Natural selection happening in front of our eyes.
Caribbean lizards that survived the tough 2017 hurricane season have larger toe pads, on both front and back limbs, report researchers.

The work is first to demonstrate the effects of hurricane-induced natural selection.

A flurry of recent findings highlight a contentious question in this area

From the earliest days of the CRISPR-Cas9 era, scientists have known that the first step in how it edits genomes-snipping DNA-creates an unholy mess: Cellular repairmen frantically try to fix the cuts by throwing random chunks of DNA into the breach and deleting other random bits. Research published on Monday suggests that's only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg: CRISPR-Cas9 can cause significantly greater genetic havoc than experts thought, the study concludes, perhaps enough to threaten the health of patients who would one day receive CRISPR-based therapy.

New seismic data provide structural basis for strong earthquakes that strike at both ends of the Pacific Northwest fault zone.

With four years of data from 268 seismometers on the ocean floor and several hundred on land, researchers have found anomalies in the upper mantle below both ends of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They may influence the location, frequency and strength of earthquake events along the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The anomalies, which reflect regions with lower seismic wave velocities than elsewhere beneath the fault line, point to pieces of the Earth's upper mantle that are rising and buoyant because of melting rock and possibly elevated temperatures, said Miles Bodmer, a University of Oregon doctoral student who led a study now online as an accepted paper by the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Nematodes moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age in major scientific breakthrough, say experts.

The roundworms from two areas of Siberia came back to life in Petri dishes, says a new scientific study.

'We have obtained the first data demonstrating the capability of multicellular organisms for longterm cryobiosis in permafrost deposits of the Arctic,' states a report from Russian scientists from four institutions in collaboration with Princetown University.

Some 300 prehistoric worms were analysed - and two 'were shown to contain viable nematodes'.

'After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life,' said a report today from Yakutia, the area where the worms were found.

'They started moving and eating.'

But looking back, always the spirit of joyousness rises before me as her emblem and characteristic: she seemed formed to live a life of happiness: her spirits were always held in check by her sensitiveness lest she should displease those she loved, & her tender love was never weary of displaying itself by fondling & all the other little acts of affection.--

We have lost the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age:--she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.

~Charles Darwin's memorial of his daughter Anne, who died at the age of 10. April 30, 1851.

In her 2004 book The Afterlife Is Where We Come From detailing her fieldwork among the Beng farmers of West Africa, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb recounts the story of an elderly woman named Afwe Zi. Afwe first came to Gottlieb seeking treatment for a persistent cut she had on her leg. Gottlieb writes that, "We tried every curative cream we could find in the pharmacy, but the cut stubbornly refused to heal. We fretted aloud about the mysterious wound, and we began hearing that Afwe had suffered with this cut for many years. It never got worse, never got better - it just stayed there." After Gottlieb returned to the United States, she asked a biomedical doctor about the injury, and he suggested that the wound may have been ulcerated, which would explain the lack of healing.

The Beng explanation, however, was that the wound was due to witchcraft. Some Beng villagers even suspected that Afwe Zi herself was a witch, due to the sad and disquieting details of her personal history. When Gottlieb returned to the village eight years later, Afwe told Gottlieb her tragic story. Over the course of her life, Afwe had fifteen children: fourteen of whom died as infants or toddlers, all from the same unknown illness. Eleven of her children had died before they could even walk. At a loss to explain this unhappy pattern, Afwe and many of the other Beng attributed the many deaths of her children to witchcraft. Gottlieb writes, "I asked Afwe who was responsible for the witchcraft. She replied: 'My mother tried to find out by doing sacrifices. They sacrificed sheep, they sacrificed sheep, they begged them. . . . Me, I've been called a witch, but never, never!! My mother offered palm wine. . . . She gave sráká sacrifices to children. It was a diviner who told my mother to offer these sacrifices. She did a lot of them! She asked the witches to release my children.'" (Gottlieb, 248)

Planetary scientists studying images of Jupiter taken from some of the Earth's largest telescopes have discovered a mysterious dark "ribbon" winding around the giant planet's magnetic equator.

The equator is the region equidistant between a planet's north and south poles. Unlike the geographic equator, the magnetic equator defined by the north and south magnetic poles, which on Jupiter, as on Earth, are tilted about 10 to 11 degrees from true north.

Not that this ribbon is visible to human eyes. In a paper published this week in Nature Astronomy, a team led by Tom Stallard, a planetary astronomer at the University of Leicester in the UK, found it by studying infrared emissions from H3+ ions, which are created by interactions between the planet's magnetic field and an upper layer of its atmosphere known as the ionosphere.

"That molecule gets hot and starts glowing," he says. "It's a probe of the interaction between the atmosphere and the surrounding space environment."

Most H3+ observations on Jupiter, he says, have focused on the magnetic poles, where the ions are associated with the planet's aurorae.

Away from the poles, these emissions are much less intense. "It's about 100 times weaker," Stallard says. "The only way [to see it] is by using really big telescopes for a long time."

Life could have existed on the Moon billions of years ago, according to a new scientific study, which concludes that the necessary environmental conditions could have existed there, at not one but two points in history.

The research, published in the Astrobiology journal this week, does not say definitively that there was ever life on the Moon, but argues that the conditions which would have made life possible existed there during two different time periods, for tens of millions of years at a time.

The study's authors write that at least some of the key conditions existed simultaneously on the Moon for long stretches of time.

"If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, co-author of the study and a Washington State University astrobiologist.

Discoveries made in recent years have shown that the Moon is not as dry as was previously thought. One study even showed that there was probably still ice or water trapped within the Moon's interior at the lunar poles - but the new study suggests that there could have been a significant amount of water on the surface of the Moon; many moons ago, so to speak.

New research led by Cardiff University has shown that under a 'business-as-usual' scenario of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, ocean acidification is likely to hit unprecedented levels.

Ocean acidification occurs when CO2 from the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater, resulting in more acidic water with a lower pH.

Around a third of the CO2 released by burning coal, oil and gas gets dissolved into the oceans. Since the beginning of the industrial era, the ocean has absorbed around 525 billion tons of CO2, equivalent to around 22 million tons per day.

The rapid influx of CO2 in to the oceans is severely threatening marine life, with the shells of some animals already dissolving in the more acidic seawater.

Scientists have created a tiny rotor that rotates at speeds of up to 60 billion revolutions a minute - the fastest-spinning human-made rotor in history, and 100,000 times faster than your average dental drill.

The record-breaking invention not only pushes the boundaries of physics but could also be used to study some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and how objects operate in a vacuum.

We're actually dealing with some of the fundamentals of science here, like how gravity and friction work in a vacuum. Now that the nano-rotor is up and running, some detailed investigations can begin, according to the team of researchers.

A common set of genes is involved in numerous mental health conditions, according to a study of almost 900,000 genomes. The findings hint that conditions such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia may all share a physiological basis, and open the door to better diagnosis and treatments.

Verneri Anttila of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues analysed the genomes of around 865,000 people, including those with one of 25 conditions and healthy controls, to see if there were any patterns. Finding these patterns is an important step toward understanding how and why these conditions develop.

The 25 conditions included neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, and psychiatric conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.