Oxygen

Evolution is usually gradual, but half a billion years ago it took off at a gallop in an event that’s now known as the Cambrian Explosion. One of the leading theories is this came from a huge spike in oxygen levels, and now a team may have found where all that oxygen come from – plate tectonics.

Most oxygen in the universe isn’t in the form that we need to breathe: molecular oxygen, or O2. Now, researchers at Caltech claim to have created a reactor that can turn carbon dioxide into molecular oxygen, which could help us fight climate change here on Earth or generate oxygen for life in space.

Within a relatively short period of time, life burst forth into an incredible diversity of forms, in an event that has since come to be known as the Cambrian explosion. Now, an international team of scientists has found clues to what may have caused that – spikes in oxygen levels.

Arsenic is toxic to almost all life forms, but now researchers have discovered that some microbes in the Pacific Ocean actively breathe it. The discovery has implications for how life may adapt to a changing climate, as well as where we might find it on other planets.

Over the last few years humans have tried to mimic nature with artificial leaves, but they’re never quite up to scratch. Now, researchers have designed a new version that could work under real-world conditions, sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and creating oxygen and synthetic fuels.

During a recent expedition to the Gulf of California, a team of marine biologists discovered huge schools of fishes living in an environment that’s almost completely devoid of oxygen – levels well below the amount previously thought necessary for these animals.

The oceans are heating up at an alarming rate, and it turns out that the problem may be worse than we initially thought. A new study has used a more accurate technique to measure the rate of ocean warming, and found that it could be 60 percent higher than the current worst-case scenario suggests.

To avoid a future where once-routine procedures become life-threatening again, new ways to fight bacteria need to be developed. A new study has now shown oxygen can be weaponized against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by way of nanoparticles activated by light.

Ordinary (or baryonic) matter is relatively rare in the universe, and there seems to be a huge chunk of it missing. After 20 years of scouring the sky, astronomers using the ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory have now found clues to this missing matter hiding in intergalactic gas.

Elements like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen weren’t very common until the first stars had fired up, burnt out and exploded. Now, astronomers using ALMA have detected the most distant – and hence, earliest – signature of oxygen, in a galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away.

Metals may seem tough, but given enough time even plain old air can be their undoing. An MIT team has found that aluminum can be protected from oxidation by a thin coating of aluminum oxide, which acts like a liquid, flowing to fill any gaps as they form.

Billions of years ago, the Great Oxygenation Event wiped out most life on Earth at the time. This ramped up about 2.5 billion years ago, but now scientists have discovered signs of the oldest known “oxygen oasis” in South Africa, showing that the process started almost half a billion years earlier.