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Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for roughly 180 million years, filling nearly every ecological role available to them. Yet one gap in their story has puzzled scientists for decades: there were no small ones.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has liquid rain, rivers and seas much like Earth, except its clouds are made of methane rather than water vapour. Planetary scientists studying the moon found that its rainstorms are far more extreme than anyone had anticipated.

Beneath the permanently shadowed craters near the Moon's south pole, scientists believe significant deposits of water ice may be buried out of reach of the instruments currently used to search for it from orbit. A new study led by researchers at the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Hawaii proposes a different way to find it, listening for the way seismic waves, the same vibrations recorded during earthquakes on Earth, change as they pass through frozen versus dry lunar soil.

Viruses have been attacking living organisms for billions of years, long before humans first appeared on Earth. Yet one of the biggest questions in biology has remained remarkably difficult to answer: where did the human immune system come from?

Snakes represent one of the most successful groups of vertebrates on Earth, with over 4,200 living species accounting for one-third of all scaled reptiles. Despite a long history going back to at least the Middle Jurassic, the exact environmental origins of these creatures have remained a subject of debate.

Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas, abundant in quantity but its chemical stability makes it difficult to convert into useful materials. Since the 1960s, scientists have been attempting to transform carbon into polymers, which require specific catalysts to overcome the energy barriers.

The Arctic region is warming three times faster than the global average since the past 40 years, which makes it one of the most sensitive areas on the planet. Recent scientific findings published in Nature Geoscience have uncovered a previously unknown natural process that massively increases the number of cloud-forming particles in the Arctic atmosphere.

Along with Russia, the United States possesses nearly 90% of all nuclear weapons on Earth. The country has over 5,044 total warheads and is known to have the most balanced and heavily maintained strategic triad delivery systems.

For much of the twentieth century, the deepest parts of the oceans remained among the least understood places on Earth. Ships crossed vast stretches of water every day, yet almost nobody knew what lay beneath them beyond scattered depth measurements collected for navigation.

Somewhere along the East African Rift Valley sits a chain of lakes holding more than a quarter of all the surface freshwater on the planet. Most people have never heard of them.