extinction

The Rheobatrachus silus frog has been extinct since 1983. This unusual Australian creature was known for swallowing its eggs and then releasing the young from its mouth. That's way too awesome to just let the animal be resigned to the biological history books.

Australian researchers have spent five years conducting experiments using somatic-cell nuclear transfer, a technique for creating a cloned embryo. Appropriately enough, it's called the Lazarus Project. The scientists took donor eggs from a related frog and replaced the nuclei with dead nuclei from the extinct frog. Some of the eggs then began to grow.… Read more

When asteroids attack, dinosaurs lose. Though there are still competing theories as to why we lost awesome animals like Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptors, many scientists look to a long-ago asteroid impact to explain the wipeout.

A study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters adds a new wrinkle to the asteroid assumption by suggesting that the dinos may have had to contend with not one, but two deadly balls of flying space rock. Titled "Morphology and population of binary asteroid impact craters," the study was lead by Katarina Miljkovic from the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris.

If you look out into space around Earth, you'll find that about 15 percent of asteroids are binary, meaning they're traveling in pairs. However, only 2 to 4 percent of craters on Earth have been labeled as binary impacts. Miljkovic believes this number is under-reported and that many binary asteroids have been overlooked because their craters overlap.… Read more

More than 3,000 languages are on the verge of extinction and Google is trying to do something about it.

Collaborating with scholars, researchers, and language communities, the Web giant launched the Endangered Languages Project today, backed by a coalition called the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity. Through the project Web site, people can learn about the Earth's endangered languages and see what kind of documentation is being created to preserve them.

The diverse languages range from Navajo, which is spoken by only 120,000 people in the Southwest U.S., to Koro, a previously unknown language that was documented … Read more

The American auto industry's "Big Three" are on the ropes, claiming to face imminent bankruptcy if the government won't give them billions loans, which looks like it may not happen. General Motors and Chrysler are in the direst shape, with Ford somewhat better off.

While both the concatenation of events leading to this situation and the potential scope of failure are unprecedented, the loss of a brand (or three, or even an entire multibrand manufacturer) is not.

Oldsmobile was a recent single-brand loss. Ditto Plymouth a few years back. Thirty years ago, it was the "Big Four," the fourth being American Motors, which was born from the merger of Nash and Hudson in 1954 and which even in the late 1970s was in trouble. An alliance with Renault failed to save AMC, and it was swallowed up by Chrysler in 1987. The Eagle nameplate survived for a few years after that; Jeep is still with us.

Before that, there was Studebaker. Best known for innovative (or was it outrageous?) styling in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the futuristic Avanti of the 1960s, Studebaker predated the automobile. The company started as a wagon-builder in the mid-19th century, and constructed many of the Conestoga wagons that brought pioneers to the American west. … Read more

For some 4.5 billion years, natural forces such as volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and earthquakes have shaped the Earth.

Now, however, human activity is rewriting geologic history, according to scientists in the February issue of GSA Today, produced by the Geological Society of America.

They blame the industrial revolution for a new geologic epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Stresses to the planet's atmosphere, oceans, life forms, and very surface are dramatic enough to end the Holocene epoch, the geologists say. That period began about 12,000 years ago as the last Ice Age melted and the planet warmed enough … Read more