LIVE SCIENCE - The first animals may have appeared on Earth hundreds of millions years earlier than their fossils suggest, a new modeling study suggests. Previously, the earliest fossil evidence of animals dated to around 574 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period (635 million to 538 million years ago). In the new paper, a...
EARTHSKY - People are fascinated by the idea of a planet orbiting more than one star, like Tatooine in “Star Wars” or Trisolaris in “The Three-Body Problem.” On September 29, 2026, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, said they have modeled a nearby binary star system and found that it could potentially support an...
EARTH.COM - More than 2 billion years ago, oxygen became a permanent part of Earth’s atmosphere. What happened next has puzzled scientists for decades. Somehow, oxygen levels stayed high enough for millions of years to eventually support complex life. New research finally explains how, and the answer traces back to a nutrient most people rarely...
PEOPLE - Venus may be moonless today, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it always was. A new study suggests that if Venus once had a moon, the planet’s unusually slow rotation could have eventually pulled the celestial body back toward its surface, potentially ending with a massive collision. After the collision, the fragments of the...
MASHABLE - Venus' sluggish spin may be the key to why it doesn't have a moon — anymore, at least, new research says. The study, led by University of California, Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane, appears in The Astrophysical Journal. Kane's team built computer simulations of how gravity ties a planet to a moon in space...
BBC - Scientists have come up with a surprising new theory about one of our neighbouring planets - and it involves a missing moon. They think Venus may once have had one, but that it slowly moved closer to the planet, before eventually crashing into it. The idea could help explain why Venus doesn't have...
POPULAR MECHANICS - On July 30, 2025, at 11:24 a.m. local time, a massive magnitude 8.8 megathrust earthquake rattled the eastern coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. It was the largest seismic event since the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, although thankfully it was much less deadly. The massive quake happened along the Kuril–Kamchatka subduction zone—a fault...
REUTERS - A California-based astrophysicist presented a new theory on Monday to explain why Venus, the planet most like Earth in size, mass and structure, lacks its own moon. Call it a case of celestial cannibalism. The extremely slow speed at which Venus rotates on its axis would have doomed any natural satellite that may...
LIVE SCIENCE - Given that it's the closest planet to the sun, Mercury seems like it should be the hottest planet in our solar system. However, at a blistering 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), Venus tops Mercury's 800 F (430 C) highest surface temperature, despite being an average of 31 million miles (50 million...
EARTH.COM - Nobody can tell you exactly when an earthquake will hit. But a team of scientists has gotten remarkably good at answering a different question: where. Their new method, developed at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), flags the specific stretches of major earthquake faults where stress has been quietly piling up for years...