(Left to right): ANDIA/UIG/GETTY IMAGES; ANITA KUNZ; NASA SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO
By Alex Fox
Stonehenge, other ancient rock structures may trace their origins to monuments like this
Stonehenge may be the most famous example, but tens of thousands of other ancient sites featuring massive, curiously arranged rocks dot Europe. A new study suggests these megaliths weren’t created independently, but instead can be traced back to a single hunter-gatherer culture that started nearly 7000 years ago in what is today the Brittany region of northwestern France.
This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril
In the past 9 months, BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, has become the very public face of the #MeToo movement in science. Scores of women have reached out to her for advice, posting harrowing tales of harassment on the MeTooSTEM.com website that McLaughlin launched in June 2018. Now, her own scientific career is on the line. In 2017, a faculty committee that previously approved her tenure unanimously reversed itself. Unless something changes, she will lose her job on 28 February, when her National Institutes of Health grant expires.
Radar reveals a second potential impact crater under Greenland’s ice
Just months after revealing an impact crater the size of Washington, D.C., buried under the ice of northwestern Greenland, a team of scientists has discovered that it has company: another large depression 180 kilometers away that may also be an asteroid or comet impact crater.
Here’s how your city’s climate will change by 2080, if you’re in Canada or the United States
Climate change is a hard thing to imagine, especially 60 years into the future. With that in mind, environmental scientists have developed a web-based app that can tell people living in one of 540 cities in Canada or the continental United States how their homes will transform by the year 2080—and which modern-day city it is most likely to resemble. For example, residents of Washington, D.C., can expect a climate in the 2080s that resembles the current climate in Paragould, Arkansas, about 132 kilometers northwest of Memphis, Tennessee.
New patent win for University of California upends CRISPR legal battle
The University of California has received good news on a patent for the invention of the genome editor known as CRISPR: As STAT reports, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, posted a “notice of allowance” last week for the school’s CRISPR patent, which it originally applied for in March 2013. The patent, which will likely move the fierce legal war over CRISPR closer to a peace treaty, should be officially issued within the next 2 months.
Source: Science Mag