News

Highly efficient archaea, called Thaumarchaea, out-survive bacteria in the energy-poor, oxygen-containing sediments beneath the deep sea. These Thaumarchaea consume bits of proteins from dead cells…

Just in time for the “Year of Carbon,” DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen has published a sweeping history of carbon: Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything.

Sediments from erosion reduce the friction when one tectonic plate sinks beneath another into the mantle. This also may be true in Earth’s past, and a new hypothesis proposes that sediments helped…

Microbiologist Karen Lloyd takes us on a trip to the volcanoes and hot springs of Costa Rica, shining a light on subterranean organisms and how they could have a profound impact on life at Earth's…

The Evolution of Nanomachines in Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors (ENIGMA) project has received a $6 million grant from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to investigate…

Could a new classification system that accounts for minerals’ distinct journeys help us better understand mineralogy as a process of universal and planetary evolution?

DCO ABOVE (Aerial-based Observations of Volcanic Emissions) is the second part of a DCO-funded project to explore volcanic emissions in Papua New Guinea using cutting-edge drone technologies.

A new way of determining the amount of carbon entering a subduction zone, where an oceanic plate sinks beneath a continental plate, could lead to better estimates of the global movement of carbon…

Anaerobic methanotrophs are a group of microbes that consume methane and live a low-energy lifestyle in oxygen-free environments. A new study shows that measuring the ratio of rare isotopes of…

At high pressures and low temperature, water can form amorphous ice – a non-crystallized ‘glass-like’ solid that researchers had thought was related to supercooled water. New research, however, shows…