New research suggests that the iron-depleted, oxidized chemistry typical of the Earth's continental crust did not result from the crystallization of the mineral garnet, as was widely believed in 2018. The low iron content of Earth's continental crust in comparison to oceanic crust caused the continents to be less compact and more buoyant, causing continental plates to reside higher atop the planet's mantle than oceanic plates and making terrestrial life possible. The disparity in density and buoyancy was discovered to be a major factor in why continents have dry land and oceanic crusts are submerged, as well as why continental plates always come out on top when colliding with oceanic plates at subduction zones, where one edge of a crustal plate is forced sideways and downward into ...

Researchers have been trying for a very long time to figure out why it is that migratory songbirds normally take off during the night, but they have not been successful. Now, the results of two separate studies reveal that the birds use the approach of night and the prospect of clear skies in the near future as cues to take flight. The investigations, which were published in the journal Movement Ecology, made use of radio tracking devices and evaluated data from roughly 400 songbirds belonging to nine different migratory species, such as the yellow-rumped warbler, the American redstart, and the Bicknell's thrush.

The first building elements of organic life, amino acids and carboxylic acids, may have been formed by the collision of solar particles from solar eruptions with vapors in the early Earth's atmosphere, according to scientists. In the late 1800s, scientists hypothesized that the origins of life began in a "warm little pond": a soup of chemicals energized by electricity, heat, and other energy sources that could combine to create organic molecules. In 1953, when these conditions were recreated in a laboratory at the University of Chicago, twenty distinct amino acids were discovered to have formed. Life began in a "warm little pond" according to late 1800s biologists. Vladimir Airapetian, a stellar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a...