Discoveries

A psychedelic fish that bounces on the ocean floor like a rubber ball has been classified as a new species. The frogfish was discovered by scuba diving instructors a year ago off Ambon island in eastern Indonesia. The new species is described in this month's edition of Copeia, the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.

An important 19th century painting has been brought back to public view after languishing for decades, forgotten beneath a pile of reproductions in a church closet. The Rev. Steven Olson of Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Dassel, Minn., approached the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2007, looking for advice on how to preserve a painting he had found in a janitor's closet. The museum's experts now have determined that the painting was the long-forgotten "Christus Consolator," which was painted by the Dutch-born, French-trained artist Ary Scheffer, one of the pre-eminent Romantic painters in Paris of the first half of the 19th century.

In Los Angeles, one of the galaxy's true hubs of confusion and uncertainty, this latest puzzle ranks as a real blockbuster: Is there--or was there--life on Mars? And will scientists find the answers in a hunk of rock that whizzed down from the sky 13,000 years ago in . . . uh, Antarctica? Tourist Sebastian Puts, 11, of Canada, was one of untold thousands pondering those questions Wednesday, even while scientists were reporting possible evidence of cellular life in the ancient meteorite.

In Los Angeles, one of the galaxy's true hubs of confusion and uncertainty, this latest puzzle ranks as a real blockbuster: Is there--or was there--life on Mars? And will scientists find the answers in a hunk of rock that whizzed down from the sky 13,000 years ago in . . . uh, Antarctica? Tourist Sebastian Puts, 11, of Canada, was one of untold thousands pondering those questions Wednesday, even while scientists were reporting possible evidence of cellular life in the ancient meteorite.

It is a rare scientific event that shakes humanity's sense of itself. Copernicus' suggestion four centuries ago that the Earth was not the center of the universe, Darwin's argument last century that human beings were not descended from Adam and Eve but instead evolved from less exalted creatures--these are among the alarming ideas that now and again have shattered civilization's repose.

The desire for a loaf of bread is thought to have been one of the primary reasons that early humans abandoned their vagabond lifestyles and settled on the first farms. But new evidence indicates that a jug of wine may have been equally high on their list of priorities.

His kingdom wasn't much to behold--a declining city-state in its last gasps of power. For a king, he wasn't much to behold either. Only 5 feet 2, he had once suffered a broken neck and mysteriously lost all his teeth before he died, perhaps at the unusually young age of 35. His people apparently had neither the resources nor the desire to commemorate him with a temple or even a marker.

After 10 years of intense searching, scientists have identified a key molecule that allows the AIDS virus to infect human cells, a discovery that promises a new approach to treating the deadly disease and that yields insight into why some individuals are apparently more resistant to the virus. Identification of this "co-factor" should make it possible to develop inexpensive animal models for the disease, thereby accelerating the testing of new drugs and vaccines.

Brazilian researchers have discovered a new species of marmoset in South America's tropical rain forest, the sixth new species of the primitive primates to be discovered there since 1990. The new species of squirrel-sized tree dweller has been named Callithrix saterei for a group of Indians indigenous to the area of the Brazilian Amazon where the animals were found. Brazil is home to almost 30% of the 250 known primate species. "This discovery . . .

French and Thai researchers have discovered in Thailand the grandfather of all tyrannosaurs--the oldest example of the vicious, meat-eating dinosaur ever found. The new dinosaur, dubbed Siamotyrannus isanensis, is 20 million years older than the earliest known tyrannosaur and may prove that the species evolved in Asia, the researchers say in the June 20 issue of Nature.