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Washington, D.C., 1 July 2009— The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Carnegie Institution a $4 million grant over three years to initiate the Deep Carbon Observatory -- an international, decade-long project to investigate the nature of carbon in Earth's deep interior.
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 Argonne, IL, 5 June 2009—Millions of people today carry around pocket-sized music players capable of holding thousands of songs, thanks to the discovery 20 years ago of a phenomenon known as the “giant magnetoresistance effect,” which made it possible to pack more data onto smaller and smaller hard drives.
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 Washington, D.C., 28 April 2009—The Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory has been selected as one of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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 Washington, D.C., 8 April 2009—The Earth’s original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the “Great Oxidation Event.”
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Washington, D.C., 25 March 2009—The car-sized asteroid that exploded above the Nubian Desert last October was small compared to the dinosaur-killing, civilization-ending objects that still orbit the sun.
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 Washington, D.C., 3 February 2009—An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element―boron.
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 Washington, D.C., 23 March 2009—Unraveling the origins of agriculture in different regions around the globe has been a challenge for archeologists. Now researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* report finding evidence of early human experiments with grain cultivation in East Asia.
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 Washington, D.C., 11 March 2009—Ever since the Bronze Age, humans have experimented with combining different metals to create alloys with properties superior to either metal alone. But not all metals readily form alloys, for some pairs of elements the atoms are too dissimilar.
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 Washington, DC, Thursday, November 13, 2008 — Evolution isn’t just for living organisms. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found that the mineral kingdom co-evolved with life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 known types of minerals on Earth can be directly or indirectly linked to biological activity.
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 Washington D.C., 9 January 2009—Asteroids are hunks of rock that orbit in the outer reaches of space, and scientists have generally assumed that their small size limited the types of rock that could form in their crusts.
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Washington, D.C., 12 November 2008—The key to understanding Earth’s evolution, including how our atmosphere gained oxygen and how volcanoes and earthquakes form, is to look deep, really
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Washington, D.C., 28 October 2008—Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have developed a new technique for improving the properties of diamonds – not only adding sparkle to gems
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Since we can’t sample the deepest regions of the Earth, scientists watch the velocity of seismic waves as they travel through the planet to determine the composition and density of that mater
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Washington, D.C., 11 December 2007—Organic compounds contain carbon and hydrogen and form the building blocks of all life on Earth. By analyzing organic material and minerals in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001, scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory have shown for the first time that building blocks of life formed on Mars early in its history. Previously, scientists have thought that organic material in ALH 84001 was brought to Mars by meteorite impacts or more speculatively originated from ancient Martian microbes.
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Carnegie's research team from the Geophysical Laboratory and Department of Terrestrial Magnetism is awarded an Astrobiology Institute grant!
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Washington, D.C., 3 September 2008— Nitrogen atoms like to travel in pairs, hooked together by one of the strongest chemical bonds in nature.
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Washington, D.C., 4 August 2008—Oxygen, the third most abundant element in the cosmos and essential to life on Earth, changes its forms dramatically under pressure transforming to a solid wit
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Washington, DC, 19 May 2008—Superconductors can convey more than 150 times more electricity than copper wires because they don’t restrict electron movement, the essence of electricity.
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Washington, DC, 13 March 2008—The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generous helpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levels previously measured in other similar meteorites. This result suggests that the early solar system was far richer in the organic building blocks of life than scientists had thought, and that fallout from space may have spiked Earth’s primordial broth.
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Washington, DC, 28 Feb. 2008 — Interstellar space may be strewn with tiny whiskers of carbon, dimming the light of far-away objects. This discovery by scientists at the Carnegie Institution may have implications for the “dark energy” hypothesis, proposed a decade ago in part to explain the unexpected dimness of certain stellar explosions called Type1a supernovae.
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Washington, D.C. — Scientists have discovered that the magnetic strength of magnetite—the most abundant magnetic mineral on Earth—declines drastically when put under pressure.
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A discovery by scientists at the Carnegie Institution has opened the door to a new generation of piezoelectric materials that can convert mechanical strain into electricity and vice versa, potentially cutting costs and boosting performance in myriad applications ranging from medical diagnostics to green energy technologies.
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Washington, D.C.—In the first experiments able to mimic the crushing, searing conditions found in Earth’s lower mantle, and simultaneously probe tell-tale properties of iron, scientists
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