Cost of carbon
Australia will put a price on carbon from July 2012, after its Clean Energy Act squeezed through the country鈥檚 parliament on Monday. The nation鈥檚 500 most polluting companies will be required to pay A$23 (拢15) per tonne of carbon they emit.
First feather was black
Archaeopteryx, an ancestor of modern birds, had black feathers. Pigment-producing structures are preserved in a single Archaeopteryx feather found in 1861. Ryan Carney at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, compared them with structures in living birds to reveal the feather鈥檚 colour, he told the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week.
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Super settlement
British drug firm GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to pay $3 billion to settle several disputes with the US government over the sale and marketing of drugs. The disputes included a claim that GSK had illegally marketed the antidepressant Wellbutrin as a slimming aid. The exact terms of the settlement are now being worked out.
ET no home
No evidence exists that aliens have ever 鈥渃ontacted or engaged any member of the human race鈥�, and nor is there evidence that life exists 鈥渙utside our planet鈥�. So said the White House in response to two petitions this week calling on the US government to admit to any contact with aliens.
Sick? US?
Chronic and seriously ill patients fare worse in the US than in other industrialised countries, a survey of 18,000 patients in 11 rich nations has concluded. The New York based Commonwealth Fund found that 42 per cent of the Americans polled couldn鈥檛 afford the treatment they needed, at least twice the comparable rates elsewhere.