Sea monster seen: For the first time, humans have spotted the elusive giant squid, researchers report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. According to the study, the squid “attacked prey from a horizontal orientation with a pair of long tentacles and enveloped the prey within a coiled tentacular ball.”
Mayan city unearthed: Yale anthropologist Marcello Canuto has found the lost Mayan city known as Q, in Guatemala. Archaeologists were tipped off to Q’s existence 40 years ago after many peculiar Mayan artifacts began appearing on the antiquities market.
Fellow travellers: Researchers at Simon Fraser University have determined that the pathogenic fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi, which afflicts elm trees across North America, forces its host to ramp up production of a chemical that attracts bark beetles. The beetles then carry the fungus to other trees.
Future warning label: Women who have smoked a pack a day for at least 11 years have a 40 per cent higher chance of developing breast cancer. Published in Cancer Causes and Control, the study also found that the risk of breast cancer is 110 per cent higher in women who combine smoking with hormone replacement therapy.
Butterfly effect: In the days before the Hurricane Rita’s landfall, gasoline use in the Houston area-where some 3 million people were ordered to evacuate-doubled from 83 million to 170 million litres of gasoline per day. Rice University energy experts have noted that besides the evacuation, drivers’ inclination to keep their cars fully gassed was one of the causes behind the ripple in demand, which pushed average gasoline prices in America up from US$2.50 to US$3 a gallon in Rita’s aftermath.
