Free Republic

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers studying the origin of Earth's first breathable atmosphere have zeroed in on the major role played by some very unassuming creatures: plankton. In a paper to appear in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ohio State University researcher Matthew Saltzman and his colleagues show how plankton provided a critical link between the atmosphere and chemical isotopes stored in rocks 500 million years ago. This work builds on the team's earlier discovery that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that...

WASHINGTON -- The Hubble Space Telescope has detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of a distant planet, the first time these elements have been found around a world outside our solar system, scientists said today. Unlike Earth, the planet is a hot, gassy orb very close to its sun-like star, and the oxygen and carbon are not signs of any sort of life, Hubble scientists said in a statement. Still, astronomers said Hubble's findings show that the chemical composition of atmospheres of planets many light-years away can be measured. The planet -- known as HD 209458b or Osiris --...

Research by the University of Birmingham has provided evidence that a warm atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide was present in an ancient ice age. This could only have happened if the planet was nearly all covered in ice and snow. Scientists from the University’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, say that, whereas today, we associate more greenhouse gases with a warm world, in a very severe ice age, even plenty of greenhouse gas cannot stop the world being covered in reflective ice and snow. This type of glaciation could occur again in the future if the Earth’s atmosphere...

Red-blooded genealogists take note: The discovery in microbes of two oxygen-packing proteins, the earliest known ancestors to hemoglobin, brings scientists closer to identifying the earliest life forms to use oxygen. According to the project’s lead investigator, University of Hawaii microbiologist Maqsudul Alam, the research may also aid in the search for blood substitutes as new molecular details shed light on how the structure of such proteins, called protoglobins, evolved to transport and release oxygen. Scientists from the Maui High Performance Computing Center and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center contributed to the research. The findings will appear in the...

Scientists have new theory on ice age KU researchers believe gamma-ray burst caused extinctions, cooling By Alea Smith - Special to the Journal-World Monday, December 29, 2003 Researchers now believe a cosmic explosion 440 million years ago may have decimated life on Earth. Kansas University scientists are attracting international attention with their research into the possibility a massive gamma ray explosion caused an ice age that wiped out much of the life on Earth. "It appears that the (gamma ray) bursts are a serious danger, although not something you would expect to hit us very often, maybe every few hundred...

Study suggests steps a planet must go through for complex animal life to arise. Clay made animal life possible on Earth, a UC Riverside-led study finds. A sudden increase in oxygen in the Earth’s recent geological history, widely considered necessary for the expansion of animal life, occurred just as the rate of clay formation on the Earth’s surface also increased, the researchers report. “Our study shows for the first time that the initial soils covering the terrestrial surface of Earth increased the production of clay minerals and provided the critical geochemical processes necessary to oxygenate the atmosphere and support multicellular...

Bacteria froze the Earth, researchers say By Michael Kanellos http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com, marketwatch-cnet.com.com/Bacteria+froze+the+Earth%2C+researchers+say/2100-7337_3-5815965.html Story last modified Tue Aug 02 17:15:00 PDT 2005 Humans apparently aren't the first species to change the climate of the planet. Bacteria living 2.3 billion years ago could have plunged the planet into deep freeze, researchers at the California Institute of Technology claim in a new report. Several graduate students, along with supervising professor Joe Kirschvink, have released a paper presenting their explanation of what caused "Snowball Earth," a periodic deep freeze of Earth's atmosphere that has been theorized for years. The Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion...

Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors Explanation: The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. These reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction. Pictured above is Fossil Reactor 15, located in Oklo, Gabon. Uranium oxide remains are visible as the yellowish rock. Oklo by-products are being used today to probe the stability of the fundamental constants over cosmological time and distance scales and to develop more effective means for...

Evolution upset: Oxygen-making microbes came last, not first Get ready to rewrite those biology textbooks - again. Although the "lowly" blue-green algae, or Cyanobacteria, have long been credited as one of Earth's earliest life forms and the source of the oxygen in the early Earth's atmosphere, they might be neither. By creating a new genetic family tree of the world's most primitive bacteria and comparing it to the geochemistry of ancient iron and sulfur deposits, Carrine Blank of Washington University has found evidence that instead of Cyanobacteria being very ancient, they may have appeared much later, perhaps as much...

