Last year, researchers at UCLA made a rather fantastic, if serendipitous, discovery. A team of scientists led by chemist Richard Kaner had just finished devising an efficient method for producing high-quality sheets of the Nobel-prize winning supermaterial known as graphene... with a consumer-grade DVD drive. That…

Coal generates nearly half the electricity we use in the United States. We all depend on the fossilized remains of plants — but the vast majority of the coal in the ground comes from a single era, from 360 to 300 million years ago.

Graphene, the eternally stretching two-dimensional form of carbon, is one of the most promising synthetic materials in existence, but is still costly to produce to specification. New research released in the PNAS shows a simple and cheap way to produce the stuff, and could herald a graphene revolution.

The latest estimates suggest there are at least 160 billion exoplanets in the Milky Way alone, which means there could easily be several billion potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy. But are all these Earth-like planets really like our home?

They might be microscopic, but as far as molecules go, buckyballs are absolutely gigantic. These soccer ball shaped molecules are made of 60 carbon molecules each, and new data from the Spitzer Telescope suggest they are everywhere in the universe.

The first, moss-like plants emerged on land about 470 million years ago. In just 25 million years, they stripped the planet of vital minerals, wrecked Earth's carbon cycle, started an ice age, and caused a mass extinction of marine life.

All living organisms use DNA as the carrier of genetic material and RNA as the messenger molecule directing the expression of genes and creation of proteins. This arrangement has lasted 3.5 billion years. But what came before these life-giving molecules?

A few months back, astronomers discovered a diamond planet formed from the remnants of an exploded star. It looked like a cosmic oddity, but giant diamond-encrusted planets might be way more common than we ever suspected.

Graphene is incredibly cool stuff: a sheet of interlocking carbon atoms, only one atom thick. It's an extremely interesting material, and a newly pioneered technique has created a way of painting stripes on the graphene sheets to change its functionality.

Located some 11 billion light-years from Earth are two clouds of gas. Just two billion years younger than the Big Bang itself, they appear to be the first known clouds that are completely unaltered since the birth of the universe.