Shabaan Ahmad

Redrawing the geological timeline of Earth’s first billion years is casting new light on whether life emerged on land or in the oceans. EARTH is 4.5 billion years old. It formed at the same time as the sun and the other planets in our solar system when thousands of rocks, large and small, collided and merged. Then came a hammer blow.  A smaller planet  seems to have struck Earth with such force that  our world’s entire surface melted  and  huge amounts of material were blasted into orbit , eventually forming the moon. This explains why Earth’s first 500 million years are called the Hadean aeon after the mythical Greek underworld. But eventually, the vast sea of hot magma cooled and solidified into rock. Oceans formed. Land masses emerged. The young planet would still have looked profoundly different from today. There was no oxygen in the air, so lots of metallic iron was dissolved in the water, staining the oceans green. Levels of atmospheric methane were perhaps high enough to colour

Long-term contact, particularly with a person's skin lesions, is now thought to be the main method of transmission. Infected cells are seen in blue in this coloured transmission electron microscope picture of monkeypox virus particles (red). Credit: SPL/NIAID/NIH   Researchers are learning more about the disease's transmission as the number of cases of monkeypox worldwide keeps rising. According to a number of recent research, early predictions that the virus spreads mostly through frequent skin-to-skin contact between individuals have largely come true. According to Oriol Mitjà, a researcher in infectious diseases at the Germans Trias I Pujol University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, who co-authored one of the recent studies published in The Lancet1, "When you put all these studies together, we see that the clinical presentation everywhere is similar—but also surprising." This is due to the fact that the signs and symptoms are different from what scientists had seen i