News at a glance: Weird early trees, CERN ’s next big collider, and protecting U.S. gray wolves

PALEONTOLOGY Rare fossil reveals weird early tree The earliest trees, from nearly 400 million years ago, are known mostly from fossils of their trunks; their leaves and canopy shapes have remained a mystery. A newly reported, 350-million-year-old tree found in Canada provides a vivid answer for one such primordial species: As if having a perpetual bad hair day, a thick crown of spiky leaves stuck out perpendicularly from the trunk . Scientists named the tree Sanfordiacaulis densifolia , after the owner of the New Brunswick quarry where they found five specimens. The fossils, among the few showing trees with attached leaves and branches, probably were preserved when a landslide buried them in a lake. These trees stood at least 2.6 meters tall, with each of their more than 200 leaves extending about 1.7 meters, the research team reported last week in Current Biology . PARTICLE PHYSICS CERN maps path for big collider The future of the European laboratory CERN became clearer this week as officials updated their plan to build two enormous particle colliders in a tunnel that would cross the border of Switzerland and France, circling beneath both countries. The tunnel’s path has been decided, yielding a circumference of 91 kilometers, slightly shorter than the initial goal of 100 kilometers, lab officials said. The first of the colliders, to be built by the mid-2040s, would be an electron-po...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news