The full story is that by analysing half a billion stars (measured by the Two Micron All Sky Survey) computers have worked out that this is how we look!

It is often debated (usual answer asteroid) what caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that signaled the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago

The Permian-Triassic (250 million years ago) extinctions were worse: No class of life was spared from the devastation. Trees, plants, lizards, proto-mammals, insects, fish, mollusks, and microbes -- all were nearly wiped out. Roughly 9 in 10 marine species and 7 in 10 land species vanished.

"Deep inside Permian-Triassic rocks, scientists have found soccer ball-shaped molecules called "fullerenes" (or "buckyballs") with traces of helium and argon gas trapped inside. The fullerenes held an unusual number of 3He and 36Ar atoms -- isotopes that are more common in space than on Earth. Something, like a comet or an asteroid, must have brought the fullerenes to our planet."

They fail to mention cosmic rays. Near the end of these papers one reads:

"These variations in 3He concentration are caused by fluctuating sedimentation rates, sediment focusing, and/or variability in the IDP flux to Earth. Most of this IDP 3He in the GPC core is produced by high-energy cosmic ray bombardment of silicates..."

NASA reports that comets could have delivered important organic molecules to Earth -- sowing the seeds for life.

Genesis by comets is a controversial idea, but it has received an important boost with the knowledge that a NASA supported experiment has revealed that complex molecules hitchhiking aboard a comet could have survived an impact with Earth. The next test will be bacterial spores...

This article from the Observer suggests that we have reached the end of our evolutionary path.

"A generation ago, men and women rarely mated with anyone from a different town or city. Hence, the blending of our genes which will soon produce a uniformly brown-skinned population. Apart from that, there will be little change in the species."

And "survival of the fittest" no longer matters:

"virtually everybody's genes are making it to the next generation, not only those who are best adapted to their environments."

Of course the entire debate ignores the possibility that gradual evolution is an illusion, which is the most obvious reason for it not happening within the modern era.

Advanced supercomputers have simulated extremely powerful energy jets squirted out by black holes, confirming that they are powered by the black hole's rotation, reports NASA

"The jets contain energy equivalent to the power of the Sun, multiplied ten billion times and then increased another one billion times."

Dr. Percy Seymour has come closer than anyone to proving the reality of astrological forces - it's an excellent, in-depth, referenced and glossarised article.

His theory includes a proposal that the regular magnetic reversal of the Sun's field, which occurs roughly every eleven years, is due to the tidal effects of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The Sun itself actually moves about the common center of mass of the solar system with a period of just over ten years, and this is mainly due to the pull of Jupiter and Saturn. By violently tugging on the common center of the mass of the solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune cause the little eddy currents that generate the Sun's magnetic field to reverse or flip over from being in one direction to being in another direction.

The conventional theory is that an asteroid struck the Earth some 65 million years ago, and the resulting dust obscured the sun, shutting down photosynthesis and snuffing out life.

Kevin Pope from Geo Eco Arc Research shows in the February issue of GEOLOGY that the assumptions behind this theory are amiss, and therefore damage estimates from future asteroid impacts are also amiss.

Also at New Scientist

The maximum activity in the 11-year cycle of the Sun appears to be twin-peaked. The most recent "Solar Max" peaked in mid-2000. However, sunspot activity has been increasing again, and at least one scientist who watches sunspots said the cycle may have more than one high point

It’s rare to find a jellyfish fossil--not having a skeleton, they easily decay. So why is an entire horde of them preserved in central Wisconsin? - This link doesn't have all the answers, but they do say: "During the Cambrian, Wisconsin enjoyed a tropical environment and was covered by a shallow inland sea" - more inadvertent pole shift evidence, methinks

University of South Carolina scientists think that they might be gravastars instead - cold, dense shells supported by a springy, weird space inside, that look like black holes from the outside. Using the idea of quantum gravity, they show that gravastars fit all of Einstein's equations just as good as black holes, but in a simpler and more elegant way.

Wacky concept - Ancient civilizations shaken by quakes Earth gets to live for 200 million more years Japanese to build a 2 kilometre high pyramid

NASA have discovered that stars blasting high-speed gas jets from their poles can be older than 100,000 years - this new one is 4 million years old.

If they find a star like our sun (same age, same size) with jets, will they tell us?

Scientists are always scratching their heads. After a severe drought, when they expected numbers of wading birds to shrink, wildlife biologist Peter Frederick found that their numbers were the highest in 25 years. Go figure.

I have long subscribed to the idea that UFOs are just hallucinations caused by movements of the ground below us - after reading the work of Paul Devereux. Now there is scientific evidence. A labratory experiment has produced lights and electromagnetic effects from earthquakes.

"In a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, physicist Friedemann Freund theorizes that positive charges can be generated when huge stresses are generated along faults in the Earth's crust. The rocks in the crust normally act as insulators that conduct electrical charges only poorly. But under the severe stress generated before an earthquake, these rocks may behave briefly like 'p-type semiconductors" found in computer chips, capable of releasing large numbers of positive charges referred to as "holes.'

These charges speed upward toward the surface of the Earth at between 220 and 660 mph.

Freund, a professor at San Jose State University in California, thinks they ionize the atmosphere upon reaching the air, accounting for the bizarre effects -- radio interference and colored streamers, flashes and glows reported by thousands of observers."

The Anchorage Daily News has more...

"Pulses of light have been slowed down and stopped in a solid for the first time. Alexey Turukhin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US and colleagues used an yttrium-based crystal to slow light pulses to just 45 metres per second, and then to trap and release them. Previously, these effects had only been seen in gases, which are more difficult to control. A solid should be easier to develop into real applications, such as high-density information storage for quantum computing" - More at PhysicsWeb

Note: One month later they did the same thing at Rowland Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

PLUS! Electricity goes faster than the speed of light...(well, they cheat)

"Geologists once thought magma plates such as the one that created the Hawaiian Islands stay in one spot as the plates of the Earth's crust move over them. For years, they used these hot spots as a fixed point of reference to measure the motion of the plates in relation to the Earth's core"

But it is the hot spots, not the plates, that are moving. More in this New Scientist article

New Scientist 15 Dec 2001, page 10

"...life on Earth may have been repeatedly disrupted by bursts of gamma rays from space. The bursts would have disturbed the Earth's atmosphere, exposing organisms to high levels of mutagenic radiation"

The scientists believe the bursts only reach Earth once every 5 million years (it was previously thought never) and degrade the atmosphere, exposing organisms to UV radiation (and cosmic rays, I presume, which the atmosphere also protects us from).

"The impact of gamma-ray bursts has not been widely discussed, nor do biologists, including myself, have much information about their frequency or exposure levels" - admits scientist Mitch Sogin.

Similar research reported at Space Daily

A BBC report of an archaeological site off India's western coast that may be up to 9,000 years old. Acoustic images from the sea-bed suggested the presence of built-up structures resembling the ancient Harappan civilisation, which only dates back around 4,000 years.

More at Times of India and BBC again

Feb 2002 articles at Earthfiles (Linda Moulton Howe) and Arabia.com

The composite global temperature for 2001 was 0.06 degrees C (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the 20-year (1979-to-1998) average, says a report from the University of Alabama. Sounds like normal variances for a stable planet to me. Elsewhere I have learnt that although a lot of human activity warms the planet up, the biggest culprits are forest fires and cows farting. And human activity can cool things down due to sulfur emissions (although they give us acid rain).

And Nature magazine is telling us that Antarctica is getting colder by 0.7C a decade. But then a week later we are told it is warming up again

An amatuer photograph shows mysterious lines across Northern Alaska. There isn't usually any natural explanation for straight lines...