre for Mathematical Research in Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues looked at records of hurricanes from four ocean basins around the world between 1966 and 2007. For each known hurricane, they calculated how much energy it released, based on the wind speeds and how long the hurricane lasted.

Cambridge, Mass., – June 28, 2010 – "More than meets the eye" may soon become more than just a tagline for a line of popular robotic toys. Researchers at Harvard and MIT have reshaped the landscape of programmable matter by devising self-folding sheets that rely on the ancient art of origami.

While Arctic sea ice continues to shrink as the world warms, the ice around Antarctica is actually growing, thanks to the influence of the ozone hole over the southernmost continent, scientists have reported.