About 250 million years about 70 percent of life on land was wiped out.   A new study says it has evidence to support massive volcanic eruptions that had broad impact on the global oceans and contributed to the extinction.

Researchers at the University of Calgary believe they have discovered evidence for the hypothesis that volcanic eruptions burnt significant volumes of coal, producing ash clouds that had broad impact and was a direct factor in the late Permian extinction.

A new fossil cephalopod has turned up in the news! It's funny cuz I was just pondering ammonites recently.

"It is a new species of squid, totally new, that has not been seen in other parts of the world," paleontologist Klaus Honninger told AFP. Honninger, director of the Meyer-Honninger Paleontology Museum in the northern city of Chiclayo, said the fossil was a large cephalopod of the extinct Baculite species, known for their long straight shells.

For hundreds of years, mathematicians even as great as Leonhard Euler(1) have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting.  Progress has been made but there has never been a full theory to explain partitions.   Answers have always led to more questions.

Basically, partitions are not considered by some to be part of number theory at all but to keep it simple for now, in number theory, a partition of a positive integer (n) is a way of writing n as a sum of positive integers.    

Here is an example from the Classic Encyclopedia:

Over at the Journal of Cosmology, an engaging open journal I've discussed before, there is a controversy over their book, "The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet".  Namely, Eurekalert refused to accept their press release.  Says the JoC:

EurekAlert has refused to issue a paid-for press release announcing the publication of the book edition of The Human Mission to Mars. Over 120 top scientists, including 4 astronauts who walked on the Moon, co-authored this text.

Lab rats generally don’t live pleasant lives. Some are infected with diseases. Some are exposed to radiation. Some are sucked nearly dry with ticks. But occasionally a rat makes it lucky and is chosen to participate in a study on pleasure and rewards, where the pleasure and rewards are sex.  

You might think, as I once did, that initiating rat sex would be straightforward.  Male rat + female rat = GO! And… mission complete!

Microbiologists have discovered a central metabolic pathway in microorganisms and the microorganisms use this pathway to survive under extremely salty conditions, like the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea is not dead, in the science sense.  Many microorganisms which inhabit it belong to a group of salt-tolerant archaea (from the Greek archaĩos, from which we also get"archaic“).   Archaea are among the most primordial life forms on earth and have managed to survive in extreme environments.