Tropical snacks
Small rodents may be a tropical tree鈥檚 best friend. The trees produce large seeds and may have evolved to rely on giant mammals like mammoths to disperse them. Nowadays rodents do the job instead, shifting seeds around as they bury them to snack on later ().
Live fossil dig
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A new set of hominin fossils will be excavated live online at the Maropeng Visitor Centre in South Africa. Bones of our extinct relative Australopithecus sediba have been found embedded in a rock 鈥� they may complete an existing skeleton.
Bulging waistline
A new way of measuring obesity is better at predicting premature death, when used with BMI, than either metric alone. 鈥淎 Body Shape Index鈥� is based on waist circumference in relation to height and weight. High ABSI often corresponds to an excess of abdominal fat, which has been linked to adverse metabolic changes (PLoS One, ).
Dark matter mine
The world鈥檚 most sensitive dark matter hunter has reached its underground lair, a former gold mine in South Dakota. Shielded from background signals, the Large Underground Xenon detector will produce photons when a particle of dark matter interacts with its xenon core. It is due to go online in 2012.
Up and at 鈥檈m
Couch potatoes, beware, you may be in line for diabetes or colon cancer. Failing to take moderate exercise for 150 minutes per week seemingly causes 6 to 10 per cent of the world鈥檚 major non-communicable diseases. In 2008, inactivity was deemed responsible for 14,000 colon cancer deaths in the US (, ).