"Pregnant With Life, But Not With Humanity"

"After all, if life emerged independently on two planets in a single solar system, it is nothing unusual. Indeed, that finding alone would be powerful evidence that life has a tendency to emerge, and is presumably widespread throughout the universe. The origins of life would indeed be found in the laws of nature.
"But we can't make too much of that either. For though any such finding would greatly raise life's stature in the universe, it would do nothing to elevate that of humanity. Even if we prove that life is a property of physics, we humans would still be creatures of chance—and natural selection."

Adam Gaffney at The New Republic reviews Roy R. Gould's Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life.

"The Window Into the Past That These Children Provide Is Priceless"

"By analyzing the older infant's genome, Potter and his colleagues, including José Víctor Moreno Mayar and Lasse Vinner, have shown that she belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient people, who are distinct from all known Native Americans, past and present. The team have dubbed them the Ancient Beringians.
"'We'd always suspected that these early genomes would have important stories to tell us about the past, and they certainly didn't disappoint,' says Jennifer Raff from the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.'"

Ed Yong at The Atlantic writes about new "clues about when and how the first peoples came to the Americas."

"Turns It Sideways"

"But to me, the most important thing Randall did in this comic is to beautifully show how rapidly the Earth is warming. The increase in temperature is pretty slow, with the dashed line of temperature moving left to right subtly as you scroll down. But then, finally, after nearly 15,000 pixels of scrolling down, you can see the temperature take a sudden sharp surge to the right, showing the painful and very recent upturn in heat stored all over our planet. It's a slap in the face."

Phil Plait at Slate praises Randall Munroe's illustrated timeline of climate change.

Lucy in the Ground with Fossils

"Researchers had previously believed that the first member of the human family tree to walk upright was Homo erectus, which flourished between 1.8 million and 70,000 years ago before giving way to modern humans. But the new discovery indicates that the transition from trees to grasslands actually took place one to 2 million years earlier."

Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times reports on a recent conclusion about a "fossilized foot bone from Ethiopia."