Volcanoes are no longer just for vulcanologists… Skydiver parachutes into the active Mutnovsky volcano and snowboarders ski down the ashes of a Nicaraguan active volcano.

“CHICAGO, ILLINOIS–Paleoanthropologists working in Africa have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old. That pushes the date of the earliest known blades back a remarkable 150,000 years and raises a question: What human ancestor made them? ….”  (Science Now via Geology.com)

“How scientists and Native Americans pulled off a major dig before the feds triple border fence destroyed everything…. “(via San Diego CityBeat)

From Nature via BBC News… A discovery in China has prompted researchers to question the scaly image of dinosaurs. Previously, experts thought the first feathered dinosaurs appeared about 150 million years ago, but the find suggests feathers evolved much earlier. This has raised the question of whether many more of the creatures may have been covered with similar bristles, or "dino-fuzz". The team describe the fossil in the journal Nature.

 From Science News: Nyiragongo, an active African volcano, possesses lava unlike any other in the world, which may point toward its source being a new mantle plume says a University of Rochester geochemist. The lava composition indicates that a mantle plume—an upwelling of intense heat from near the core of the Earth—may be bubbling to life beneath the soil of the Democratic Republic of the Congo… Basu analyzed the lava, which resides in the world’s largest lava lake—more than 600 feet wide inside the summit of Nyiragongo—and found that the isotopic compositions of neodymium and strontium are identical to ancient…

 Canadian paleontologists have found a skeleton for the smallest meat-eating dinosaur – Hesperonychus elizabethae. (BBC via Geology.com)(AP Photo/Nicholas Longrich, University of Calgary)