U.S.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified elk as the primary source of a bacterial infection that has been plaguing cattle in the Greater Yellowstone Area. The disease, caused by Brucella bacteria, has been raging there for two decades—so targeting elk transmission might squash the outbreak for good.
Switzerland
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Researchers and composers are collaborating to translate data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the world's biggest particle accelerator, into music. The joint effort by Plymouth University in England, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and CERN aims to organize the resulting tunes into a composition to be played by a pianist from the Juilliard School in the spring of 2018.
Brazil
The world's oldest mushroom fossil was discovered in northeastern Brazil, pushing back gilled mushrooms' origin to between 120 million and 113 million years ago. The next oldest specimen is 99 million years old.
China
African park rangers who protect elephants gathered in Hong Kong to insist that the region ban all ivory sales and confiscate stockpiled supplies without reimbursing vendors. Local officials said they welcomed the rangers' input as part of their ongoing effort to eliminate Hong Kong's ivory trade by 2021.
Australia
In the past three decades water bird population numbers have dropped by 70 percent around Australia's most heavily developed river basin, the Murray-Darling, a study finds. The researchers, from the University of New South Wales, pin the decline on dam construction and wetland drainage.
