* Astronomy

In a paper published in this months Geophysical Journal International, Dr Graeme Eagles from the Earth Sciences Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, reveals how one of the largest continents ever to exist met its demise.
Gondwana was a supercontinent that existed between 500 and 180 million years ago. For the past four decades, geologists have debated how Gondwana eventually broke up, developing a multitude of scenarios which can be loosely grouped into two schools of thought one theory claiming the continent separated into many small plates, and a second theory claiming it broke into just a few large pieces. Dr Eagles, working with Dr Matthais König from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, has devised a new computer model showing that the supercontinent cracked into two pieces, too heavy to hold itself together.

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Geologists at the University of Leicester have solved a puzzle found in rocks half a billion years old.
Some of the most important fossil beds in the world are the Burgess Shales in the Canadian Rockies. Once an ancient sea bed, they were formed shortly after life suddenly became more complex and diverse the so-called Cambrian explosion and are of immense scientific interest.
Normally, only hard parts of ancient animals became fossilised; the bones, teeth or shells. Soft parts were rarely preserved: many plants and invertebrate animals evolved, lived for millions of years and became extinct, but left no trace in the fossil record. The Burgess Shales preserved soft tissue in exquisite detail, and the question of how this came to happen has troubled scientists since the discovery of the fossils in 1909.
Now, painstaking work by Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, with Desmond Collins of the Royal Ontario Museum, has provided an answer. They analysed the shales millimetre by millimetre, and found that unlike most rocks of this type, they werent slowly deposited, mud flake by mud flake. Instead, a thick slurry powered down a steep slope and instantly buried the animals to a depth where normal decay couldnt occur.

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A team of scientists led by young Croatian evolutionary geneticist Tomislav Domazet-Loo from Ruder Bokovic Institute (RBI) in Zagreb, Croatia, have developed a new methodological approach in evolutionary studies. Using the method they named 'genomic phylostratigraphy', its authors shed new and unexpected light on some of the long standing macroevolutionary issues, which have been puzzling evolutionary biologists since Darwin.

The only direct method of research in evolutionary history involves analysing the fossil remains of once living organisms, excavated in various localities throughout of the world. However, that approach often cannot provide the full evolutionary pathway of some species, as it requires uncovering of many fossils from various stages of its evolutionary history. As the fossil record is imperfect, the evolution research fundamentally hinges on luck factor in discovering the adequate palaeontological sites.
However, the RBI team proposed a novel and interesting approach to bypass this obstacle. Namely, they suggested that the genome of every extant species carries the snapshots of evolutionary epochs that species went trough. What's even more important, they also developed the method which enables evolution researchers to readily convert those individual 'snapshots into the full-length 'evolutionary movie' of a species.
Applying their new methodology on the fruit fly genomic data they tackled some of the most intriguing evolutionary puzzles - some of which distressed even Darwin himself. First, they demonstrated that parts of the living organism exposed to the environment so called ectoderm - are more prone to evolutionary changes. Further, they explained the evolutionary origin of the germ layers, the primary tissue forms that form during the first days after the conception of a new animal, and from which subsequently all other tissues are developed. Finally, they discovered the potential genetic trigger for the 'Cambrian explosion', a major global evolutionary event on the planet, when some 540 million years ago almost all animal forms known today suddenly 'appeared'.

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Geologists have developed a new theory to explain how and when the Appalachian Mountain range was created. Their research redraws the map of the planet from 420 million years ago.
The scientists recently discovered a piece of the Appalachian Mountains in southern Mexico, a location geologists long had assumed was part of the North American Cordillera. The Cordillera is a continuous sequence of mountain ranges that includes the Rocky Mountains. It stretches from Alaska to Mexico and continues into South America.
For the past decade, geologists have collected information from Mexico's Acatlán Complex, a rock outcropping the size of Massachusetts. As they uncovered each new piece of data from the complex, evidence contradicting earlier assumptions about the origins of that part of Mexico emerged.
According to the conventional map of 420 million years ago, two main land masses were separated by the Rheic Ocean. In the south sat Gondwana, a supercontinent consisting of South America, Africa, India, Australia and Antarctica. To the north was Laurussia, made up of North America, Greenland, Europe and part of Asia. The old map showed the Acátlan Complex attached to Laurussia. The complex broke off Gondwana about 80 million years earlier, drifted toward North America along with the other land masses, closing an older ocean, known as the Iapetus Ocean, as it did so. The collision created the Appalachian Mountains.
The new map looks rather different.
Evidence collected by Nance and his colleagues from rocks in the Acatlán Complex shows that its collision with Laurussia actually occurred about 120 million years later. The rocks once existed on an ancient ocean floor, but this ocean has proven to be the Rheic, not Iapetus as previously thought.
The explanation is that the Acatlán Complex was originally attached to Gondwana. Gondwana and the complex eventually slammed into North America, closing the Rheic Ocean in the process. This cataclysmic crunch of continental plates formed the goliath land mass known as Pangea, and created the Appalachian Mountains.

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