Free Republic

Pandas face a difficult future, despite great efforts to preserve them. With their dwindling population, shrinking habitat, and weakening genetic strength, one evolutionist has suggested that these longstanding symbols of the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) should be allowed to die out...

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth,...

Comet strikes are an unlikely cause of past mass extinctions on Earth, according to computer simulations. Scientists used the simulations to model the paths of long-period comets, to determine the likelihood of these "dirty snowballs" striking our planet. The University of Washington, Seattle, research appears in Science journal. How many mass extinctions in Earth's history were caused by these icy bodies crashing into our planet has been a subject of considerable debate. Many scientists agree that an asteroid strike 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. But there is uncertainty about how many other such events were triggered by...

"These findings are inconsistent with the alternative and already hotly debated theory that overhunting by Clovis people led to the rapid extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age, the research team argues in the PNAS paper."

NY- The Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the U.S. But just a small fraction of U.S. adults considered social Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace as a good source of news and even fewer would opt for Twitter. More than half of the people questioned in the Zogby Interactive survey said they would select the Internet if they had to choose only one source of news, followed by 21% for television and 10% for both newspapers...

News to Note, May 2, 2009A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (Read the following stories, and much more by clicking excerpt link at the bottom) 1. LiveScience: “Swine Flu Is Evolution in Action”Swine flu—both the virus itself and the associated paranoia—seems to be sweeping the world. Is it evolution in action? 2. LiveScience: “Some Dinosaurs Survived the Asteroid Impact”The widely taught model of dinosaur extinction doesn’t line up with the latest fossil findings. 3. National Geographic News: “Baby Mammoth CT Scan Reveals Internal Organs”The preserved baby woolly mammoth shows that it died in an “oxygen-deprived environment” that...

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas. The simulation also shows that a...

March 9, 2009 — The Permian extinction – one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on Earth, in which some 90% of species went extinct...is now being interpreted as a “nonevent” by four geologists. ... Robert Gastaldo and two geology colleagues from Colby College in Maine, and geologist Johann Neveling from Pretoria, studied the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and published a paper in Geology this month,1 titled, “The terrestrial Permian-Triassic boundary event bed is a nonevent.” ... Well, isn’t this an upset.  How much lag time will it take to change...

A bird suspected to be extinct was reportedly photographed for the first time in the Philippines, and then sold to a poultry market as food.

Feb. 4, 2009 -- An ancient killer is hiding in the remote forests of Siberia. Walled off from western eyes during the Soviet era and forgotten among the endless expanse of wilderness, scientists are starting to uncover the remnants of a supervolcano that rained Hell on Earth 250 million years ago and killed 90 percent of all life. Researchers have known about the volcano -- the Siberian Traps, for years. And they've speculated that the volcanic rocks, which cover an area about the size of Alaska, played a role in runaway global warming that led to the end -- Permian...

Arctic find challenges the idea that the massive reptiles declined slowly. A new fossil find suggests the dinosaurs may have died out quickly.Ablestock / Alamy Fossils uncovered recently in the Arctic support the idea that dinosaurs died off rapidly — perhaps as the result of a massive meteor hitting Earth. The finding contravenes the idea that dinosaurs were already declining by this time.Geological evidence indicates that an impact occurred near the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago. But whether the event created an all-out apocalypse that wiped out the dinosaurs is still a matter...

With the increased seismic activity in the Yellowstone Caldera, it is likely that there is some increased interest in in the geology of the area. Here are some resources that should be of interest. First, we have a fairly recent peer reviewed publication on the "Super Volcano" known as Yellowstone, including some discussion of just what a "Super Volcano" is. The largest scale of volcanic eruptions, the so-called super-eruptions, can destroy all living beings and infrastructure over tens of thousands of square kilometres, can disrupt agriculture over millions of square kilometres and can alter global climate for years or decades....

A Yellowstone earthquake update: 1) The rumbling continues, including 3.5, 3.0 and 3.2 quakes just today 2) Here is some more Jake Lowenstern (the Yellowstone volcano scientist) analysis (via TIME): Jake Lowenstern, Ph.D.,YVO's chief scientist, who also is part of the USGS Volcano Hazards Team, told TIME that it doesn't appear a supervolcano event is imminent. "We don't think the amount of magma exists that would create one of these large eruptions of the past," he said. "It is still possible to have a volcanic eruption comparable to other volcanoes. But we would expect to see more and larger quakes,...

<p>Eight members of a remote Indian tribe have died after drinking a chemical they mistook for alcohol.</p> <p>The dead men from the tiny Onge tribe swigged the brown liquid which washed ashore in a bottle.</p> <p>There are fewer than 100 members of the Onge left. They are the last remaining hunter-gatherers and live on the Andaman and Nicobar islands.</p>

Hawking sea lion skin souvenir canoes at one of South America's most remote outposts, Francisco Arroyo is among the last members of a Patagonian tribe staring down the barrel of extinction. The elderly Arroyo recalls wending the icy channels and fjords of southern Chile's Patagonia region with his father as a boy, tending a fire lit on dried earth on the bottom of their canoe and diving naked for giant mussels to survive. With only an estimated 12-20 pure-blooded members of his nomadic Kawesqar tribe surviving, most of them elderly, another of the far-flung region's tribes will soon disappear. "It...

University of Alberta scientists contend they have the answer to mass extinction of animals and plants 93 million years ago. The answer, research has uncovered, has been found at the bottom of the sea floor where lava fountains erupted, altering the chemistry of the sea and possibly of the atmosphere.Undersea volcanic activity triggered a mass extinction of marine life and buried a thick mat of organic matter on the sea floor about 93 million years ago, which became a major source of oil, according to a new study. "It certainly caused an extinction of several species in the marine environment,"...

Evolution may provide us with the most abundant phenotypes (observable genetic characteristics) rather than the fittest, according to a new theory published on July 18 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology. That is, natural selection may be optimal for choosing the most fit organism of the moment, but evolutionary biologists question if the process leads to the optimal organisms in the long run. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, led by Drs. Matthew Cowperthwaite and Lauren Ancel Meyers, propose a new theory: life may not always be optimal.

Exploding asteroid theory strengthened by new evidence located in Ohio, Indiana Space & Earth science / Earth Sciences Ken Tankersley seen working in the field in a cave in this publicity photo from the National Geographic Channel. Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana in recent weeks is strengthening the case to attribute what happened 12,900 years ago in North America -- when the end of the last Ice Age unexpectedly turned into a phase of extinction for animals and humans -- to a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada. A comet/asteroid theory advanced by Arizona-based geophysicist...

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

Woolly-Mammoth Gene Study Changes Extinction Theory Ball of permafrost-preserved mammoth hair containing thick outer-coat and thin under-coat hairs. Credit: Stephan Schuster lab, Penn State A large genetic study of the extinct woolly mammoth has revealed that the species was not one large homogenous group, as scientists previously had assumed, and that it did not have much genetic diversity. "The population was split into two groups, then one of the groups died out 45,000 years ago, long before the first humans began to appear in the region," said Stephan C. Schuster, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn...