The debate over what wiped out the dinosaurs has been raging for three decades, and researchers writing in Science say they have compiled enough evidence to end it. They say it really was an asteroid that was responsible for the mass extinction. 

Scientists first proposed the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur mass extinction 30 years ago. The discovery of a massive crater at Chicxulub [CHICK-shuh-loob], in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in 1991, strengthened that hypothesis. The Chicxulub crater is more than 120 miles wide and scientists believe it was created when an asteroid more than six miles wide crashed into Earth 65 million years ago. 

A Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above, a standard indicator of obesity, is not associated with poorer health among adults under age 40, according to a new study.

In addition, researchers found that across all age groups studied, from 25 to 70 years, there was little difference in the current health status in normal-weight vs. overweight people based on the medications they took.

The study was published in the International Journal of Obesity.

The researchers acknowledge that health problems in older adults with BMIs of 30 or higher might be traced back to carrying extra weight in young adulthood. Among people age 40 or older, use of medication was significantly higher among adults considered to be obese compared to adults with a normal weight.

For some people, raising "good" cholesterol levels isn't necessarily a healthy choice, according to a new study in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. The study is the first to find that a high level of the supposedly good cholesterol places a subgroup of patients at high risk for recurrent coronary events, such as chest pain, heart attack, and death.

Researchers at the University of Leeds have found that a compound known as pyrophosphite may have been an important energy source for primitive lifeforms.

The findings, published in the journal Chemical Communications, are the first to suggest that pyrophosphite may have been relevant in the shift from basic chemistry to complex biology when life on earth began. Since completing this research, the authors have found even further evidence for the importance of this molecule and plan to further investigate its role in abiogenesis - how life on Earth emerged from inanimate matter billions of years ago.

Scientists from the University of Alabama, Huntsille have developed a new way to use satellite instruments to measure surface temperatures over most of the world's land area. 

The new technique developed by Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Danny Braswell, both research scientists in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, uses microwave sensors on NOAA and NASA satellites to collect surface temperature data over virtually all of Earth's land area.

They say they hope the new system will provide a stable method for monitoring climate change without some of the problems associated with the existing network of surface thermometers.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is dead, says NASA.  Last week, the Mars Odyssey orbiter flew over the Phoenix landing site in final attempts to communicate with the lander but no transmission was detected and since Phoenix also did not communicate during 150 flights earlier this year, NASA declared its mission over.

The latest image transmitted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed what appears to be ice damage to the lander's solar panels.

Arctic Heroes #1 - Alfred Wegener


The history of Arctic and Antarctic exploration and discovery is filled with the names of heroes.  Many of those names get repeated over and over in popular writings on polar exploration.  Other names tend to get forgotten.  Here, in no particular order, I hope to write of some of these heroes, both remembered and forgotten.


Alfred_Wegener is most famous for his Theory of the Drift of the Continents.  He is less widely known for his enthusiastic contributions to climatology and meteorology, which led to his death on the Greenland ice sheet in 1930 under the most heroic circumstances.

One of the worst things I see on the internet, as both a parent of children on the spectrum and as scientifically-based, rational person who works hard to instruct my students in critical thinking skills and being able to detect pseudoscience, is the woo that abounds relating to alternative autism treatments.

The charlatans and snake oil salesmen abound, and one of these individuals, who promises to cure your child of his autism is a chiropractor named Chun Wong who really, really likes the woo. His latest article on his site, dated May 10, is about helminthic therapy for autism, or as I've decided to call it, Wong's wormy wormy woo.

You are not supposed to be reading this. You’re an ape who never evolved to read, but you can do so because writing culturally evolved to be shaped just right for your illiterate visual system. As I have argue in my research and recent books, culture’s trick for getting writing into us was to harness our ancient visual system for a new purpose (The Vision Revolution), a trick also used for speech and music (upcoming in Harnessed). (Hint: The trick to harnessing is, in each case, to mimic nature.)

A team of archaeologists has captured a snapshot of rural life in the village of Sanyangzhuang in western China during the Han Dynasty, over 2,000 years ago.

Researchers found that the town, though located in a remote section of the Han Dynasty kingdom, appears quite well off. Exploration has revealed tiled roofs, compounds with brick foundations, eight-meter deep wells lined with bricks, toilets, cart and human foot tracks, roads and trees.

There is an abundance of metal tools, including plow shares, as well as grinding stones and coins. Also found have been fossilized impressions of mulberry leaves, which researchers see as a sign of silk cultivation.