The oldest substantial chunk of Earth’s crust has been found in Greenland, and dates back at least 3.8 billion years. The find is important because it is of a type known as an ophiolite – a signature of plate tectonics – and provides the best evidence yet that plates have been moving across the Earth’s surface for at least a billion years longer than thought.

[…]

Ophiolites form when a piece of ocean crust is forced up onto a piece of continental crust. Ocean crust is denser than continental crust, and so it usually is forced under, meaning ophiolites are quite rare. They are created when two tectonic plates are moving towards each other, with one being forced under the other. The fragments of the descending – or subducted – oceanic plate can be shaved off and left on top of the other plate, forming an ophiolite.

Until now, the oldest example of an ophiolite was an example in China dated to 2.5 billion years ago, and its identification had been questioned. Now Harald Furnes at the University of Bergen in Norway and colleagues have analysed an ophiolite fragment embedded in the Isua supracrustal belt in south-west Greenland. The fragment was part of a distinctive layered deposit called “sheeted dikes” that are a key component of ophiolites, measuring about 30 by 50 metres.

(via rocketboom)

The theory that nerves may use sound to communicate rather than electricity isn’t as disturbing to me as the idea that scientists(doctors included) are quite sure about the workings of anesthetics. Yet they use the stuff every damn day.

Physicists don’t liek the idea of electricity traveling along nerves because there’s no detecable heat along the nerve. It’s a whole Law of Thermodynamics, you know.

The sound theory seems to solve that problem:

Nerves are wrapped in a membrane of lipids and proteins. Biology textbooks say a pulse is sent from one end of the nerve to the other with the help of electrically charged salts that pass through ion channels in the membrane. But the lack of heat generation contradicts the molecular biological theory of an electrical impulse produced by chemical processes, says Heimburg, who co-authored the new study with Copenhagen University theoretical physicist Andrew Jackson.

Instead, nerve pulses can be explained much more simply as a mechanical pulse of sound, Heimburg and Jackson argue. Their idea will be published in the Biophysical Journal.

Normally, sound propagates as a wave that spreads out and becomes weaker and weaker. But in certain conditions, sound can be made to travel without spreading and therefore it retains its intensity.

The lipids in a nerve membrane are similar to olive oil, the scientists explain. And the membrane has a freezing point that is precisely suited to the propagation of these concentrated sound pulses.

(via yahoo news)

Not a plague *of* bees, but a plague *on* bees. Funny how this doesn’t get as much airplay as bees attacking people.

Does no one recall The Circle of Life?

A mysterious illness is devastating honeybee populations across the US from California to Florida, claiming up to 80% of colonies in some areas. The losses of honeybees could disrupt the pollination of food crops, researchers warn.

Beekeepers are finding once-healthy colonies abandoned just a few days later, says Jerry Bromenshank, at the University of Montana at Missoula and Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem: “In most cases the only one left is the queen, along with a few young bees.”

The absence of dead bees makes it difficult to know what ails them and where they have gone. Furthermore, experts cannot track the spread of the mysterious illness. “The problem is that it strikes out of the blue,” says Bromenshank.

At a loss for an explanation, researchers have referred to the honeybee decline as “colony collapse disorder”.

Thank a mispent youth. I figured out the bees true plan.

(via new scientist, neil gaiman, buzzy youtube)