A Caribbean cruise may unlock one of biology’s oldest secrets—both on Earth and elsewhere in the universeMODERN life is powered by the sun. But photosynthesis, the process that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into plants, is a mere 2.4 billion years old. Life itself goes back at least 3.5 billion years. Before photosynthesis, the energy must have come from something else. Without understanding what that something was, it is impossible to know how life on Earth got going. Moreover, there are those who think that whatever did power Earth-bound life before photosynthesis might also power it on other planets. Which is why, on October 7th, a mission was launched from Cape Canaveral—not from the rocket pads in the north of the cape, but from the docks at its south.The good ship Cape Hatteras, crewed by Chris German of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in Massachusetts, and his colleagues, will act as a base for the exploration of a region of inner, rather than outer space—specifically, the Mid-Cayman Rise, a submarine mountain range that lies under almost 7km (about 4 miles) of water near Grand Cayman island in the Caribbean. When it gets there, Cape Hatteras will launch Nereus, an unmanned submarine, named after an ancient Greek sea god, that is capable of withstanding the pressure at such depth (it went down 11km on a previous expedition). ...

  Prizes for optical fibres, charge-coupled devices, ribosomes and telomeresHOW do you look through a window that is 100km thick? That, in essence, was the question facing Charles Kao in 1966. For working out the answer, Dr Kao has been awarded part of this year’s Nobel prize for physics. Besides being thick, the window was narrow: it was an optical fibre. Dr Kao’s prize is a belated recognition of his contribution to the telecommunications revolution of the past few decades. But better late than never. The rest of the physics prize goes almost as belatedly to Willard Boyle and George Smith who, in 1969, ushered the charge-coupled device (CCD) into being, paving the way for the digital camera. The chemistry prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for working out the structure of ribosomes—the parts of living cells that translate genetic information into proteins. And the physiology prize went to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres, the DNA caps that stop the ends of chromosomes either unravelling or sticking to one another. ...

  The market for dinosaur bones tumblesThe dinosaur market is in the doldrums. At an auction held in Las Vegas on October 3rd the star lot, a Tyrannosaurus skeleton nicknamed Samson (whose skull is pictured) attracted a bid of only $3.6m and failed to make its reserve. Samson—actually reckoned to be a female—is thought by some palaeontologists to be an example of a new tyrannosaur species, not the familiar rex. If so, he, she or it would not be the only new tyrannosaur in the news at the moment. Alioramus altai, described in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was smaller and nimbler than T. rex and sported a horn, to boot. And, at the end of September, an unquestioned specimen of rex, called Sue, which sold for $8.36m in 1997, was diagnosed as having had trichomonosis, a disease that also afflicts those descendants of dinosaurs, the birds. ...

  A lesson from history on how to prevent climate-induced warsTHE starkest views of climate change paint war as a looming threat. The idea that violence will erupt as drought and rising sea levels displace people from their homes is, in part, why the Nobel prize for peace was awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. Yet a newly published study analysing the historical connection between war and climate throws into question the assumption that rising temperatures and violence go hand in hand.Aware that evidence for the link was lacking, Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, and Sebastian Wagner of GKSS, a research institute near Hamburg, Germany, set out to collect data on climate and conflict in Europe over the past thousand years. Their results have just been published in Climatic Change. ...

  What killed Fossil Lake?SINCE the early 19th century, Fossil Lake, a 52m-year-old site in south-west Wyoming, has been known for its fish, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals. It contains millions of them, beautifully preserved in layers of limestone that are interspersed with volcanic ash. Yet this palaeontological paradise holds a dark secret: the mass deaths were not caused by a single event. The interspersing layers of ash show they were a regular occurrence. Until now, though, nobody has worked out what happened. Jo Hellawell of Trinity College, Dublin, and her colleagues in the Organic Geochemistry Unit at Bristol University think that they have solved the mystery. In doing so, they adopted Sherlock Holmes’s maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. ...

  The routine use of anti-AIDS drugs is spreadingMORE news from the battle against AIDS. A report published jointly by the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Children’s Fund and UNAIDS says that over 4m infected people in poor and middle-income countries are now on drugs intended to keep the virus under control. That is 1m more than last year. More than 5m others who might benefit from those drugs are not on them, however, so there is no room for complacency. But the latest data suggest that with 42% of those who need the drugs actually receiving them, significant progress is being made.Encouragingly, the proportion covered in sub-Saharan Africa, the worst-affected area and the one with the least developed health infrastructure, is slightly higher than the global average, at 44%. And women, long regarded by AIDS activists as the epidemic’s forgotten sex, are doing better than men. They comprise 55% of those in need, but form 60% of those receiving therapy. ...