ADVENTURE OF DISCOVERYS

What Was the First Life on Earth? The earliest evidence for life on Earth arises among the oldest rocks still preserved on the planet. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks still in existence date back to just 4 billion years ago. Not long after that rock record begins, tantalizing evidence of life emerges: A set of filament-like fossils from Australia, reported in the journal Astrobiology in 2013, may be the remains of a microbial mat that might have been extracting energy from sunlight some 3.5 billion years ago. Another contender for world's oldest life is a set of rocks in Greenland that may hold the fossils of 3.7-billion-year-old colonies of cyanobacteria , which form layered structures called stromatolites. Some scientists have claimed to see evidence of life in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Akilia Island, Greenland. The researchers first reported in 1996 in the journal Nature that isotopes (forms of an element with different numbers of

The Outer Space Treaty Has Been Successful – But Is It Fit for the Modern Age?   This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Space exploration is governed by a complex series of international treaties and agreements which have been in place for years. The first and probably most important of them celebrates its 50th anniversary on January 27 – The Outer Space Treaty . This treaty, which was signed in 1967, was agreed through the United Nations , and today it remain as the "constitution" of outer space. It has been signed and made official, or ratified, by 105 countries across the world. The treaty has worked well so far but challenges have increasingly started to crop up. So will it survive another 50 years? The Outer Space Treaty, like all international law, is technically binding to those countries who sign up to it. But the obvious lack o