Carnegie’s Andrew Steele is a member of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute-led Earth First Origins project, which has been awarded a $9 million grant by NASA’s Astrobiology Program. The five-year project seeks to uncover the conditions on early Earth that gave rise to life by identifying, replicating, and exploring how prebiotic molecules and chemical pathways could have formed under realistic early Earth conditions.
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Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, and volcanoes—they all stem from the very same forces that give our planet life. It is only when these forces exceed our ability to withstand them that they become disasters. Science and engineering can be used to understand extreme events and to design our cities to be resilient, but we must overcome the psychological drive to normalization that keeps humanity from believing that we could experience anything worse than what we have already survived.
Carnegie’s Winslow Briggs, a giant in the field of plant biology who explained how seedlings grow toward light, died on February 11 at Stanford University Medical Center. He was 90.
The density of rock layers on the terrain that climbs from the base of Mars’ Gale Crater to Mount Sharp is less dense than expected, according to the latest report on the Red Planet’s geology from a team of scientists including Carnegie’s Shaunna Morrison.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal. Ambitious Chinese regulations on coal mining that took effect in 2010 have not curbed the nation’s growing methane emissions as intended, says new research from a team led by Carnegie’s Scot Miller and Anna Michalak.
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Carnegie's Juna Kollmeier and Université de Bordeaux's Sean Raymond kicked off an internet firestorm late last year when they posted a draft of their article about submoons on a preprint server. The online conversation obsessed over the best term to describe such phenomena. But nomenclature was not the point of Kollmeier and Raymond’s investigation, who set out to define the physical parameters for moons that would be capable of being stably orbited by other, smaller moons.
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For millennia, humanity has used medicinal plants and plant-based compounds to treat a variety of neurological ailments including epilepsy, mania, migraines, and bipolar disorder. Now a team of researchers from Carnegie and Stanford University is using microscopic worms to understand what these plant-derived molecules are and how they affect the brain’s biochemistry.
Carbon plays an unparalleled role in our lives: as the element of life, as the basis of most of society’s energy, as the backbone of most new materials, and as the central focus in efforts to understand Earth’s variable and uncertain climate. Yet in spite of carbon’s importance,...
Superdeep diamonds are tiny time capsules carrying unchanged impurities made eons ago and providing researchers with important clues about Earth’s formation. Diamonds derived from below the continental lithosphere, are most likely from the transition zone (415 miles, or 670km deep...
Carnegie is renowned for its post-doctoral and graduate student fellowship programs, which operate on each of the Carnegie campuses. Our fellows participate fully in the institution’s vigorous intellectual life, and have complete access to the laboratory instruments and facilities at the...
Capital Science Evening Lectures
Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - 6:30pm to 7:45pm
Over the past few years, Dr. Sheppard and his team have been performing the largest and deepest survey ever attempted of our Solar System’s fringes. In December 2018, he...
Capital Science Evening Lectures
Tuesday, March 5, 2019 - 6:30pm to 7:45pm
Entrepreneur and inventor Dr. Rothblatt cofounded Sirius Satellite Radio and then pivoted to establish biotech company United Therapeutics in an effort to save her daughter’s life from...
Astronomy Lecture Series
Monday, March 18, 2019 - 7:00pm to 8:45pm
Astronomers have mapped almost the entire history of our universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. One last frontier remains, an epoch known as cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies...
Some 40 thousand tons of extraterrestrial material fall on Earth every year. This cosmic debris provides cosmochemist Conel Alexander with information about the formation of the Solar System, our galaxy, and perhaps the origin of life.
Alexander studies meteorites to determine what went on before...
Roiling cauldrons of liquid-laden material flow within Earth’s rocky interior. Understanding how this matter moves and changes is essential to deciphering Earth’s formation and evolution as well as the processes that create seismic activity, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Bjø...
Staff member emeritus François Schweizer studies galaxy assembly and evolution by observing nearby galaxies, particularly how collisions and mergers affect their properties. His research has added to the awareness that these events are dominant processes in shaping galaxies and determining...
