M.J. Rose

Basically, what this new finding tells us is that the chances of microbial life being found on Mars are quite a bit higher now! –

Marsquake! Scientists Find New Signs of Rumblings on the Red Planet

When space probes first began taking closeup images of Mars in the early 1970s, the pictures revealed what appeared to be a long dead world. Ancient waterways were visible on the surface, but they had been dry for billions of years. Crater-topped volcanoes dotted the planet — some of them a mile or more higher than Everest — but they had stopped erupting eons ago.

It all made a melancholy sort of sense: with only a tenth the mass of Earth, Mars has too little gravity to have held onto an atmosphere for very long, so any surface water would have escaped into space along with it. Its small size also let Mars’ inner heat drain away relatively quickly, just as a newly baked bagel cools faster than a loaf of bread. Without that heat to drive volcanism, the planet would surely have gone seismically still.

Read more here.

Exciting news: M.J. will be touring the blogosphere for the latest release in her Reincarnationist series, THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES, from February 20th through April 13th. Tune in to the blog for blog tour updates and links to her delicious posts about lost fragrances. Your senses will thank you!

Here’s an intro…

M.J. Rose writes: I’ve been fascinated with lost fragrances since long before I started writing The Book of Lost Fragrances…since I found a bottle of perfume on my great grandmother’s dresser that had belonged to her mother in Russia. Here is one of those lost fragrances that stirs the senses and the imagination…(researched and described with the help of the perfume writer Dimitrios Dimitriadis) –

And so, M.J.’s February 20th guest post at the TBR Pile is a review of GUERLAIN’S CUIR DE RUSSIE – click here to read it.

THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES comes out on March 13 from Atria Publishing! I’ve read the book and it’s beautiful and impossible to put down. You will be spellbound as I was.

More goodies:

These Are the Earliest Human Paintings Ever

(Gizmodo.com)

According to new dating tests, these are the first paintings ever made by humans. They are seals painted more than 42,000 years ago, located in the Cave of Nerja, in Málaga, Spain. And they may change our ideas about humanity’s evolution.

Until now, archeologists thought that the oldest art was created during the Aurignacian period, by modern humans. But these are way older, way more primitive than the ones in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, the 32,000-year-old paintings featured in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

According to the latest dating of the charcoal found next to the paintings—used either to make the paintings or illuminate them—these seals may have been made more than 42,300 years ago. In fact, they may be as old as 43,500 years.

For the complete story, click here to go to Gizmodo.