chemistry

In 2020, an international team of researchers made an important discovery about a parasite called a dodder. Dodders are a group of over a 100 parasitic plant species, found through much of the world.

The molecular working parts of living things are complex organic molecules with a backbone of carbon atoms. Some scientists think that hot springs might have provided the special chemical environments needed to link simple molecules up to form these longer and more complicated molecules.

The ancient Egytians used copper to sterilize wounds and clean their drinking water. They even wrote about it in one of the oldest known medical texts, the Smith Papyrus, which is over four thousand years old.

Crop rotation involves a lot of questions, like a puzzle. There are so many different crops that farmers can choose to plant, and so many different combinations; the possiblities are endless.

Rudist clams were around in the late Cretaceous and are extinct today. Their fossils can tell us a lot of surprising things, such as the length of a day 70 million years ago.

In 2020 an international team of astonomers made a surprising discovery using the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawai'i. They found evidence that the atmosphere of the planet Venus contains tiny amounts of phsophine gas.

Many astronomers think that exoplanets circling distant stars might be waterworlds, but maybe we don't need to look that far away. In 2020 two American geologists published evidence that Earth's surface may have been entirely covered with water up until at least 3.2 billion years ago.

Too much lead is always a cause for concern, and scientists are still learning about how lead interacts with other substances. Take aluminum and phosphate. Phosphate is sometimes added to water because it inhibits corrosion of lead pipes, reducing the amount of lead released into water.

Pretzels, potato chips, and popcorn are all covered in it. It's baked into our bread and mixed into our butter. It snows down on our fies and even our cucumber slices.

German scientists studying young beeches and maples knew plants responded to predation, but they wanted to know if plants could tell the difference between a deer chewing their leaves verus being damaged by other factors like storms, or being trampled upon.