Dance of the rings
One of Saturn’s outer rings is surrounded by a spiral of powder-sized particles, according to the Cassini spacecraft. The spiral curls around and into the planet’s F ring. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Carolyn Porco, an imaging team member who described the research on Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences in Cambridge, UK.
Black-and-white dinner
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Ancient humans dined on giant pandas. Evidence from seven Chinese fossil sites suggests that pandas formed part of the human diet approximately 600,000 years ago, says Cai Huiyang, from Guizhou Provincial Museum in Guiyang. Today the State Forestry Administration says only about 1590 pandas live in the wild, most in mountainous areas in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces.
Mammoth ozone hole
This year’s seasonal hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is the size of Europe, the largest breach since 2000 and the third-largest ever recorded. The 10-million-square-kilometre hole was reported by the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite on 6 September.
Outbreak in India
A severe outbreak of Japanese encephalitis continues to blight the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The virus has killed 480 people, mainly children, but health experts say the eventual toll could be thousands, with around one child dying every hour since the onset of the disease at the end of July.
Green goal for soccer
Organisers of next year’s World Cup soccer finals in Germany vowed to make the tournament the “greenest” ever via an agreement signed on 6 September with the UN Environment Programme. The aim is to make the tournament “climate-neutral” by meeting eco-targets on water, refuse, energy and transport.
