3.5 billion year old fossils found that predate oxygen on Earth

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Researchers have found fossils of bacteria in northwest Australia’s Pilbara region, that are dated at 3.49 billion-years-old. That’s older than oxygen and just one billion years after Earth’s formation. The fossils, which are textures on the surfaces of sandstone thought to be sculpted by once-living organisms, are believed to be the oldest visible fossils ever…

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New state of matter (and new type of magnetism) discovered by MIT researchers

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Since 1987, a third state of magnetism, one that could be highly relevant to high-temperature semiconductors, has been a theoretical prediction. Now researchers at MIT have demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior (and a new form of matter), adding to the two previously known magnetic states (ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism).…

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