Chemical analysis of some of the world’s oldest rocks has provided the earliest record yet of Earth's atmosphere and shows that the air 4 billion years ago was very similar a billion years later, when the atmosphere, though it likely would have been lethal to oxygen-dependent humans, supported a thriving microbial biosphere that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of life on Earth today.

Until now, researchers have had to rely on widely varying computer models of the earliest atmosphere's characteristics.

Dinosaurs once flourished in Europe but when an asteroid hit 66 million years ago, they died quickly, according to a new study.

That an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs is widely held, but until recently dinosaur fossils from the late Cretaceous, the final period of dinosaur evolution, were almost exclusively found in North America. This raised questions about whether the sudden decline of dinosaurs in the American and Canadian west was merely a local story.

The new study synthesizes research on European dinosaurs over the past two decades. Fossils of late Cretaceous dinosaurs are now commonly discovered in Spain, France, Romania, and other countries. 

According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, cocaine is the second most commonly used illegal addictive in Europe, after cannabis.  A discovery related to the mechanism behind a dopamine transporter could help in the development of future medical treatment against cocaine addiction.  

After mass bleaching in 1998, more than half of coral reefs in the Seychelles have slowly recovered. Nick Graham

By John Pandolfi, The University of Queensland

Coral reefs are the poster child for the damage people are doing to the world’s oceans. Overfishing, pollution and declining water quality have all taken their toll on reefs around the world. Perhaps the most famous example is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where half of the coral cover has disappeared over the past 25 years.

Picture this scenario: A politician is appointed to run NASA who thinks its budget is too high and then half its money and a third of its workforce is on its way to evaporating. Public support for a mission to Mars is nonexistent.

It must be in late 2015, after anti-science Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has control of NASA, if you read science media (and then whatever Huffington Post and Slate are).

In space no one can hear you bleed, but what about on a private spacecraft? 

The commercial aviation industry has medical care standards, as does NASA for traditional space missions. Eventually someone is going to tell Elon Musk and Richard Brandon that the commercial space transportation industry will need to define medical care practices as well.

There are well-known risks, of course, but there can be disclaimers 400 pages long and if an attorney stands in front of a jury and talks about what lax safety standards there are, someone with the passionate pleading skill of John Edwards will get a judgment that runs their companies into bankruptcy.

If you want to make your children neurotic, clinginess and overprotectiveness on your part - helicopter parenting - is the way to go.

Assuming you don't want to cause that, it is still okay to hover over your dogs and cats, according to an analysis of pet owners by psychologists at U.C. Berkeley and California State University, East Bay.

For most people, they can extend their healthy lifespan by walking for 20 minutes a day. Yet most people don't do it.

It's become a popular sport to criticize obese people while lamenting that our pop culture encourages people to be too thin. We should be criticizing people who don't go for walks rather than fat people if we care about lowering health care costs, according to a study of over 334,000 European men and women which found that twice as many deaths may be attributable to lack of physical activity compared with the number of deaths attributable to obesity.

In the future, if we use money to fund basic research for solar and stop subsidizing existing technology that does not work very well, there will be no energy crisis. In the time it takes you to read this article, the sun will provide enough energy to power the planet for a year.

But that does not translate to everything.  An international group of scientists has noted once again that "renewable" is not synonymous with "unlimited."