Har Gobind Khorana, a biochemist who rose from humble origins in rural India to win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1968, died on 9 November at the age of 89. He won the prize while working at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for working out how RNA codes for the synthesis of proteins.

Khorana was born in Raipur, a small village in the Punjab region of India, around 9 January 1922 (he was never sure of the date). His Hindu father was an agriculture taxation clerk for the British colonial government and was dedicated to educating his five children. “We were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people,” Khorana wrote.

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Posted on behalf of Matt Kaplan

Locations that are rich in fossils often have intriguing stories behind them. Some are the result of landslides that killed and covered animals long ago. Others were once tar pools that became covered in water, snaring unsuspecting animals that waded in for a drink.

A recently discovered site in the Colorado mountains now hints at another type of grisly demise. Researchers told the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual conference in Las Vegas last week that the unfortunate beasts found there may have become trapped not in tar, but in quicksand formed in a deadly earthquake.

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Posted on behalf of Arran Frood

They say it takes two to tango. And when plain-tailed wrens sing a duet, it seems that the songs made by male and female partners are indeed like a dance: each individual reacts to the other’s notes as dancers do to their partner’s footsteps.

“Dancing is the perfect analogy,” says lead author Eric Fortune of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “The same types of interactions occur between two birds singing and a man and a woman dancing.”

In the first study to measure the brain activity of duetting songbirds, published in Science today, researchers also found that the females take the lead, whereas males are most likely to make mistakes.

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Posted on behalf of Marian Turner

Mosquitoes assault our senses with their buzzing and their itchy bites, but we can get back at them by messing with their sense of smell. According to a paper published today in Nature, the chemical DEET, often used in insect repellents, works by confusing the odour code insects use to locate their food.

Scientists already suspected that DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) affects insects’ olfactory systems, either by blocking the insects’ ability to recognize a food target by smell, or by actively repulsing them.

But Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University in New York and her colleagues now think that neither idea tells the full story. Instead, their new data show that DEET interferes with the normal activity of smell-sensing neurons in insect antennae, which Vosshall says are the equivalent of their noses. The insects receive scrambled messages about the odours around them, so they are less effectively attracted to their target.

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Posted on behalf of Lee Sweetlove.

A meta-study published in Science today provides the first evidence that global movement of plants and animals to higher latitudes and altitudes is directly linked to climate change. The research, led by ecologist Chris Thomas at the University of York, UK, also reveals that species are moving two to three times faster than previously thought.

Ecologists tracking the movement of butterflies, such as the comma butterfly (pictured), first noticed over ten years ago that their range was shifting. Since then, it has become clear that large numbers of different plants and animals across the globe are moving towards the poles or to higher ground (see “”https://www.nature.com/news/2003/030106/full/news030106-1.html">Warming planet shifts life north and early" and “”https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110121/full/news.2011.33.html">Coral marches to the poles"). The most likely explanation is that organisms are moving to cooler latitudes or altitudes to escape the effects of global warming, but, until now, this has not been proven.

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Posted on behalf of Lee Sweetlove

Either the Moon is significantly younger than thought, or scientists need to completely rethink how it formed. That’s the conclusion of new isotope dating of the lunar crust published in Nature today.

The Moon was created when a Mars-sized body hurtled into the newly-formed Earth. Debris from the collision ended up in orbit around the Earth, and eventually accreted to become the Moon. It is thought that the satellite was initially a molten ball of rock – a global magma ocean – that gradually cooled at its surface to form a solid crust.

A study by geochemist Lars Borg at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his colleagues now suggests that this process took tens of millions of years longer than thought. Using improved isotope dating techniques, they have revised the age of a class of lunar crustal rocks known as ferroan anorthosite (FAN). According to their measurements of a sample of FAN collected during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, the Moon’s crust solidified 4,360 million years ago, around 200 million years after the formation of the Solar System.

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When he was nominated as President George W. Bush’s chief science advisor, he was described as a mild-mannered mediator and public explainer of science. But John H. Marburger, who died on Thursday aged 70, will be remembered as the man who staunchly defended Bush’s policies in the face of angry criticism from researchers.

A physicist with a background in lasers and non-linear optics, Marburger was president of Stony Brook University in New York from 1980 to 1994, then became director of Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1997. He had to turn the lab around after a radioactive leak angered locals and environmentalists, and won praise for using a combination of patience and openness to gain trust and get the facility running smoothly again (see “Leading a laboratory out of the mire”).

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Posted on behalf of Melissa Gaskill.

A paper published today in Conservation Letters suggests that the number of whales and dolphins killed during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill could be as much as 50 times that originally reported.

During the disaster, the US government compiled figures of injured and dead wildlife based on reports from US Fish and Wildlife Service and other authorized sources. Those numbers include approximately 115 whale and dolphin carcasses.

But after analysing data on abundance, mortality rates and strandings for whale and dolphin species in the Gulf, Rob WIlliams and his colleagues have concluded that that only two percent of the whales and dolphins that die in these waters are ever recovered.

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Science journalist Jane Qiu has now reached the Palmer ecological research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, joining researchers investigating how climate change has affected the region in recent decades. Please check back for her dispatches from the bottom of the world.

Cold rooms seem redundant in the Antarctic. But that’s where Christopher Schvarcz spends most of his working hours at the Palmer ecological research station in western Antarctic Peninsula. Looking into a microscope, he is transferring individual phytoplankton – single-celled plants that are the starting point of the marine food chain – into a flat plate with 96 wells, each about seven millimetres in diameter.

A second-year PhD student at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, Schvarcz will let the isolated phytoplankton proliferate for a few weeks, to create cell cultures that originate from single cells. He will then infect the cultures with viruses collected from sea water around the station. Ultimately, Schvarcz and his colleagues want to identify virus strains that infect known types of phytoplankton.

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Science journalist Jane Qiu is travelling to the Palmer ecological research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, joining researchers investigating how climate change has affected the region in recent decades. Please check back for her dispatches from the bottom of the world.

The R/V LM Gould sailed through a stormy blizzard for most of the night. Today, 30 November, the decks and anchor chains are covered in snow. We are well into the Gerlache Strait, the stretch of 160-kilometre long water that separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula. The entire landscape – the placid sea, occasional icebergs and ice-draped mountains – is coated in different shades of grey and shimmers under the unearthly Antarctic light.

In the distance, the Palmer ecological research station – consisting of a few buildings that perch on the rocky coast of the Anvers Island in the western Antarctic Peninsula, just north of the Antarctic Circle – begins to emerge from a curtain of thick fog. Parts of the island are covered by the gigantic Marr Ice Piedmont glacier, which is about 64 kilometres long and up to 32 kilometres wide, and reaches an elevation of over 2,800 metres.

Palmer has been operated by the United States as a research base since 1967. Twenty years ago, it became part of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, set up by the US National Science Foundation to research the effects of environmental changes. Most of the 26 LTER stations are located in and around the United States, with Palmer the only one studying marine ecosystems in polar regions.

In peak seasons during the southern hemisphere’s spring and summer, Palmer can host 46 scientists and supporting staff. A few times a week, researchers document environmental details from atmosphere and ocean properties to populations of the marine ecosystem – mostly within a three-mile radius. To expand the research area, annual research cruises sail 900 kilometres along the peninsula and take measurements at over 100 fixed locations.

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