Nature Briefing in Pictures 3/30/2018 Get Nature Briefing in your inbox fr

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The DAMA/LIBRA experimentin Italy is hunting for signs of dark matter.(DAMA-LIBRA Collab./LNGS-INFN)

Beguiling dark-matter signal persists

Long-awaited results from six years of the DAMA experiment show tantalizing evidence of dark matter — 20 years after the first hints of such a signal. DAMA seeks the subatomic interactions that might occur as the Solar System moves through the ‘halo’ of dark matter that is thought to envelop the Milky Way. Its first results were met with scepticism by some physicists. Now, after an upgrade in 2010, more-detailed findings are raising more questions than answers.

The mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope are designed to peer at the Universe"s first stars. (Desiree Stover/NASA)

Big delay for the successor to Hubble

NASA will delay the launch of its ambitious James Webb Space Telescope by nearly a year, until about May 2020. Engineers need more time to test components such as the innovative, collapsible tennis-court-sized sunshield — a crucial step because the telescope can’t be fixed once it’s in orbit. The delay is likely to bust the mission’s US$8 billion budget, and have a knock-on effect on the budgets of projects such as the next big planned space observatory, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Quote of the week

“He told my mom that he doesn’t believe in the drug and he is not giving it. He doesn’t care who I am.”

Physician Christopher Lewandowski, who showed that the anti-clotting drug TPA treats strokes in a study 22 years ago, still battles with sceptics. The drug was denied to his own father. (The New York Times)

The green swirls in the Arabian Sea are blooms of a marine organism called Noctiluca, as seen from space (Aqua/MODIS/GSFC/NASA)

Your seven-day plankton bloom forecast

Ocean scientists are working to forecast damaging plankton blooms and ‘red tides’. But simulating these events presents a thorny problem that requires understanding local water chemistry, ocean circulation and the behaviour of different plankton species. A massive bloom of Noctiluca scintillans is currently winding down in the Arabian Sea, where it created a glut of decomposing creatures that sucked the oxygen out of the water and threatened to choke desalination plants.

Artwork of the prehistoricbird Confuciusornis which lived around 125-120 million years ago. (Jaime Chirinos/SPL)

Early birds may have been too big to brood

Birds that lived at the time of the dinosaurs, including Archaeopteryx, might have been too big to sit on their eggs. The birds’ pelvic canals would have fit eggs only a fraction of the size of a similar-sized bird today. The findings suggest that the habit of incubating eggs by sitting on them evolved late in modern birds, flying in the face of evidence from some non-avian dinosaurs closely related to birds.

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