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Foot in both camps

There were two kinds of hominin walking around Africa 3.4 million years ago. A fossil foot discovered in Ethiopia has an opposable big toe that would have been used to grasp tree branches. All other hominins from the time found so far have had feet more like ours (Nature, ).

Prize for pattern master

This year’s Abel prize, worth $1 million, was won by Endre Szemerédi. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded him the mathematics prize on 21 March for his work in combinatorics, which deals with the different ways of counting and rearranging discrete objects such as numbers or playing cards, and has provided insights into artificial intelligence and computing.

Vatican stem cell veto

Fears of a “public scandal” have prompted the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life to cancel a conference on stem cells in April, according to the Catholic News Agency. It says academy members opposed talks on human embryonic stem cells, research that the Vatican says is unethical because embryos are destroyed to obtain the cells.

Fly like a stone

Who knew that kidney stones form in fruit flies? Michael Romero of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told a meeting of the Genetics Society of America in Chicago that by knocking out a gene called prestin in the flies’ kidney tubules, dietary oxalate wasn’t able to combine with calcium to form kidney stones.

North Sea gas leak

A drilling platform in the North Sea has been evacuated after a cloud of gas began bubbling up from the sea floor, forming a large sheen of gas condensate on the surface. As 91av went to press, operators were considering drilling a relief well to stop the leak.