The National Research Council has identified and reported on Ten Questions that will shape 21st century earth science. Some may be a little surprised that these questions are still unanswered, having been told in no uncertain terms in science classes in the last century that science already had definitive answers to questions like how the earth and other planets in our solar system formed. Live and learn. Here’s a bare list of the identified questions…

1. How did earth and other planets form?
Scientists still do not know enough about how our planet got its elements to understand its evolution, or why other planets in our system are very different.

2. What happened during the first 500 million years?
Current scientific belief is that another planet collided with ours during the late formation stage, creating the moon and melting this planet all the way to its core. Yet unknown is how (and when) the Earth developed its atmosphere and oceans.

3. How did life begin?
Scientists hope to obtain evidence from rocks and minerals, as well as investigations of Mars and other members of our system.

4. How does earth’s interior work, and how does it effect the surface?
Science still cannot precisely describe the magnetic field-producing convection currents in the mantle and core, which means they have not yet modeled past evolution and cannot predict future evolution of the surface environment.

5. Why does earth have plate tectonics and continents?
Scientists still do not know when continents first formed, how they were preserved for billions of years, or how they will evolve in the future.

6. How are earth processes controlled by material properties?
Scientists hope to gain more understanding of plate tectonics and mantle convection by reducing the macroprocesses down to the atomic microscale. It is hoped this will allow prediction.

7. What causes climate to change – and how much can it change?
Study of our planet’s past climate extremes may lead to improved models that can predict the magnitude and consequences of climate change.

8. How has life shaped earth – and how has earth shaped life>
The ways that geology and biology influence each other are still unknown, though scientists do suspect life had a role in oxygenating the atmosphere, and know of geological events that caused mass extinctions.

9. Can earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and their consequences be predicted?
Scientists admit they may never be able to accurately predict earthquakes, but are getting better at predicting volcanic eruptions. Knowledge of the mantle movements could help.

10. How do fluid flow and transport affect the human environment?
Scientists hope to produce mathematical models that can predict the performance of natural fluid systems (surface and underground water, primarily), to contribute to better human management of natural resources and the environment.

Link:
Ten Questions

Earth scientists have managed to discover a lot of not-earth planets in the last couple of decades, though none of them look to be very much like Earth. Now Eric Ford, a University of Florida astronomer, has published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal that suggests To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out as Living Planet…

If they could measure our planet’s rotation, its atmospheric gases, the presence of abundant water, and calculate what our temperature range must be, our planet would definitely stand out as life-friendly. To intelligent life forms a lot like us, anyway. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it kind of neat to consider myself as ET. Even though I doubt we’d qualify as cute enough or friendly enough to other ETs for them to want to actually meet us.

Speaking of planet Earth, it was reported last week that a Climactic Chain Reaction Caused Runaway Greenhouse Effect 55 Million Years Ago. In this age of increasing climate change concern, we might learn something significant from examining similar climate changes in the past.

During the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum period 55 million years ago a rapid increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere was caused by chain-reaction events likely triggered by intense volcanic activity. As the earth warmed, submarine methane hydrates – ice-like structures storing massive amounts of methane – melted, contributing that methane to the atmosphere as well. With a 6º overall rise in global temperatures, even the arctic had palm trees and crocodiles. Current climate change models don’t show this, but it’s something to keep in mind as we examine the possible repercussions of climate change in our own time.

There’s some interesting medical research news to report as well, from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Scripps Research Institute. Seems that researchers have discovered that an Anti-malarial Drug Prevents Cancer in Mice, and this finding may have significant implications for human cancer treatment.

The results of this study tend to support an older epidemiology study that suggested malaria prophylaxis with chloroquine reduced the incidence of Burkitt lymphoma. Chloroquine appears to be the active ingredient, as it induces cellular autophagy (self-eating). The researchers suggest that by controlling autophagy using chloroquine or other agents might provide a useful new avenue in the development of anti-cancer drugs.

Links:

To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out as Living Planet

Climactic Chain Reaction Caused Runaway Greenhouse Effect 55 Million Years Ago

Anti-malarial Drug Prevents Cancer in Mice

This week there’s lots of news from the fields of biology, medicine and psychology about people. What they want, what they do, and what makes them that way. But I’ll start with the famous extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs ~65 million years ago, making room for humans to evolve at all.

U.S. and Czech astrophysicists reported that a Large Asteroid Breakup May Have Caused Mass Extinction at that time. They created a clever simulation of the disintegration of a giant asteroid in the belt roughly 100 million years ago, which caused an asteroid bombardment of the earth and moon as fragments crossed our path.

Yet more evidence to add to the iridium layer that tells us what most likely happened to those gentle and not-so gentle reptilian giants who once dominated the planet.

On the subject of extinction, the World Conservation Union reported its Red List of Threatened Species added more than 16 thousand species of plants and animals last year.

Extinction Crisis Escalates: Apes, Corals, Vultures, Dolphins All in Danger lets us know in no uncertain terms that it doesn’t necessarily take a cosmic billiard ball to cause a big biodiversity loss on this planet. Something to think about.

Another endangered animal – one of our world’s rarest primates – has been trying to teach University of Arizona Biodesign Institute researcher Brian Verrelli and his team about the evolution of color vision.

