On:

An ancient supercontinent has been pieced together by an international team of geologists led by John Rogers, of the University of North Carolina. The giant landmass, which they have named Columbia, would have spread across the face of the Earth more than one and a half billion years ago.

Their theory is that it fragmented into smaller pieces before reassembling into another supercontinent called Rodinia. Later on, it reformed again into a huge landmass scientists now call Pangea. The researchers base their conclusions on rocks from India, East Africa and Saudi Arabia. The specimens were collected during a joint Indian and U.S. study.
read more

On:

The Pope is under increasing pressure from his cardinals to step down due to illness according to a front-page article in Corriere della Sera by Vittorio Messori. He says both liberals and conservatives inside the Vatican say the 81-year-old Pope can no longer attend to his duties and should abdicate.

The Vatican has announced that the Pope will not follow the usual custom on Good Friday of doing the Stations of the Cross inside the Coliseum but will only ?preside? by sitting nearby on the papal throne. He has cancelled several engagements because of an arthritic knee.
read more

On:

Tim Naish, of the New Zealand Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, warns that Antarctic?s huge ice shelves may break up completely as the global climate warms. The recent collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica was ?a wakeup call to expect more collapses,? he says and believes that such collapses have ?a dramatic effect on global climate? by disrupting ocean currents.
read more

On:

Think you can tell when someone is lying? People who think they have good intuition and a ?gut instinct? about liars are worse at picking out liars than those who don?t, says Paul Seager of the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. ?People generally aren?t very good at detecting lies — accuracy is between 45 and 65 per cent,? he says. ?So my interest is: are there ways of making people better lie detectors??

Seager showed 10 video clips of people lying or telling the truth about their favorite films or preferred ways of relaxing to 200 people. Half the people being tested believed they were very intuitive and got high scores on questionnaires designed to reveal this. The other half had low scores.
read more