Sydney, April 22 : In an analysis of fossil deposits in central India, an international team of geologists has found that complex life, in the form of multicellular organisms, existed on earth more than 400 million years earlier than previously thought.

According to a report by ABC News, the finding comes out of research aimed at ending controversy over the age of the Vindhyan basin in central India.

The controversy concerns two fossil discoveries in 1998, which gave conflicting views over when the Vindhyan sedimentary basins, which spread over more than 100,000 square kilometers of central India, were formed.

London, April 22 : A fossil found in China, dating from the middle of the Cretaceous period, may belong to a dinosaur that was probably the ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

According to a report by BBC News, uncovered near the city of Jiayuguan, the fossil finds come from a novel tyrannosaur dubbed Xiongguanlong baimoensis.

The fossils date from the middle of the Cretaceous period, and may be a “missing link”, tying the familiar big T rex to its much smaller ancestors.

Washington, Apr 22 : Female field crickets tend to remember attractive males on the basis of their songs, and then choose their mates accordingly, a new study has found.

In the research, UC Riverside biologists have found for the first time that female crickets compare the information about the attractiveness of available males around them with other incoming signals when selecting attractive males for mating.

Berlin, April 21: Scientists have developed a novel reaction scheme by which CO2 can be efficiently converted into methanol under very mild conditions.

The technique was developed by researchers working with Yugen Zhang and Jackie Y. Ying at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore.

As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the scheme is based on an N-heterocyclic carbene catalyst and a silane as the reducing agent.

Washington, April 21: In new discoveries by researchers from Uppsala, Cambridge and Duke Universities, it has been shown that the earliest backboned land animals had different life histories.

The researchers studied fossil upper arm bones from the two so-called “four-legged fishes”, Ichthtyostega and Acanthostega, from Greenland.

These animals, which lived during the Devonian period about 365 million years ago, were among the earliest vertebrates (backboned animals) with fore- and hindlimbs rather than paired fins.

Soot or black carbon from mud cooking stoves, used in tens of thousands of villages in India, are turning out to be one of the main causes of global warming - says one of the world's leading climate scientists, Veerabhadran Ramanathan. According to a study by Ramanathan, Soot, the second most pernicious gas, after carbon dioxide, is causing 18 percent of the global warming, while carbon dioxide is responsible for 40 percent of carbon dioxide.