A thick haze of organic material let the early Earth soak up the sun’s warmth without absorbing harmful ultraviolet rays, according to a new study. The model offers a new twist on an old puzzle: Although the sun was so dim billions of years ago that the Earth should have been a ball of ice, the young planet had liquid oceans capable of supporting life. “Given these recent papers, we can probably... 

After years of struggling to understand how to properly assemble a galaxy, astronomers have discovered that the answer is blowin’ in the wind. The supernova wind, that is. New computer simulations show that winds generated by supernovas, which are the explosions of massive stars, can push stars out from the center of a dwarf galaxy. This simulation of supernova winds redistributes both ordinary... 

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures. “The underlying grammatical structure seems similar...