12-10-23 When I first conceived of Earth Day, a global holiday to celebrate the wonder of life on our planet, I thought long and hard about the day on which it should fall. It must be meaningful. One that might be accepted universally for all of humankind. W...

12-10-19 Earthquakes sway buildings, buckle terrain（地形，地势） , and rumble -- both audibly and in infrasound, frequencies below the threshold（门槛，极限） of human hearing. New computer modeling by a team of researchers indicates that most of the low-fr...

12-10-19 European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system -- the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet（外星行星） ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was...

12-10-18 The giant impact believed to have formed the Earth-Moon system has long been accepted as canon（标准，教条） . However, a major challenge to the theory has been that Earth and Moon have identical oxygen isotope compositions, even though earlier impa...

12-10-12 New research led by Yale University scientists suggests that a rocky planet twice Earth's size orbiting a nearby star is a diamond planet. This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth, said lead rese...

12-10-12 Gaze at the vivid yellows, blues, and psychedelic（引起幻觉的） swirls of a single emperor angelfish（神仙鱼） and you'll sense the whimsy（怪念头，反复无常） of evolution. Go on to explore its home in lush coral reefs and you'll soon hit sensory ov...

12-09-28 The seasons on earth are forever changing, In spring, you left some flowers and said goodbye, Not intending to return to share sighs of fall! Now, even the cloudy yellow leaves are all fallen, It left vast gray skies lonely. How can you stand the co...

12-09-27 Seismologists（地震学家） have known for years that the Indo-Australian plate of Earth's crust is slowly breaking apart, but they saw it in action last April when at least four faults broke in a magnitude-8.7 earthquake that may be the largest of it...

12-09-25 There is evidence that some microbial life had migrated from Earth's oceans to land by 2.75 billion years ago, though many scientists believe such land-based life was limited because the ozone layer that shields against ultraviolet radiation did not...

12-09-20 I was thirtyseven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth and lent everything the gloomy air of a Flemish landscape: the ground crew ran g...