Rise of the dinos
The collapse of tropical rainforests 300 million years ago paved the way for the rise of the dinosaurs. As the forests died back, early reptiles evolved a host of new lifestyles to cope, including eating plants and hunting each other (Geology, vol 38, p 1079).
Toxic snow on Everest
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Following in Edmund Hillary鈥檚 footsteps? Don鈥檛 drink the water on your way up. Dangerous levels of arsenic and cadmium have been found in snow samples from Mount Everest, 7000 metres above sea level. Pollution from Asian industry is probably to blame (Soil Survey Horizons, vol 51, p 72).
Extreme HIV evolution
Just a century after making the leap from chimpanzees to humans, HIV-1 has evolved into an astonishing 48 new strains, according to a history of the virus. Substantially different forms of HIV could evolve in the future, making it more difficult to combat (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, ).
Red dwarf bounty
The universe contains three times as many stars as we thought. For the first time, astronomers at Yale University have identified the faint signature of red dwarfs outside the Milky Way. In eight nearby elliptical galaxies, the researchers found that the low-mass, dim stars were more bountiful than expected (Nature, ).
Car bomb kills physicist
Majid Shahriari, a nuclear physicist at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, has been killed in a bomb attack in the capital. In January, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist at the University of Tehran, was also killed in a car bomb attack. Iran says the killings are linked to its nuclear programme.