Using ALMA, astronomers have taken a new, detailed look at the very early stages of planet formation around a binary star. Embedded in the outer reaches of a double star's protoplanetary disk, the researchers discovered a striking crescent-shape region of dust that is conspicuously devoid of gas. This result, presented at the AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C., provides fresh insights into the planet-forming potential of a binary system.

As polar ice caps melted at the end of the last Ice Age about 8,500 years ago, the global sea level rose and Panama’s Pearl Islands were isolated from the mainland. A new archaeological study by a team including a Smithsonian scientist shows that several thousand years later pre-Columbian colonists hunted a dwarf deer to extinction on an island called Pedro González.

José Hernán Sarasola, CONICET associate researcher at the Instituto de las Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de la Pampa (INCITAP, CONICET-UNLPam) [Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences of La Pampa], and his research team recently revealed that large felid predators with an exclusively carnivorous diet can contribute to their ecosystems as secondary seeds dispersers. The study was published in Scientific Reports.