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A fossilized lycopsid—a tree-sized relative of club moss—buried by Carboniferous sediment. (credit: Wikimedia)

It made for a neat story:

Question: Why did so much of the world’s coal form during the geologic period we now call the Carboniferous?

Answer: Large tree-like plants evolved before fungi evolved the ability to break down the fibrous lignin that helped give the plants structure. With nothing to make them decay, their remains were free to pile up and yield thick coal deposits.

It’s a neat story, but, a new study led by Stanford’s Matthew Nelsen argues, it’s not true.

While coal deposits formed both before and after the Carboniferous, this period provided the mother lode. It occurred a bit over 300 million years ago and was a funky time that saw relatives of club mosses grow to the size of trees while insects also reached comparatively gigantic proportions due to the higher-than-modern oxygen concentration.

Those following virtual reality developments woke up to some surprising news this morning, with headlines blaring that Frontier's high-profile space sim Elite: Dangerous was dropping Oculus Rift support in favor of the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. Those headlines were especially surprising considering that Elite: Dangerous had been one of the best showcases for the Oculus Rift development kits so far (just ask our own Lee Hutchinson).

It turns out that those initial headlines were wrong—or at the very least misleading. Elite: Dangerous is still planned for the Oculus Rift, as it has been all along. "This is not true. I wish people would check their facts," Elite CEO David Braben tweeted in response to one of those early headlines.

The source of the confusion seems to be a statement Frontier gave to Eurogamer, saying that "right now, we've chosen to focus on SteamVR. We haven't cut an exclusivity deal with any VR manufacturer, and we're still working with Oculus on Rift support."

(credit: Dsimic)

Google has—for years—kept secret the amount of money it has made from its Android operating system. But the cat is now out of the bag.

An Oracle lawyer has told a US court that the search and ad giant had generated £22 billion ($31 billion) in revenue, and £15 billion ($22 billion) in profit since the OS first launched in 2008, according to Bloomberg.

It was also disclosed that Google paid Apple £700 million ($1 billion) in 2014 to be the default search engine on the iPhone.