Microbes drove Earth's mineral evolution

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

A comprehensive history of Earth's mineral wealth concludes that without life, many raw materials wouldn't exist. In the early interstellar medium, scientists say, there were about twelve minerals. The planetary formation process upped this to around sixty. The addition of water (itself a mineral) allows for more different kinds of reactions and the mineral count jumps into the hundreds

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Origins of life: The rubber gloves come off in scientist free-for-all about the origins of photosynthesis

Darkfrog submitted, created time 2 months 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

About 2.4 billion years ago, Earth's oxygen levels rose sharply, in what has turned out to be a prerequisite for almost every form of life (I am assuming that aquatic oxygen levels rose as well). This is one of the reasons why scientists studying early life and the origins of life have always considered the 2.4 billion mark to coincide with the emergence of photosynthetic organisms.

However, geologists in Australia have unearthed some shale that shows markings from hydrocarbons that "could only have been put there by photosynthetic organisms." Their date stamp? 2.7 billion years. ..

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Trade Center Dig Exposes Ice Age Landscape

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 months 2 weeks (www.time.com)

Crews excavating the World Trade Center site this summer for the foundations of a new skyscraper have uncovered features carved into the bedrock by glaciers about 20,000 years ago, including a forty-foot-deep pothole

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Mars rover makes tracks

sea-maid submitted, created time 4 months 1 week (www.nature.com)

It's now or never for the Opportunity. The Mars rover Opportunity is set to climb out of the Victoria crater a bit ahead of schedule. The original plan had been to allow the rover more time to examine the layers of the Martian crust exposed in the crater's sides, but its operators noticed a spike in the current similar to the one that preceded severe problems with its sister rover, Spirit. If the Opportunity were to lose one of its six wheels now, say scientists, it would make it nearly impossible for it to climb out of the crater and visit other parts of the Martian surface.

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Microbes beneath sea floor genetically distinct

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 2 weeks (esciencenews.com)

Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, according to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic...

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Ancient amphibians left full-body imprints

herry submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.geosociety.org)

Unprecedented fossilized body imprints of amphibians have been discovered in 330 million-year-old rocks from Pennsylvania. The imprints show the unmistakably webbed feet and bodies of three previously unknown, foot-long salamander-like critters that lived 100 million years before the first dinosaurs.

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