science!: complex life may be 2 billion years old, rather than 600 million; nasa discovers 750 possible extrasolar planets

• Apparently paleobiologists' minds are exploding:
  
  

  The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago.

  
  Particularly interesting given the estimated age of the Earth (4.54 billion years); this would mean that complex life may have evolved much earlier in the planet's history than previously predicted, and prior to the Cryogenian (a.k.a. "snowball Earth") and subsequent Cambrian Explosion that is believed to have resulted in the ancestors of modern animals.


• NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered 750 potential planets in a mere 43 days within a tiny fraction of the sky. Prior to Kepler's discoveries, only 461 planets outside the solar system had been identified.


• UC Berkeley researchers found that Tibetans have evolved in a mere 3,000 years to better deal with high-altitude life, through selection for a gene that keeps blood hemoglobin levels low. 87% of Tibetans have this gene, compared to only 9% of ethnically-similar Han Chinese.


• Recycling at its best: Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have transformed their outdated particle accelerator into the world's brightest X-ray laser:
  
  

  [T]he ultimate goal envisioned for the SLAC laser is far more ambitious — to take pictures of individual molecules like proteins in a few millionths of a billionth of a second before the molecules are blown to smithereens.
  
  “We are going into the arena of biology and trying to take snapshots of the worker molecules in people’s bodies,” said Joachim Stöhr, the director of the laser center.