I Did Not Know That Either. That Is One HUGE Sea Turtle.

An Asian elephant calf and its mother flee from a mob, throwing fiery balls of tar, in the Indian state of West Bengal.

Is Poisoned Halloween Candy a Myth? 

Every year around Halloween, we hear the same concern: you gotta check the candy for poison because strangers put laxatives in Tootsie Rolls, Razor Blades in Apples and drugs in Snickers. 

Where did this fear come from?

The truth is out there.

Coptic tombstone unearthed at Sphinxes Avenue in Luxor

Egyptian archaeologists in Luxor have stumbled upon a decorative Coptic tombstone buried on the eastern side of the Sphinxes Avenue, under Al-Mathan Bridge.

The tombstone is carved of limestone and decorated with a cross and Coptic texts, Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Ahram Online.

The exact date of the object has not yet been ascertained, nor the identity of the deceased. However, Mostafa Al-Saghir, director of the Sphinxes Avenue, said experts are now studying the tombstone find out.

The excavations in the Sphinxes Avenue are part of a Ministry of Antiquities programme to restore the area and transform it into an open-air museum. Read more.

Happy birthday to Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary! This Southern California sanctuary protects an area with remarkable biodiversity: here, you’ll find deep sea corals, lush kelp forests, and more.

Bats from a single cave in China have all the building blocks of a SARS epidemic

When it struck, the contagion spread fiercely. The deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in South China in 2002 infected thousands, and ultimately killed nearly 800 people.

But where did this lethal strain come from? We may now have our answer, with a study showing bats living in a single cave in China possess all the building blocks of the deadly SARS coronavirus – and potentially the means to create a new one.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences spent five years analysing SARS viruses found in multiple species of horseshoe bats nesting in a cave in China’s Yunnan Province.

In all, the team identified 11 new strains of SARS virus carried by the bats, and a genomic analysis of these – along with strains from the same cave identified in previous research – revealed something interesting.

Previous research had suggested bat viruses could have been responsible for SARS, but scientists had never uncovered evidence of a direct ancestor to the human-infecting coronavirus in bat strains.

In the new research, that held true again – none of the viruses from the cave by themselves displayed the genetic traits of the SARS coronavirus that spread to humans, infecting more than 8,000 people during the 2002-2003 emergency.

But together, it was a different story. In this one cave, there were enough genetic ingredients among the strains to build the virus that kills humans.

“Importantly, all of the building blocks of SARS-CoV genome, including the highly variable S gene, ORF8 and ORF3, could be found in the genomes of different SARSr-CoV strains from this single location,” the researchers explain in their paper.

Hypothetically speaking, the team suggests it’s possible – even probable – that if the right strains mixed with one another in the cave, you’d end up with the direct ancestor of a virus that can infect and kill people.

The findings are reported in PLOS Pathogens.

Biggest collection of dinosaur footprints found on Australian coast

Paleontologists have published a description of one of the best collections of dinosaur footprints on Earth from a stretch of beach on the northern coast of Western Australia. They include one of the largest dinosaur footprints known, as well as the first fossil evidence of stegosaurs in Australia.

Dinosaur footprints exposed on a Western Australia beach prove to be part of the most abundant track sites on Earth. Some are among the largest ever found.

Image by Steven Salisbury et al.

Just 1°C of ocean warming can upend marine ecosystems 

For 9 months, the researchers monitored the distribution and growth of marine species that settled on the heated boxes and compared them with those that lived above unheated boxes. All it took was one look to notice the difference, Ashton says. In the 1°C increase experiment, a single species of moss animal, Fenestrulina rugula, doubled its growth rate. Within 2 months, the calciferous shelves it created dominated the community, the team reports today in Current Biology. What’s more, overall species diversity plummeted by 50%.

A paper published this week confirmed a piece of speculation going all the way back to Darwin.