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| INCAN MUMMIES FOUND BY EDGE OF ROAD |
| Dozens of mummies dating back more than 500 years have been discovered on the path of a proposed highway on the outskirts of the Peruvian capital. |
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| ANTARCTIC DINOSAURS FOUND IN ICY GRAVES |
| Two new species of dinosaur, one a meat eater, the other a plant eater, have been found in Antarctica, by an international team of scientists. |
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| STANFORD STUDY QUESTIONS IDENTITY OF ALLEGED ROMANOV BONES |
| One of the most riveting detective stories of the last century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government declared that bones excavated from a Siberian mass grave seven years earlier indeed belonged to the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. |
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| MANUAL TOOTHBRUSHES WORK JUST AS WELL |
| Old-fashioned toothbrushes are just as good as electric ones at reducing plaque and gum disease, a U.K. review has found. |
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| ANCIENT INSECTS BUZZ INTO HISTORY BOOKS |
| Scientists have discovered the remains of a 400 million-year-old insect, the oldest ever located, in a fossil unearthed in Scotland in the early 1900s. |
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| COOKED UP FOSSILS REHEAT FIRST-LIFE DEBATE |
| Researchers have been cooking up inorganic, worm-like structures that look like some of the earliest fossils believed to exist. |
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| ANCIENT MUTANT POLLEN OUT FOR THE COUNT |
| Conifer tree pollen from 250 million years ago show the same mutations as those of modern pines hit by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, a new study has found. |
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| ANOTHER METEOR STRIKE BLAMED FOR EXTINCTIONS |
| A large meteorite collided 380 million years ago into what is now the Moroccan desert and may have caused one of the five known mass extinctions of life on Earth, researchers report. |
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| EARLIEST HOMO SAPIENS FOSSILS DISCOVERED IN ETHIOPIA |
| Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley along with researchers from Ethiopia and several other countries have uncovered fossils of the earliest modern human, Homo sapiens, estimated at 154,000 to 160,000 years old. According to the scientists, the findings provide strong evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals co-existed, rather than the former descending from the latter. |
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| 'THE END OF THE WORLD' HAS ALREADY BEGUN, UW SCIENTISTS SAY |
| In its 4.5 billion years, Earth has evolved from its hot, violent birth to the celebrated watery blue planet that stands out in pictures from space. But in a new book, two noted University of Washington astrobiologists say the planet already has begun the long process of devolving into a burned-out cinder, eventually to be swallowed by the sun. |
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| UMASS STUDY RECONSIDERS FORMATION OF ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET |
| Findings detailed in Jan. 16 issue of Nature; greenhouse gases implicated
A study by University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Robert DeConto posits an alternative theory regarding why Antarctica suddenly became glaciated 34 million years ago. |
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| SCIENTIST SAYS OSTRICH STUDY CONFIRMS BIRD 'HANDS' UNLIKE THOSE OF DINOSAURS |
| To make an omelet, you need to break some eggs. Not nearly so well known is that breaking eggs also can lead to new information about the evolution of birds and dinosaurs, a topic of hot debate among leading biologists. |
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| DINSOAUR ELLIOT UNEARTHED |
| A significant portion of what appears to be Australia's first complete dinosaur has just been uncovered during a five-week dig in Queensland.
A large team of workers and volunteers unearthed the remains of sauropod called Elliot, a large, plant-eating dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of the giant dinosaurs, 95 million years ago. |
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| NEW CELLULAR EVOLUTION THEORY REJECTS DARWINIAN ASSUMPTIONS |
| Life did not begin with one primordial cell. Instead, there were initially at least three simple types of loosely constructed cellular organizations. They swam in a pool of genes, evolving in a communal way that aided one another in bootstrapping into the three distinct types of cells by sharing their evolutionary inventions. |
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| 100,000-YEAR CLIMATE PATTERN LINKED TO SUN'S MAGNETIC CYCLES |
| Thanks to new calculations by a Dartmouth geochemist, scientists are now looking at the earth's climate history in a new light.
Mukul Sharma, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth, examined existing sets of geophysical data and noticed something remarkable: the sun's magnetic activity is varying in 100,000-year cycles, a much longer time span than previously thought, and this solar activity, in turn, may likely cause the 100,000-year climate cycles on earth. This research helps scientists understand past climate trends and prepare for future ones. |
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| STUDY OF FOSSILS FOUND IN ARCTIC SHOWS PLANTS MORE DEVELOPED AT EARLIER TIME |
| Along with Canadian colleagues, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientist has discovered fossils of plants dating back some 420 million years. |
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| NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS EVIDENCE FOR EARLIEST LIFE ON EARTH. U.S. AND SWEDISH SCIENTISTS SUGGEST A NON-BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN FOR CARBON IN ANCIENT ROCKS. |
| New geological and geochemical data call into question recent claims for fossil life on Earth greater than 3.8 billion years ago, say researchers from The George Washington University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History in the May 24 issue of the journal Science. Such claims have been based on interpreting the sensitive biochemical behaviour of carbon, the principal element of life, and its relationship with the rocks in which the carbon is found. |
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| EARLIEST EVIDENCE OF ANIMALS YET? |
| Scientists say they have found fossil evidence of an "animal-like" creature which they report is twice as old as any animal fossils generally accepted by palaeontologists. |
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| SCIENTISTS PUSH BACK PRIMATE ORIGINS FROM 65 MILLION TO 85 MILLION YEARS AGO. FIELD MUSEUM SCIENTIST CHALLENGES ACCEPTED THEORIES, DATING METHODS. |
| New research that accounts for gaps in the fossil record challenges traditional methods of interpreting fossils and constructing evolutionary trees. Applying a new statistical approach to primates demonstrates that this group-from which humans developed-originated 85 million years ago (Mya) rather than 65 Mya, as is widely accepted. |
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| ORGIN OF MYSTERIOUS SUBTERRANEAN GASES IDENTIFIED, SAYS UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO RESEARCHER |
| Evidence of gases similar to those that may have played a part in the formation of the earliest life on the planet has been found by a University of Toronto geochemist. |
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| GEOPHYSICIST STUDIES LIFE IN THE EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM |
| Between the cataclysmic impact that created the Moon around 4.5 billion years ago and the first evidence of life 3.8 billion years ago, there may have been long periods during which life repeatedly spread across the globe, only to be nearly annihilated by the impact of large asteroids. |
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| RESEARCHERS FIND GLASS-EATING MICROBES AT THE ROCK BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN |
| Welcome to the bottom of the deep-sea food chain. The rock bottom, that is. In the current edition of Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a team of researchers uncovers and characterizes a process that is commonplace below the ocean bottom. In the upper 300 meters of the earth’s oceanic crust, microbes were found to have literally eaten their way through rock. Traces of this process are preserved in the glassy margins of underwater lava flows (scientists call super-cooled lava spewed by undersea volcanoes "glass," which is similar to material used to make stone-age axes and knives). |
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| ANCIENT AUSSIE ALGAE REVEAL EARLY HISTORY OF LIFE |
| The earliest convincing fossils of the branch of life that includes all the plants, animals and algae have been unearthed in northern Australia. |
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| COULD GEOLOGY EXPLAIN WHY THIS IS SAID TO BE A FAVOURITE NESSIE HAUNT? |
| Earthquakes may be the origin of mythical sightings like Scotland's Loch Ness Monster, an Italian geologist believes. Visions of Nessie, along with some other figures from Greek mythology, probably arose because sites associated with them were active geological faults, the scientist claimed at a conference in Edinburgh. |
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