While the goal of en enlightened society has always been food so plentiful and cheap that even poor people could afford to be fat, it hasn't been without pitfalls in the form of a looming crisis for society, caused by millions of people who are seriously overweight - that will be the topic of a University of Greenwich public lecture on November 28th.

Small critters tend to evolve into bigger beasts, according to paleontologist Edward Cope, what is now known as Cope's Rule.

Using statistical modeling methods, a new test of this rule as it applies dinosaurs says that Cope was right -- sometimes.  Which is statistically possible.

On June 6th, ESA’s Mars Express revisited the Argyre basin, this time aiming at Nereidum Montes, some 380 km northeast of Hooke crater. The rugged terrain of Nereidum Montes marks the far northern extent of Argyre, one of the largest impact basins on Mars and it stretches almost 1150 km and was named by the noted Greek astronomer Eugène Michel Antoniadi (1870–1944).

Self-harm is rather common among young people but we tend to think of all self harm in modern times as elaborate cutting rituals and signs of mental illness.  

Not so, many teenagers have at one time scratched, punctured or even cut themselves and hit their head forcefully against a wall - and it is behavior almost as common among boys as it is girls, despite the the steretotype. Labeling young people who self-harm as on a slippery slope to adult psychiatric states is not warranted.  Rather than over-diagnose, some knowledge is needed in order not to over-interpret the behavior of young people, says psychologist Jonas Bjärehed in his thesis at Lund University in Sweden.

Solar systems with life-bearing planets are, so far, unique.  There is only one.  But they would be rare anyway, if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid belts of just the right mass, according to two US astronomers.

Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado and astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the Sun's protoplanetary disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life could evolve on an Earth-like planet. 

Using the family tree linking every known bird species, scientists now say that birds appear to be accelerating their rate of evolution. Most people did not predict that. 

They spent five years creating their tree, using millions of years worth of fossil data stretching back to Dinosaurs. They then mapped where on Earth and when in history birds' diversification took place. Their paper in Nature contains results of how 9,993 bird species currently alive globally made it to where they are today. Based on previous studies, the researchers expected to see bird speciation slowing down, but they instead found that birds' speciation rate is increasing, not declining.