Day: November 22, 2008

News-bites… 22 November 2008

Mars’s equatorial regions are covered in glaciers… Vast glaciers on Mars

Our ancestors had floppy, flexible gibbon feet …gibbons give a hint what our bipedal, but arboreal, ancestors were doing to get around. More Here

Villa living in 4,500 BC… 6,500-year-old village found in Greece

Did asteroid cause ancient N.Y. tsunami? …”Deep Impact” back in 300 BC.

Rain-making Bacteria and the Global Water-cycle …could be a whole biosphere in the upper atmosphere. If here, then why not Venus?

Mystery Source of Cosmic-Rays is less than 1,000 ly away …any further and the electrons being seen are dispersed and lose energy.

Concealed Glaciers Discovered On Mars At Mid-latitudes …more on the Mars Glaciers.

New Life Beneath Sea And Ice …new ecosystems surprisingly richer than imagined. one is deep beneath Antarctica’s glaciers, the other is in the interface between hypersaline lakes and regular seawater on the Mediterranean sea-floor. Both are full of life.

Always more news, but most of it you’ve doubtless seen yourself. The giant motile Protist is pretty amazing – potentially a “living fossil” nearly 2 billion years old. Not that the species itself existed, but the behaviour may have spanned the aeons.

Fossil Phantom is Exposed

Animals appear as fossils c.570 million years ago, back in the Ediacaran, but there are trackways preserved in old mud going back nearly 2 billion years. The trackways look somewhat like worm-trails, but no worm has been identified in the fossils from then, or known specimen from the present, as a likely culprit. Now it seems a new suspect is on offer and it’s not an animal…

Grape is Key to Fossil Puzzle

Discovery Of Giant Roaming Deep Sea Protist

Single-celled giant upends early evolution

Deep-sea protists may explain trace fossils

Discovery of giant roaming deep sea protist

…a giant Protist, as big as a grape apparently, makes trails on the sea-floor just like the old fossil trails. This would neatly explain why “animal” trackways can appear in PreCambrian sediments from the PaleoProterozoic (2.5-1.6 Gya) and makes protists even more dynamic than anyone had previously imagined. Macroscopic colonies of microbes are well known as fossils – stromatolites can be gigantic, for example – but few had imagined mobile microbial colonies. Which is a bit sad since we Animals are effectively very large bacterial/Archeal colonies. Our mitochondria were once purple bacteria, while our centrioles and undulipodium were once bacteria related to spirochetes. And even now your body contains at least 10 times more bacterial than living animal cells. In a real way land animals are life-support suits for bacteria trying to live on land.