Evaluation of the impact of the most recent €10-million Europlanet project funded by the European Commission (EC) has been featured as a case study in the journal Nature Astronomy, published today. 

Rocks store information from long ago. For instance, their composition can reveal the environmental conditions during their formation. This makes them extremely important in climate research. This led a research team at the University of Göttingen and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences to investigate the following: do “cherts” – sedimentary rocks that form when silica-rich sediment mud is buried hundreds of meters deep – reveal anything about the climate of the past? The study found that oxygen isotopes in cherts do not show clear indicators about the early climate. However, they do record how much heat was released from the hot interior of the Earth to their location on the seafloor. This is crucial for understanding the early Earth: the findings allow researchers to understand the conditions on the Earth's surface up to 3.5 billion years ago. The research was published in the journal Geology.

Scientists know dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe and is responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion. Beyond that, little about it is certain, so a West Virginia University engineer is enhancing the calibration of radio telescopes that can tell astronomers about dark energy by measuring the “neutral hydrogen” in the universe, a simple form of hydrogen with no net electric charge.

Researchers at Tohoku University have taken a major step forward in the global hunt for dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up about 27% of the universe, by designing a new type of quantum sensor network that could significantly improve our chances of detecting it.