Reefs' riches
Coral reefs are worth $172 billion per year to the world economy. They attract tourists, act as sanctuaries for commercial fish species and protect coasts from storm surges. Pavan Sukhdev of the United Nations Environment Programme presented this as an argument for saving coral reefs from climate change at the Diversitas biodiversity conference in Cape Town, South Africa, last week.
Newton's heir
Issac Newton has held it, and sohas Stephen Hawking. Now the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge is set to pass to Michael Green. He helped trigger the "first superstring revolution", which showed string theory can describe elementary particles and their interactions.
Alien worlds galore
A haul of 32 new extrasolar bodies has bumped up the number of known exoplanets to more than 400. The discoveries were made by HARPS, an instrument that analyses wobbles in starlight caused by distant planets. ...
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