Astronomers have detected the first presence of oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet, a world already known to be venting massive amounts of gas into space. The find is evidence of an atmospheric "blow off" in action, where energetic hydrogen gas drags heavier elements along for a supersonic ride into space.

Vertebrate creatures first began moving from the world's oceans to land about 415 million years ago, then all but disappeared by 360 million years ago. The fossil record contains few examples of animals with backbones for the next 15 million years, and then suddenly vertebrates show up again, this time for good. The mysterious lull in vertebrate colonization of land is known as Romer's Gap, named for the Yale University paleontologist, Alfred Romer, who first recognized it. But the term has typically been applied only to pre-dinosaur amphibians, and there has been little understanding of why the gap occurred. Now...

COLLEGE PARK, Md - Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth. Alan J. Kaufman, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, Maryland geology colleague James Farquhar, and a team of scientists from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S.A., uncovered evidence that the oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere - generally known as the Great Oxygenation Event - coincided with the first widespread ice...

A study funded by the U.S. space agency suggested oxygen existed in Earth's atmosphere much earlier than thought. Two separate teams of astrobiologists found evidence of oxygen in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere approximately 2.5 billion years ago by analyzing a nearly 1-mile-long drill core from Western Australia. "We seem to have captured a piece of time during which the amount of oxygen was actually changing -- caught in the act, as it were," said Arizona State University-Tempe Associate Professor Ariel Anbar, who led one of the research teams. The other research group was led by Alan Kaufman of the...

FORT LAUDERDALE — A man smoking a cigarette while using an oxygen machine was taken to a local hospital to be treated for burns early Monday when the oxygen unit exploded, officials said.

Nasa's Cassini probe has scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of Rhea – the first time the gas has been detected directly on another worldA spacecraft has tasted oxygen in the atmosphere of another world for the first time while flying low over Saturn's icy moon, Rhea. Nasa's Cassini probe scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the planet's moon while passing overhead at an altitude of 97km in March this year. Until now, wisps of oxygen have only been detected on planets and their moons indirectly, using the Hubble space telescope and other major facilities.

Demand for an EPA offset for CO2 We the petitioners demand the EPA provide farmers, ranchers and dairymen with an Oxygen generaton offset against any CO2 fee or tax because oxygen is NOT a greenhouse gas. Example: A Christmas tree plantation uses fuel to plant and harvest however no credit is issued for their crop reducing the CO2 in the air with their trees nor is any credit given for the oxygen generated by the trees for the years between planting and harvest. Any green crop removes CO2 and generates oxygen.

ST. LOUIS — A southern Illinois woman died after being severely burned in a flash fire while undergoing surgery, a rare but vexing dilemma in operating rooms. Janice McCall, 65, of Energy, Ill., died Sept. 8 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., six days after being burned on the operating table at Heartland Regional Medical Center in Marion, Ill., her family's attorney said. Attorney Robert Howerton said he had requested medical records from the Marion hospital and that he had few details about what happened. He declined to say why McCall was having surgery. The Tennessee state medical...

On Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, which rises more than 13,000 feet above sea level, there is a mid-level base facility where scientists can pretend they are on the moon. Hawaii's volcanic terrain, soil and remote environment provide an ideal environment for testing instruments and equipment that someday may be used by astronauts at a lunar base. Recently, a team of scientists working for the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES) demonstrated its first field test for NASA's In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Project. Research Operations Manager John Hamilton supported the mission simulation to show how astronauts will be...

How Joseph Priestley inspired early America. And why he's needed now more than ever The next time you take a deep breath, think for a moment of Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century British scientist widely credited with discovering oxygen.As Steven Johnson explains in his engaging study of Priestley, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,  the circumstances surrounding Priestley's signature achievement are "far more vexed than the standard short-form biographies suggest." That's because "discovering 'oxygen' is not like 'discovering' the Dead Sea Scrolls....It is closer to, say, discovering America: the meaning of the phrase...

The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects. Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. (snip) In the 20th century, humanity has pumped increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning the carbon stored in coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the process, we've also been consuming oxygen...