Aragonite

An unexpected discovery reveals our ancestors arrived in some areas much earlier than we thought.

Engineers created a breakthrough cement that's 17 times stronger, leading to safer and more durable buildings. And they used an astonishing secret weapon.

A home aquarium can be a great decorative piece for your home. If you enjoy caring for aquatic creatures, here's what you'll need to buy for your aquarium.

Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global liveability

Stromatolites are the earliest geological record of life on Earth. These curious biotic structures are made of algae carpets growing toward the light and precipitating carbonates. After their first appearance 3.48 Ga ago, stromatolites dominated the planet as the sole living carbonate factory for almost three billion years.

Vaterite is one of the three forms of calcium carbonate, along with calcite and aragonite. Nanosized vaterite is valuable for various applications, such as drug delivery, cosmetics, and bone defect filling, owing to its biocompatibility, high porosity, solubility, and large specific surface area.

Discover an ancient fish's tragic last meal as it swallowed an oversized ammonite, shedding light on predator-prey interactions in the early Jurassic period.

Deep carbon cycling at subduction zones affects the long-term habitability of Earth's surface by regulating atmospheric CO2 concentrations. How the carbon is transferred from the slab to the subarc mantle has thus far eluded researchers.

The influence of climate on premodern civil conflict and societal instability is debated. Here, the authors combine archeological, historical, and paleoclimatic datasets to show that drought between 1400-1450 cal. CE escalated civil conflict at Mayapan, the largest Postclassic Maya capital of the Yucatán Peninsula.

In the rapidly warming Eastern Mediterranean, water stratifies into layers, like a cake. That's allowing carbon-spewing crystals to form.

Exactly how does coral make its skeleton, a sea urchin grow a spine, or an abalone form the mother-of-pearl in its shell? A new study at the Advanced Light Source at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) revealed that this process of biomineralization, which sea creatures use to lock carbon away in their bodies, is more complex and diverse than previously thought.

Most people consider climate change to consist only of the warming of the atmosphere, the consequences of which primarily affect land regions. However, this is a human-centered view and does not go far enough.

Aperiodic discharge of brine at Blood Falls forms a red-tinged fan at the terminus of Taylor Glacier, Antarctica. Samples from this discharge provide an opportunity for mineralogical study at a Martian analogue study site. Environmental samples were collected in the field and analyzed in the laboratory using Fourier transform infrared, Raman, visible to near-infrared, and Mössbauer spectroscopies. Samples were…

It has nothing to do with an errant speck of sand.

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otolith Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31575663 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Hard corals grow by generating calcium carbonate (CaCO3) from seawater and adding it to their skeletons, where it crystallizes. This process -- and coral survival -- are threatened by ocean acidification. However, scientists report that corals produce the CaCO3 in compartments protected from seawater and not, as previously believed, in exposed locations. The findings, and differing crystallization rates, could…

A collection of fossil shells from marine snails and clams is challenging a theory that says the world's deadliest mass extinction was accompanied by severe ocean acidification.

A heart cockle shell has been found to let in light through a design that resembles fiber optic cables. This could inspire everything from helping coral survive to designing new camera lenses.

Tiny, solid windows in the shells of heart cockles let in light for the photosynthetic algae inside them – and they could show us how to make better fibre-optic cables

A detailed analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite has found evidence that its parent asteroid was altered by water before being smashed apart multiple times.