In the Dec. 8 SN: Parkinson’s gut connections, beaver ecosystem engineering, Greenland’s hidden impact crater, the kilogram redefined, figurative cave art in Borneo, Dione’s stripes and more.
FIRST LOOK One of the first images NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took during its close encounter with the sun shows a streamer of plasma in the outer solar atmosphere, or corona. The probe took this image November 8 at a distance of about 27 million kilometers from the sun’s surface. The bright dot below the streamer is Jupiter.
Parker Solar Probe/NASA and Naval Research Laboratory
COMPLEX MAIZE Modern corn plants, such as these South American maize varieties, were domesticated over a surprisingly long period across a broad geographic area after a partly domesticated form originated in Mexico around 9,000 years ago, a new genetic analysis concludes.
Fabio de Oliveira Freitas
SCALY SCIENCE Nine-banded armadillos have their offspring four at a time, each genetically identical. But scientists now know that identical DNA isn’t everything.
Heiko Kiera/shutterstock
BRAIN BUILDUP Amyloid-beta (illustrated in brown) from vials of contaminated growth hormone spread in the brains of mice, researchers found.
National Institute on Aging/NIH
