Multicellular fossils may be world's oldest

Fossils found in Gabon suggest complex organisms lived as far back as 2.1 billion years ago, paleontologists say.

An international team of paleontologists has uncovered the earliest known multicellular fossils, pushing back the fossil record for such life forms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought.

Since most fossils in that period were microscopic and single-celled, finding fossils that stretched as long as 4.75 inches was "like ordering an hors d'oeuvre and some gigantic thick-crust pizza turning up," said Philip Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, who co-wrote a commentary on the finding. The report detailing the fossils, along with the commentary, was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The organisms, which don't resemble modern-day living things, existed when Earth's atmosphere would have been uninhabitable for today's plants and animals.

Their fossils provide "the first record of that fundamental threshold in organismal complexity being surpassed," Donoghue said. "To put it into context, the godfather of evolutionary biology, John Maynard Smith, identified eight major events in evolutionary history; achieving multicellularity was one of these."

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Genes predict living beyond 100

Scientists have developed way of predicting how likely a person is to live beyond the age of 100.

The breakthrough, described in the journal Science, is based on 150 genetic "signposts" found in exceptionally long-lived people.

The researchers created a mathematical model, which takes information from these signposts to work out a person's chance of reaching 100.

It is based on the largest study of centenarians in the world.

This is a rare trait - only one in 6,000 people in industrialised countries reaches such a ripe old age. And 90% them are still disability free by the age of 93.

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Pope launches mission to re-evangelise the West

Pope Benedict XVI has created a new office to "re-evangelise" the Western world in an attempt to roll back secularist advances in what the Vatican sees as the traditional heartland of Christendom.

The Pope has made no secret of his dislike for secularism and has been determined to persuade Western countries to rediscover their Catholic roots. He has frequently railed against some of the key pillars of secular liberalism such as the acceptance of homosexuality and abortion rights and the use of contraception.

At one of the last vespers' service before the Vatican shuts down for the summer break, the Pope announced the creation of a Pontifical Council for the promotion of New Evangelisation which would be dedicated to what he described as "a grave crisis in the sense of the Christian faith".

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