Around 565 million years ago, just when life was getting seriously underway: The finding, reported online January 28 in Nature Geoscience, supports an idea previously proposed by simulations that Earth’s inner core is relatively young. It also provides insight into how, and how quickly, Earth has been losing heat since its formation 4.54 billion years ago —key to understanding not only the generation of the planet’s magnetic shield but also convection within the mantle and plate tectonics.Carolyn Gramling, “Earth’s core may have hardened just in time to save its magnetic field” at ScienceNews The powerful recent phase protects lifefrom damaging radiation. Paper. (open access) See also: Researchers: The Moon made life on Earth possible and What becomes of science when the Read More ›

And cosmologists race to win a “great cosmic bake-off” to produce a new one, says astrophysicist: Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don’t make sense. Instead of one we now have two showstopping results. On the one side we have the new very precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the afterglow of the Big Bang – from the Planck mission, that has measured the Hubble Constant to be about 46,200 miles per hour per million light years (or using cosmologists’ units 67.4 km/s/Mpc). On the other side we have new measurements of pulsating Read More ›

From Stanford University at Eurekalert: Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity -specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes – collapsed. So extreme was that collapse that it was as if there was only one man left to mate for every 17 women. Anthropologists and biologists were perplexed, but Stanford researchers now believe they’ve found a simple – if revealing – explanation. The collapse, they argue, was the result of generations of war between patrilineal clans, whose membership is determined by male ancestors. … It’s not unprecedented for human genetic diversity to take a nosedive once in a while, but the Y-chromosome bottleneck, Read More ›

Uniting quantum mechanics and gravity at last. From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist One approach towards reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics has been to show that gravity at its most fundamental comes in indivisible parcels called quanta, much like the electromagnetic force comes in quanta called photons. But this road to a theory of quantum gravity has so far proved impassable. Now Antoine Tilloy at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has attempted to get at gravity by tweaking standard quantum mechanics. Odd that no one has thought of this before, given all the strenuous mental effort that has gone into the topic… But now, Nonetheless, his model makes predictions that can be tested. For example, Read More ›

From mathematician Jason Rosenhouse: Speaking of the intellectual collapse of ID, its other major blog, the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” also seems to have fallen on hard times. How else to explain the presence of this article, by Steve Laufmann? … More. Rosenhouse must mean this article, we think: “Foundational Question: Is Intelligent Design Science?” What is the other “major blog” (us?). What would an intellectual collapse look like? We can barely keep up with all the news now, and we all work for a living elsewhere. But that isn’t an “intellectual” collapse. See also: String theorist thinks universe might be designed. Kaku and Rosenhouse should talk maybe.