Welcome to the Anthropocene

In its current issue, The Economist has published an interesting piece on "The Anthropocene - A man made world". In terms of public understanding of science it gives an interesting insight into how stratigraphy works, how palaeontology and geochemistry are used to define stratigraphical ages. It also looks at earth system science and on the interplay of human activity, climate and ocean chemistry.
Even though I do not agree with some of the suggestions on terraforming, it is the first time that I had the concept of "carbonate compensation depth" explained to me in a mainstream news magazine. I also found the example of the preservation of the ruins of a city on a fast sinking river delta highly original.

Paleontologists enter the web period

After James Landell circulated 'An Open Letter in Support of Digital Data Archiving' via the paleonet list server, a quite controversal discussion followed. This thread included almost any kind of paranoia you would expect to hear if someone asks a group of pre-web scientists to share their data.

Anyway, this letter apparantly had significant impact and NATURE editors now hope that 'Fossil data enter the web period'.. hopefully paleontologists will follow;)

Welcome in the post-taxonomic world

Rod Page reports on the growing number of unclassified and 'name less' GenBank entries in is new post 'Dark taxa: GenBank in a post-taxonomic world'.