The Danakil Depression in northwest Ethiopia has the sulfuric acid-richest environments on Earth. One of the big questions in astrobiology is whether life can use solvents other than water to ...

Humans weren’t the first organisms on this planet to figure out how to turn the abundance of nitrogen in the atmosphere into a chemically useful form; that honor goes to some microbes that learned how ...

Life as we know it needs water, but life as we don't know it may run on concentrated sulfuric acid. The chemistry of life as we know it wouldn't work in a place like the huge Saturn moon Titan, where ...

Sulfuric acid dehydrates sugar. That sounds pretty tame, until you see that “dehydration” means that a huge, black, sugary pillar crawls up out of the beaker and comes after you. How much damage can ...

Acid rain is any form of precipitation that contains high levels of nitric and sulfuric acids. First coined by Scottish chemist Robert Angus Smith in 1852, acid rain can also occur in the form of snow ...