Some scientists believe that Mars is red due to rocks being rusted by water that once flooded the planet.

That is not the case, say recent laboratory studies which show that red dust may be formed by ongoing grinding of surface rocks and liquid water need not have played any significant role in the formation process. The data were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress by Dr Jonathan Merrison.

Committees and organizations usually start for the right reasons but over time they need to become self-perpetuating.

The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) has managed to milk entire decades out of deciding the boundary dates for the Quaternary Age, which covers both the ice age and moment early man first started to use tools, and it seems they have finally voted on an answer.

Voting in science? Indeed, they have formally agreed to move the boundary dates for the prehistoric Quaternary age by 800,000 years, reports the Journal of Quaternary Science.

An international team of scientists has not only verified the existence of a mountain range that is suspected to have caused the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet to form, but also has created a detailed picture of the rugged landscape buried under more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice.

A lunar geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis says that there are still many answers to be found in moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts nearly 40 years ago. And he's been studying them since then, so he should know.

Randy L. Korotev, Ph.D., a research professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts&Sciences, has studied lunar samples and their chemical compositions since he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and "was in the right place at the right time" in 1969 to be a part of a team to study some of the first lunar samples.

New research at the University of Liverpool says it is possible to develop an 'invisibility cloak' to protect buildings from earthquakes, using concentric rings of plastic which could be fitted to the Earth's surface in order to divert surface waves.

It's not coming to your building any time soon. It's a theory and they're just beginning small-scale experiments.

The seismic waves produced by earthquakes include body waves which travel through the earth and surface waves which travel across it. The new technology controls the path of surface waves which are the most damaging and responsible for much of the destruction which follows earthquakes.

A new impact on Jupiter is getting all the attention this week but it can happen here - and has. Nanosized diamonds found just below the surface of Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa Barbara are evidence of a 'cosmic impact' approximately 12,900 years ago

The hypothesis by the researchers behind the study is that fragments of a comet struck across North America at that time.

A team of scientists from Oregon State University has created the first global three-dimensional map of electrical conductivity in the Earth's mantle and their model suggests that that enhanced conductivity in certain areas of the mantle may signal the presence of water.

What is most notable, the scientists say, is those areas of high conductivity coincide with subduction zones – where tectonic plates are being subducted beneath the Earth's crust. Subducting plates are comparatively colder than surrounding mantle materials and thus should be less conductive. The answer, the researchers suggest, may be that conductivity in those areas is enhanced by water drawn downward during the subduction process.

Results of their study are being published this week in Nature.

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team say their discovery of shorelines on Mars is an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.

Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep, roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. The shoreline evidence, found along a broad delta, included a series of alternating ridges and troughs thought to be surviving remnants of beach deposits.

Scientists have discovered the presence of a natural deep earth 'pump' that is a crucial element in the formation of ore deposits and earthquakes. The process, called 'creep cavitation', involves fluid being pumped through pores in deformed rock in mid-crustal sheer zones, which are approximately 15 km below the Earth's surface.

The fluid transfer through the middle crust also plays a key role in tectonic plate movement and mantle degassing.

The discovery was made by examining one millimeter sized cubes of exposed rock in Alice Springs, which was deformed around 320 million years ago during a period of natural mountain formation.

Modern glaciers, such as those making up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are capable of undergoing periods of rapid change, according to new findings by paleoclimatologists at the University at Buffalo. Their Nature Geoscience describes fieldwork to show that a prehistoric glacier in the Canadian Arctic rapidly retreated in just a few hundred years.

The proof of such rapid retreat of ice sheets provides one of few confirmations that this phenomenon occurs. Should the same conditions recur today, they would result in sharply rising global sea levels, which would threaten coastal populations.