Snowball Earth: – The idea was first proposed back in 1973 by a geologist named William White, but no one took him seriously…

Tropical forests store about a third of Earth’s carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass. Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But new research presented at the American Geophysical Union’s 2018 Fall Meeting contradicts that theory.

Deep Carbon;

Barely living “zombie” bacteria and other forms of life constitute an immense amount of carbon deep within Earth’s subsurface—245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface, according to scientists nearing the end of a 10-year international collaboration to reveal Earth’s innermost secrets.
 
On the eve of the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory today reported several transformational discoveries, including how much and what kinds of life exist in the deep subsurface under the greatest extremes of pressure, temperature, and low energy and nutrient availability.
 
[…]

 

“Today too, we know that subsurface life is common. Ten years ago, we had sampled only a few sites—the kinds of places we’d expect to find life. Now, thanks to ultra-deep sampling, we know we can find them pretty much everywhere, albeit the sampling has obviously reached only an infinitesimally tiny part of the deep biosphere.”
 
“Our studies of deep biosphere microbes have produced much new knowledge, but also a realization and far greater appreciation of how much we have yet to learn about subsurface life,” says Rick Colwell, Oregon State University, USA. “For example, scientists do not yet know all the ways in which deep subsurface life affects surface life and vice versa. And, for now, we can only marvel at the nature of the metabolisms that allow life to survive under the extremely impoverished and forbidding conditions for life in deep Earth.”

I’m thinking what you’re thinking.

How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus

Although the reliability of blood-spatter analysis was never proven or quantified, its steady admission by courts rarely wavered, even as the technique, along with other forensic sciences, began facing increasing scrutiny.
 
In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”
 
Still, judges continued allowing spatter experts to testify.
 
Subsequent research, funded by the Department of Justice, raised questions about experts’ methods and conclusions. But little changed.
 
All along, attorneys like Bankston continued challenging the admission of bloodstain-pattern analysts. But they came to learn that a forensic discipline, once unleashed in the system, cannot easily be recalled.

Archaeologists in Algeria have discovered stone tools and cut animal bones that may be up to 2.4 million years old, bringing into question East Africa’s title as the cradle of humanity, according to research published Thursday in the journal Science…

(h/t David)

This phenomenon was reported in 2002, and I’ve mentioned it a couple of times here,  but it seems to have been largely ignored.

Biparental Inheritance of Mitochondrial DNA in Humans

The energy-producing organelle mitochondrion contains its own compact genome, which is separate from the nuclear genome. In nearly all mammals, this mitochondrial genome is inherited exclusively from the mother, and transmission of paternal mitochondria or mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has not been convincingly demonstrated in humans. In this paper, we have uncovered multiple instances of biparental inheritance of mtDNA spanning three unrelated multiple generation families, a result confirmed by independent sequencing across multiple unrelated laboratories with different methodologies. Surprisingly, this pattern of inheritance appears to be determined in an autosomal dominantlike manner. This paper profoundly alters a widespread belief about mitochondrial inheritance and potentially opens a novel field in mitochondrial medicine.

Bad news for the evolutionary genetics set, so I assume they’ll ignore this too.

The researchers said the findings were a “huge surprise”.

Doctors say there’s ‘no evidence’ high levels of bad cholesterol causes heart disease

Pass the butter.