An asteroid colliding with Earth was responsible for the Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, according to a new review published in Science.

Scientists have previously argued about whether the extinction was caused by the asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted approximately 1.5 million years. These eruptions spewed 1,100,000 km3 of basalt lava across the Deccan Traps, which would have been enough to fill the Black Sea twice, and were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale.

Sea ice may have extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time, geologists report this week in Science.

The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada -- bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.

The survival of eukaryotic life throughout this period indicates sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.

Flowing lava probably carved at least one of the river-like channels on the surface of Mars, according to results of a study presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is thought to influence the likelihood of finding life there.

I seem to have developed a reputation for hating networks, but really, it's just tough love. Complex, adaptive, self-organizing networks are fascinating (and inspired the title of this blog), and they deserve a rigorous scientific treatment. Decentralized control mechanisms are incredible, and, although they're all around us, they go completely against our instincts for good, hierarchical design for control systems. How does a cell adapt to environmental signals, in the absence of a brain or CPU? And how do we make our own, human-built networks as self-adaptive and robust as biological ones? In other words (for those of you who've endured lengthy lectures on the subject in physiology class), how do you effectively engineer homeostasis?

So, I was going to blog about the new baby giant octopus (complete with webcam!) at the Smithsonian. But, it's not really a squid.

Then I was going to talk about sperm whales collectively hunting squid, and point out that the BBC made a geographic error. (The study was conducted in the Gulf of California, on the Pacific side, not in the Gulf of Mexico, which is on the Atlantic side.) But that's really about mammals, which is just not what I do here.

Naked Beauty On Paradise Island


Did you notice that I posted this article under 'geology'.  That's because it's about geology.  You know - rocks and fossils.  This article is also about one of the last unspoiled regions on Earth - Antarctica.  So sorry to disappoint.

John Timmer comments on the problem of modern biomedical research and statistics: we can now measure so much more than our statistics can handle. In a typical genome-wide association study, you're testing so many hypotheses that the favored 0.05, 0.01, and 0.001 p-values from Stats 101 just don't cut it anymore.

"We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong:"

A new study in Environmental Science and Technology reports that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years, despite more stringent rules on the use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture.

The study involved an analysis of 18 different antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) to four different classes of antibiotics in soil samples collected in the Netherlands from 1940 to 2008.

A low-cost water purification technique that uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, according to a paper published in Current Protocols in Microbiology. The method could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world.

"Moringa oleifera is a vegetable tree which is grown in Africa, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia. It could be considered to be one of the world's most useful trees," said Michael Lea, a researcher at Clearinghouse, a Canadian organization dedicated to investigating and implementing low-cost water purification technologies.

Scientists writing this week in Geophysical Research Letters say they have pinpointed six spots on the remote Pacific Antarctic Ridge, 1,000 miles from the west coast of Antarctica, where they think  hydrothermal vents are likely to be found.

Two pieces of evidence tipped researchers off to the location of the hidden vents. First, the ocean is stratified with layers of lighter water sitting on top of layers of denser water. Second, when a seafloor vent erupts, it spews gases rich in rare helium-3, an isotope found in earth's mantle and in the magma bubbling below the vent. As helium-3 disperses through the ocean, it mixes into a density layer and stays there, forming a plume that can stretch over thousands of kilometers.