(THE CONVERSATION) From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just ...

Biosphere 2 started with eight scientists and a very ambitious experiment. Now, almost 35 years later, it's still being used for cutting-edge research. Scientists continue to use it to study Earth's ...

In the early 1990s, eight people agreed to vanish from the world and live for two years inside a sealed glass habitat in the Arizona desert, a kind of fake Earth built to see whether humans could ...

In the Arizona desert, a vast glass structure sits far from cities and farmland. It was built to test an idea that once seemed urgent and uncertain. Could humans survive inside a closed world with no ...

ORACLE, Ariz. — Plopped in the Sonoran Desert, just outside Tucson, Ariz., sits a massive, multilevel greenhouse that's probably best known as the inspiration for a Pauly Shore movie. A slick, stepped ...

Mark Nelson, one of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, offers a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world in his forthcoming ...

TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) - At the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2, a groundbreaking experiment is shedding light on how humans might one day survive on Mars. For two weeks, researcher Matthias Beach ...

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A giant impact on the early Earth could have brought the building blocks of RNA to our planet, which new research suggests could have quickly formed in the presence of compounds called borates. When ...