The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, was founded in 1984 to detect signals from faraway alien beings. The National Science Foundation and the State of California are among SETI's major supporters, but in the current economic climate monies are becoming increasingly scarce. That raises the question: Is SETI's mission important enough to keep it going?

Human eyes are well-designed to see objects using light transmitted through air, but not through water, because light travels at a different speed through the two media. However, intertidal-dwelling marine mollusks called chitons can see equally well in both environments. How did they acquire this unusual ability?

A new study published in The Open Evolution Journal described a paradox that particles-to-people evolution has failed to resolve. Called the "mutation protection paradox," it could be an intractable problem that would leave creation as the only viable origins hypothesis.

Never before had the fossil of a flying insect been discovered in Carboniferous rocks, which are said to be over 300 million years old.