Connect, They Say, Only Connect. Many think the nascent academic science of network theory may hold the key to everything from predicting fashion trends to preventing terrorism. By Emily Eakin. [New York Times: Science]

NIce useful article on networks. This IS where a lot of work is going.  11:08:43 PM    

Is this how life on Earth began?. Electronic Telegraph Jan 25 2003 8:43PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

A little hyped but a pretty reasonable discussion dealing with the possible Martian origin of life on Earth. Mars would have reached condition conducive to life much earlier than Earth and, with lots of comets and asteroids colliding with the planets, Mars would have sent lots of bacteria-laden rock to the Earth, where they could have seeded life. This is an interesting hypothesis and is one way to get around one of the 'problems' when discussing early life on Earth - the rapid rise of terrestrial life forms so soon after the extra-terrestrial bombardment stopped. Using Mars would give us a few more hundred of millions of years. We could not really prove this but finding life on Mars in the underlayers of its surface that looked similar to Earth's would be a start. Of course, the last common ancestor between life on Earth and life on Mars could be 4 billion years, so there might be lots of differences.   11:05:56 PM