Color Night Vision in the Aye-Aye presents a real puzzle to evolutionary theorists. Though Aye-Ayes (and related lemurs) split from primate lines that eventually became humans, apes and monkeys just around the time of that dinosaur-killing cosmic billiard ball, they do have full trichromatic color vision. Deal is, Aye-Ayes are totally nocturnal animals – coming out only at night – thus have no practical need of or use for trichromatic color vision.

The puzzle is why the ability to see in color was not lost in Aye-Ayes over the eons, since they don’t need or use it. The findings have challenged previous views and some assumptions about how evolution works. Researchers note that the genes for green and red opsins are found on the X chromosome, which helps explain why females have better color vision than males. Aye-Ayes show little or no accumulation of mutations as would be expected.

Of X and Y chromosomes and Why Genes of One Parent are Expressed Over Genes of the Other, the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology reports research on the marsupial platypus and wallaby that also challenges prevailing evolutionary theory.

It turns out that genomic imprinting – the expression of one parent’s gene while the other parent’s gene is repressed – isn’t associated with the X or Y chromosomes after all. Surprisingly, it’s not associated with ancestrally imprinted chromosomes either.

Reports BMC, “The results of the distribution studies suggest that imprinted genes were not located on an ancestrally imprinted chromosome, nor were they associated with sex chromosomes. Rather it appears that imprinting evolved in a stepwise, adaptive way, with each gene or cluster becoming imprinted as the need arose.”

Since the word “sex” has been introduced, check out research from cognitive scientists at Indiana University report that they’ve figured out What Men and Women Really Want in a Mate. It’s about time!

Though these findings aren’t exactly earth-shattering, surprising, or even mildly at odds with conventional evolutionary theory. Turns out that men go for the pretty girls while women are more interested in security and commitment. Duh.

The story told by the head researcher won’t surprise anybody. “Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way — women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who will accept them — would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring.”

From such politically incorrect (but quite expensive) statements of the obvious, we get some sociological findings from internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen at an ESRC conference at the University of York. The subject is blogs and bloggers… like me!

Force for Democracy – Or Information Chaos? Expert Forum Spotlights Blogging informs us that Keen thinks interactivity and user-generated content on blogs is leading us into a social morass of “less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information.” Huh. And here I thought I was helping to bring interesting science news to the internet.

If I cared what Keen thinks I’d probably get a little depressed about the pointlessness of my meager attempts. And if I were depressed, researchers reporting in the Annals of Internal Medicine warn me that I may not get the therapy I need from my health care provider.

Depression therapy not by guidelines warns that primary care physicians do not give their patients long-term care consistent with established quality standards. Showing that “additional efforts are needed to improve the treatment of depression.”

Though I sure don’t know what that would be, particularly for young people diagnosed with depression. Who, in line with modern medical thinking, are simply dosed with whatever the current psychoactive drug with the most lobbyists behind it, and sent home.

The New York Times offered a depression report from the CDC about depression in young people, Suicide Rises in Youth: Antidepressant Debate Looms.

“The increase was particularly sharp among adolescents, especially girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the figures yesterday. The timing of the increase coincided with a public debate in the United States and overseas over whether the antidepressants increased the risk of suicide in a small percentage of young people who took them. In late 2004, after public hearings, the Food and Drug Administration called for drug makers to put a prominent “blackbox” warning on the drugs’ labels, cautioning about the possibility of increased suicide risk in minors.”

The government talking heads, researchers in psychology and psychiatry, drug manufacturers and insurance company lobbyists will work all this out eventually, we hope. Meanwhile, young and old who suffer from clinical depression will still be getting inappropriate treatment from family doctors who aren’t specialists but can dispense drugs. Oh, well.

The debates have been raging for years. Scientists square off and argue with each other about what is most likely to be true, and those of us on the sidelines have picked favorites and made our bets.

How – and where – did life originate? Are we alone in the universe? And if not, where are our brothers and sisters? Two recent reports have added some new evidence and analysis to the debates.

In the article, Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities, researchers report that particles of inorganic dust in plasmas can self-organize into helical structures in the electronically charged environment, resulting in microscopic strings of particles that assume the characteristic corkscrew shape of organic molecules like DNA and even “reproduce” – bifurcate to produce two copies of the original structure. According to computer models, these structures also evolve into more complex structures, and experience a form of natural selection so that only the ‘fittest’ structures survive.

The speculation is that life out in space doesn’t necessarily have to be carbon-based like life on earth. This would qualify as “inorganic” life, though scenarios where such structures may have spontaneously arisen in plasmas created on earth by lightning strikes are intriguing as a first step to organic life as we know it. Very interesting!

On a related note, astrobiologists at Cardiff University report that analysis of recent cometary probes (like Deep Impact) suggests that life may have begun inside of wandering chunks of rock and ice. The article Did Life Begin in Space? New Evidence from Comets reports that probes have found a mixture of organic molecules (in the case of Comet Wild 2, complex hydrocarbon molecules) and fine clay particles beneath the cometary surface. The idea of clay particles as a catalyst for complex organic structures has been around for awhile in origin of life research, and the speculation that radioactive elements can keep some of the water in comets in a liquid form in the interior means that the theorized right ‘ingredients’ are present to cook up a batch of life!

We may be getting closer to answers, if not to meeting intelligent aliens with advanced technologies. Perhaps just small steps for mankind, perhaps someday will become a competition space-swim meet for all life of all kinds!