From Reuters: If confirmed as fossilized communities of bacteria known as stromatolites – rather than a freak natural formation – the lumps would pre-date fossils found in Australia as the earliest evidence of life on Earth by 220 million years. “This indicates the Earth was no longer some sort of hell 3.7 billion years ago,” lead author Allen Nutman, of the University of Wollongong, told Reuters of the findings that were published in the journal Nature. More. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, “This potentially pushes back our understanding of the antiquity of life on Earth, which is really quite astounding,” Abigail Allwood, a research scientist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Mashable. If it is true that Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From Dwight Garner at New York Times on Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists. … Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms Read More ›

In a current thread that is nominally on the latest allegedly earth-like exoplanet, predictably that is where distractors will come up on things like: >>[RVB8, 21:] “800 million (unusual figure) unborn aborted fetuses. Perhaps this is true, it’s certainly true abortions have occured, and probably happen at a faster rate now becuse of the ‘day after’ pill.”>> Of course, equally predictably, this sort of talking point did not crop up in the many threads where I have repeatedly outlined exactly how this estimate was put together. (Such are the now all too predictable patterns of objections and dismissals we see at UD and in the penumbra of attack sites. More on that in the PS.) I answered in a following Read More ›