Science News reports from San Francisco at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (p. 13)

Evidence of seafloor rise and fall shows southern Sumatra is at start of new earthquake cycle.

Earth is regularly bombarded by small meteorites, but most of the resulting craters are hard to find. A team reports finding one such crater in the forests of west-central Alberta.

The chemistry of minerals preserved in Australian rocks suggests tectonic activity for Earth’s earliest eon. (p. 10)

Bacteria can build a biofilm that preserves a tissue's structure.

Genetic material extracted from the hair of woolly mammoths has revealed new information about the extinct creatures, including how closely related they are to modern elephants.

Turns out, the variety and number of minerals in the solar system and on Earth have increased through time, and some minerals exist because Earth has life. (p. 10)

The texture of surfaces could be designed so that both water and oil can bead up and thus flow off. (p. 12)

About 70 percent of Earth's surface is covered with water, some 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of it. Too bad almost 96.5 percent of it's salty, and another 2 percent is locked away as ice in remote places such as Greenland and Antarctica. All told, just a little more than 1 percent of our planet's water is fresh and readily available for human uses such as drinking and irrigating crops. Even that small fraction, however, isn't evenly distributed. Some regions are haves—think tropical rain forests—and others are Saharan have-nots.New computer studies suggest that a number of nations will join th...