The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, inside a turtle egg…
A turtle's sex is decided by how warm the sand around the egg is, and nobody could say what inside the embryo was doing the measuring. Researchers have now found the likely thermometer: an antenna-like appendage on embryonic cells that responds to a difference of a degree or two and steers development toward male or female.
Feliks, a rare Serbian eagle, was abducted on one of his first flights from the nest and ended up in the Middle East, where poachers demanded a ransom for his return. He has now been released back into the wild.
Timema stick insects have gone a million years without sex, the longest documented celibacy of any insect, and evolution has still not thrown out the equipment. Their genomes retain the machinery for sexual reproduction largely intact, long after any obvious reason to keep it.
Meanwhile, beneath Switzerland…
Switzerland did not scrap its nuclear bomb shelters when the Cold War ended; it kept building them. There are now more than 370,000, enough for every person in the country, and some are being used to house migrants.
Particle accelerators that ride on laser-driven plasma waves have long hit a wall called dephasing: the electrons outrun the wave that is pushing them. By engineering a pulse whose focal point travels along with the electrons, physicists got them to more than twice the energy the old limit allowed over the same distance.