News in Brief
- Animals
Deep-sea worms drop acid to get dinner
Bone-eating worms produce chemicals to dissolve and feed on skeletons.
- Tech
Recreating the eye of the fly
Inspired by insect vision, camera with 180 linked lenses captures panoramic views.
- Animals
Fossil illuminates ancestry of swifts and hummingbirds
Spectacularly preserved remains suggest that the two avian groups' predecessors got small before splitting and developing their flying chops.
- Space
Snapshots reveal details of Saturn’s gigantic hurricane
Storm dwarfs anything on Earth, with enormous eye and whipping winds.
- Space
LHC detects asymmetry in particle’s decay
While interesting, the imbalance in the decay of strange B mesons isn’t large enough to explain why matter predominates over antimatter in the universe.
- Health & Medicine
HIV vaccine trial stopped
Shots-plus-booster strategy deemed ineffective in preventing infection.
- Space
Comet’s water still hanging around on Jupiter
Shoemaker-Levy 9 supplied almost all of aqueous part of the planet's upper atmosphere.
- Life
Birds may have had to crouch before they could fly
Digital reconstructions of avian ancestors show a progressive redistribution of weight toward the front of the body.
- Earth
Remnants of Earth’s crust survive in the planet’s interior
A slab stayed unperturbed in the mantle for billions of years before resurfacing, sulfur measurements suggest.
- Earth
Yangtze’s age revealed
Geologists narrow window on time of the Chinese river’s origin to 23-36 million years ago.
- Space
American Physical Society meeting
A supernova’s remnants possibly showing up in fossils and an explanation for the Crab Nebula are among highlights from the physics meeting.
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