Scientists discovered a protein secreted by a deep-sea extremophile — an organism adapted to extreme environmental conditions — that self-assembles into a biofilm and is highly stable, boosting its potential for biomedical applications.

The eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is known for its large low-oxygen zones that are increasing in size, putting marine life at risk. New research shows that 15 million years ago, the opposite was true. A Michigan State University study found that oxygen-deficient waters were distributed very differently during the mid-Miocene Epoch than they are today. The Pacific Ocean’s oxygen-deficient zones were much smaller, while the Atlantic’s were much larger. Scientists had never documented this reversal before. A computer model helped explain why. By recreating ancient ocean conditions, Associate Professor Dalton Hardisty’steam learned that a channel between North and South America allowed water to move freely between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, reshaping ocean circulation and changing where low-oxygen waters formed.

Flowering plants, or angiosperms, now dominate Earth’s flora, but biologists thought they truly took off only after dinosaurs died out following an asteroid impact 66 million years ago. UC Berkeley paleobotanists analyzed fossilized seeds and fruits from a ‘botanical Pompeii’ in New Mexico that contradicts this scenario. A mature forest buried under ash 10 million years earlier was dominated by angiosperms with elaborate diaspores that could only have been spread by animals, including early mammals.