Smallest flower
You鈥檇 have to be a very light-fingered thief to steal this orchid. Discovered hidden in the roots of a larger plant in Cerro Candelaria nature reserve in the eastern Andes, Ecuador, Platystele is the world鈥檚 smallest orchid. The flower is 2.1 millimetres wide and has transparent petals a mere one cell thick.
Black hole at work
A supermassive black hole has been spied forging its future home. The black hole is spewing out a stream of energetic particles and gas that is forming stars in a neighbouring galaxy. The two will eventually merge. The finding hints that such black holes are born before their host galaxies (Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol 507, p 1359)
How Jane Austen died
Jane Austen has long been thought to have died of Addison鈥檚 disease, which disrupts the adrenal gland. But Katherine White of the Addison鈥檚 Disease Self-Help Group in the UK disagrees. Addison鈥檚 causes confusion, but Austen wrote that she had a 鈥渃lear head鈥� and dictated comic verse before she died. Instead, she died of tuberculosis, says White (BMJ, ).
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Sweet panda music
If you鈥檙e a giant panda looking to get jiggy it helps to say so. Female pandas make different noises when fertile, researchers have shown in playback experiments. Males were twice as likely to approach and loiter near a speaker playing fertile rather than 鈥減re-fertile鈥� chirps (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ).
Contagious loner
You may feel you have none, but you can still pass loneliness on to your friends 鈥� and their friends, say Nicholas Cristakis of Harvard University and colleagues. They used surveys of Massachusetts residents to trace loneliness in social networks.