Mission to Planet Earth: The First Two Billion Years

Mission to planet Earth.

Anthraquinones are the largest group of the naturally occurring quinones. Both natural and synthetic anthraquinones are widely used in medical preparations, colourants in foods, hair dyes and others. Chrysazin (1, 8-dihydroxy-9, 10-anthracenedione; Figure 1) is a synthetic anthraquinone with 1, 8-dihydroxy groups like other natural anthraquinones such as emodin and chrysophanol which have been ...

Life: the first two billion years.

Microfossils, stromatolites, preserved lipids and biologically informative isotopic ratios provide a substantial record of bacterial diversity and biogeochemical cycles in Proterozoic (2500-541 Ma) oceans that can be interpreted, at least broadly, in terms of present-day organisms and metabolic processes. Archean (more than 2500 Ma) sedimentary rocks add at least a billion years to the recorded...

Distributed Earth Science Validation Centers for Mission to Planet Earth

Causal understanding in reasoning about the world p. 13 How to make intelligent digital libraries p. 27 Some methodology and representation problems for the semantics of prosaic application domains p. 39 Recognizing credible experts in inaccurate databases p. 46 Fuzzy logic or Lukasiewicz logic: a clarification p. 56 Logic systems for approximate reasoning: via rough sets and topology p. 65 Sig...

The First Four Billion Years

A planet with two billion cars

Road block: Economists predict that there will be two billion motor vehicles on the roads by 2030, as private vehicle ownership spreads to the developing world. The image shows an urban motorway in Beijing, China. (Photo: Bev Sykes.) From the sheer amount of bad news coming through the 24/7 news cycle, one may get the impression that the world is on the road to apocalypse. To counter this impre...