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Women are increasingly rejecting a desperate, Bridget Jones-like search for a perfect partner, preferring instead to enjoy their single status and refusing to compromise by settling for 'Mr Mediocre'. Caroline Davies reports Sunday April 13, 2008 The Observer They are successful, spirited and single and their growing numbers are contributing to a major change in the make-up of the traditional British household. 'Freemales' - manless women who are happy to remain so for the present at least - are now a force to be reckoned with and are overturning the dated Bridget Jones image of the lonely woman staring despondently...

The Japanese population is believed to have peaked at about 127.5 million in 2005. Since then the figure has declined, with some estimates suggesting the population could shrink to 105 million by 2050. The drop is feared to have negative impacts on the nation's labor force and grave social and economic consequences. Recent reports seem to indicate that the sexual proclivities of Japanese men are contributing adversely to the situation. More and more men, reports maintain, are turning to masturbation and sex toys rather than to their female counterparts. And further exacerbating an already declining birthrate of 1.29 children per...

Recovering From A Mass ExtinctionFossilised skull of the sabre-toothed Lycaenops, a top predator of the latest Permian. (Credit: Photo by Michael Benton) ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2008) — The full recovery of ecological systems, following the most devastating extinction event of all time, took at least 30 million years, according to new research from the University of Bristol. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left...

Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments. The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks. The scientists released details of the discovery at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, US. They painted a picture of a calamitous event over North America that may have severely knocked back the populations of some...

November 29, 2007 Dinosaur graveyard may unearth new reasons for their extinction Thomas Catᮠin Madrid Spanish scientists have unearthed what could be Europe’s largest dinosaur boneyard, finding the remains of 65ft plant-eaters never before discovered on the continent. The palaeontologists believe they have found eight different species amid the 8,000 fossils discovered so far. The range of species they are finding at the 80 million-year-old site and their state of conservation is virtually unparalleled in Europe and challenges long-held beliefs about the way in which dinosaurs became extinct. “This is completely beyond what we expected to find,” Francisco Ortega, co-director...

Dinosaur Deaths Outsourced to India? Boulder, CO, USA - A series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, not a meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico. The eruptions, which created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds of India, are now the prime suspect in the most famous and persistent paleontological murder mystery, say scientists who have conducted a slew of new investigations honing down eruption timing. "It's the first time we can directly link the main phase of the Deccan Traps to the mass extinction," said Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller....

Site provides evidence for ancient comet explosion JOEY HOLLEMAN; McClatchy Newspapers Published: October 7th, 2007 01:00 AM COLUMBIA, S.C. – For the second time in less than a decade, a South Carolina river bluff holds evidence pointing to a theory with history-rewriting potential. Microscopic soil particles from the Topper site near Allendale might hold a tiny key to a big theory: that comet-caused explosions wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, prompted the last ice age and decimated the first human culture in North America about 12,900 years ago. The comet theory first began generating a buzz at an international meeting...

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 ka, has been previously identified at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at 12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization,...

Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists. The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, and dozens of other species of megafauna may have become extinct when a disintegrating comet or asteroid exploded over North America with the force of millions of hydrogen bombs, according to research by an international team of scientists. The blast, which the researchers believe occurred 12,900 years ago, may have also doomed a mysterious early human culture, known as Clovis people, while triggering a planetwide cool-down that wiped out the plant species that sustained many outsize Ice Age beasts, according to research published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

WASHINGTON - When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mangulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday. While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

According to the going theory, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago, throwing enough dust up into the atmosphere to dim the sun for years, killing off green plants and triggering a famine that wiped out all the dinosaurs in the geologic blink of an eye. Not so fast, says U.S. Geological Survey geologist emeritus James Fassett. A few years ago, Fassett’s colleagues were digging in a fossil-rich area of New Mexico when they uncovered the four-foot-long fossilized thighbone of a duck-billed, plant-eating hadrosaur in a sandstone cliff. When Fassett dated the bone to half...

An extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago wiped out mammoths and started a mini-ice age, scientists believe Margaret Munro CanWest News Service Monday, May 14, 2007 A comet or some other extraterrestrial object appears to have slammed into northern Canada 12,900 years ago and triggered an abrupt and catastrophic climate change that wiped out the mammoths and many other prehistoric creatures, according to a team of U.S. scientists. Evidence of the ecological disaster exists in a thin layer of sediment that has been found from Alberta to New Mexico, say the researchers, whose work adds a dramatic and provocative twist to...

Fireballs set half the planet ablaze, wiping out the mammoth and America's Stone Age hunters Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere. Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilisations that were emerging in Europe and...

Catastrophic Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts Jeanna Bryner LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com Mon May 21, 9:30 AM ET An extraterrestrial object with a three-mile girth might have exploded over southern Canada nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as megafauna like mastodons and mammoths. The blast could be to blame for a major cold spell called the Younger Dryas that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, a period of time spanning from about 1.8 million years ago to 11,500 years ago. Research, presented today at a meeting of the American...

Contact: Jim Barlow jebarlow@uoregon.edu 541-346-3481 University of Oregon Oregon researchers involved in new Clovis-age impact theory Did a comet hit the Great Lakes region and fragment human populations 12,900 years ago? Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago. Driving the theory is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at...

Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada? Sid Perkins Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say. IT'S IN THERE. A layer of carbon-rich sediment (arrow) found here at Murray Springs, Ariz., and elsewhere across North America, provides evidence that an extraterrestrial object...

June 28, 2007 Comet theory collides with Clovis research, may explain disappearance of ancient people A theory put forth by a group of 25 geo-scientists suggests that a massive comet exploded over Canada, possibly wiping out both beast and man around 12,900 years ago, and pushing the earth into another ice age. University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear said the theory may not be such "out-of-this-world" thinking based on his study of ancient stone-tool artifacts he and his team have excavated from the Topper dig site in Allendale, as well as ones found in Georgia, North Carolina and...

A "black mat" of algal growth in Arizona marks the extinction of mammoths 12,900 years ago New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals. The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and their colleagues. James Kennett, a paleoceanographer at the university, said that the discovery may explain some of the highly debated geologic controversies of recent decades. The period in...

Source: Stanford University Date: August 10, 2007 What We Can Learn From The Biggest Extinction In The History Of Earth Science Daily — Approximately 250 million years ago, vast numbers of species disappeared from Earth. This mass-extinction event may hold clues to current global carbon cycle changes, according to Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences. Payne, a paleobiologist who joined the Stanford faculty in 2005, studies the Permian-Triassic extinction and the following 4 million years of instability in the global carbon cycle. Jiayong Wei, Payne's colleague, examined a block of early Triassic microbial limestone. (Credit: Jonathan Payne)...