Molecular clock, two to six times slower than thought

Don't you just love it when you can say "I knew that!", "I told you!"

I did not have the hard evidence to prove it but I have been all the time arguing that the human molecular clock estimates (even by the standard Zhivotovski's compensated system) must be much older than normally claimed, at least twice.

Now penguins come to confirm my suspicion.

DNA from dead penguins that has remained frozen in Antarctica extreme conditions has demonstrated that the usual molecular clock age estimates are underestimated by 200 to 600 per cent.

In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old...

Source: Science Daily.

Original report: S. Subramanian et al., High mitogenomic evolutionary rates and time dependency. Trends in Genetics, 2009 (paywall).
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Antarctica heating up faster than predicted.

The rise of winter temperatures in the frozen continent has been of 2ºC in the last 30 years alone. This challenges somewhat estabilished models of climate prediction, not for the better but for the worse. Antarctica holds enough ice as to rise sea levels 57 meters (even if this is not a likely scenario in the short run).

Source: BBC.