Earth is younger than previously thought - Spoiler: It's not 6000 years old.

Researchers have calculated that the planet could have taken far longer to form following the birth of the solar system 4.567 billion years ago than scientists have previously believed.

By comparing chemical isotopes from the Earth's mantle with those from meteorites, geologists at the University of Cambridge claim the planet reached its current size around 4.467 billion years ago.

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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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BBC: Finless porpoises in China on brink of extinction

Finless porpoises, a rare type of toothed whale, may be even more endangered than previously thought.

A survey of finless porpoises in Asia has revealed there are two species, not one, and that they rarely intermingle.

"Most conservation biologists have a strong feeling that the Yangtze finless porpoise has a very high risk of extinction"

- Prof Guang Yang

More worrying, finless porpoises living in the freshwater of China's Yangtze river are genetically unique, say scientists, who warn that greater efforts must be made to prevent these animals, numbering fewer than 1000, from following another Yangtze cetacean, the Baiji, to extinction.

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New evidence may solve mystery of the origin of water on Earth

For chemical compounds to bind together with other chemical compounds, they need to be in something fluid so that they can freely move around. This is why there is no life on Mars or Venus, the water would be either ice or steam.

When water is in its liquid format, then any chemicals inside the water are free to float along until they touch another chemical, which bind together and eventually create large chemical strings and eventually life.

That is a simplified version but if you'd like to learn more about this process take a look at this Made Easy video

This is only part 3 in a series of 11 short videos, that I've linked on the left hand side of this blog.

However, the BBC article below is on the origin of water, the petri dish of life, on our planet:

Scientists have found new evidence that the water on Earth was delivered by asteroids during the earliest years of the solar system.

The development comes after two teams of scientists independently discovered the first “wet” asteroid, paving the way for the first experimental proof of a longstanding mystery surrounding the origin of water on Earth.

Scientists believe that the Earth was formed barren. During a period of intense bombardment, between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, ice-covered comets and asteroids could have delivered water. It had been assumed that these asteroids would have now dried out.

But the new observations, by teams using infrared telescopes at Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, and the University of Central Florida, show that 24 Thermis, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, is covered in a thick layer of frost

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