By Christopher Mims

Lately, it seems as if the Bar Harbor, Maine–based Jackson Laboratory, famous for its research on mammalian genetics, cannot catch a break in its efforts to build a satellite research facility in Florida. Since 2003, the state has heavily recruited biomedical institutions including Scripps, Max Planck, Torrey Pines, Sanford-Burnham and the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute (Nat. Med. 16, 1066–1069, 2010). But its attempts to engage Jackson Labs have been fraught with delays and setbacks.

As recently as the spring of 2010, Jackson Labs was in talks to locate its new branch in Naples, Florida. However, according to Tammie Nemecek, president of the Economic Development Council of Collier County, which includes Naples, that effort fell through when the state failed to fully finance its innovation fund, which would have provided Jackson Labs with $100 million to construct its facility, for two years in a row. Nemecek says that under then-governor Charlie Crist, “you didn’t have that leadership at state level where you got the strategy and funding to do it.”

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Planetary scientists have pinpointed what they believe is the source of Saturn’s “G-ring,” which is among the furthest and most diffuse of Saturn’s seven rings. According to the Cassini Probe, which is orbiting the second largest planet in town, the G-ring likely came from a half-kilometre wide, as yet unnamed “moonlet”.

Researchers believe that the G-ring formed from meteorite impacts and other collisions with the moonlet. Those impacts, they postulate, kicked up the fine dust that makes up the ring. It’s actually the third time a moonlet has been spotted embedded in a ring.

I don’t know if it’s Saturn, or rings, or moonlets or what, but this story has been getting nothing but ink since it came out yesterday.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute