Tuesday, May 14th
Last update06:05:39 AM GMT
Science Glance
The ocean depths are home to myriad species of microbes, mostly hard to see but including spaghetti-like bacteria that form whitish mats the size of Greece on the floor of the Pacific.
The survey, part of a 10-year Census of Marine Life, turned up hosts of unknown microbes, tiny zooplankton, crustaceans, worms, burrowers and larvae, some of them looking like extras in a science fiction movie and underpinning all life in the seas.
Three species of creature, which are only a millimetre long and resemble jellyfish encased in shells, were found 2.2 miles (3.5km) underwater on the ocean floor, 124 miles (200km) off the coast of Crete, in an area with almost no oxygen.
The animals, named Loriciferans due to their protective layer, or lorica, were discovered by a team led by Roberto Danovaro from Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy.
The remarkable remains of two ancient human-like creatures (hominids) have been found in South Africa. The fossils of a female adult and a juvenile male - perhaps mother and son - are just under two million years old.
A new species of giant lizard has been discovered in the Philippines. The 2m-long reptile is a monitor lizard, the group to which the world's longest and largest lizards belong.
The monitor, described as spectacular by the scientists who found it, lives in forests covering the Sierra Madre mountains in the north of the country. The striking reptile has bright yellow, blue and green skin, and survives on a diet of just fruit, yet until now it has escaped the eyes of biologists.
"It is an incredible animal," says Dr Rafe Brown, one of the scientists who describe the new lizard in the journal Biology Letters. In the journal, the researchers describe how rare it is to find such a large terrestrial animal new to science.
The new species of hominid, the evolutionary branch of primates that includes humans, is to be revealed when the two-million-year-old skeleton of a child is unveiled this week.
Common toads appear to be able to sense an impending earthquake and will flee their colony days before the seismic activity strikes. The evidence comes from a population of toads which left their breeding colony three days before an earthquake that struck L'Aquila in Italy in 2009.
A team of scientists in Switzerland have collided sub-atomic particles at record power, in an attempt to mimic conditions of the Big Bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
"This is a major breakthrough. We are going where nobody has been before. We have opened a new territory for physics," Oliver Buchmueller at the the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), said.
The experiment in Cern's 27km long Large Hadron Collider (Lhc) will allow researchers to examine the nature of fundamental matter and the origins of stars and planets. The collisions took place at a record total collision energy of 7 billion electron volt, just a fraction of a second slower than the speed of light.
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