Reuters Science News Summary
Following is a summary of current science news briefs.
Spanish lab sterilises mosquitoes as climate change fuels spread of dengue fever
A Spanish laboratory is breeding and sterilising thousands of tiger mosquitoes to fight dengue fever and other diseases as climate change encourages the invasive species to spread across Europe. Using an electron accelerator, the regional government-funded Biological Pest Control Centre in Valencia sterilises and releases about 45,000 male mosquitoes every week so they can pair with females - whose bite transmits diseases among humans - and eventually reduce the overall mosquito population.
Ancient Egypt's 'screaming' mummy woman may have died in agony
It is a startling image from ancient Egypt - a mummy discovered during a 1935 archaeological expedition at Deir el-Bahari near Luxor of a woman with her mouth wide open in what looks like an anguished shriek. Scientists now have an explanation for the "Screaming Woman" mummy after using CT scans to perform a "virtual dissection." It turns out she may have died in agony and experienced a rare form of muscular stiffening, called a cadaveric spasm, that occurs at the moment of death.
Meteorite impacts identified as driver of moon's tenuous atmosphere
The NASA astronauts who became the first people to land on the moon's surface in the 1960s and 1970s also discovered a previously unknown lunar characteristic - it has an atmosphere, though quite tenuous. Soil samples they retrieved are now revealing the main physical process driving this atmosphere. By analyzing which forms of two elements - potassium and rubidium - were present in nine tiny soil samples from five Apollo missions, researchers determined that the lunar atmosphere was created and is sustained primarily by the effects of meteorites, large and small, striking the moon's surface.
Primordial spiny slug from China was forerunner of world's mollusks
Earth's roughly 76,000 species of mollusks come in an impressive variety of forms including clams, oysters, scallops, mussels, snails, slugs and even some possessing exceptional intelligence such as octopuses, cuttlefish and squid. But their ancestral form and early evolutionary history have been tough to decipher. Fossils discovered in southern China of a curious little marine creature that lived during the Cambrian Period about 514 million years ago - essentially a spiny slug - are now providing some clarity about the initial stages of the mollusk lineage.
