As a wildlife field technician, Luke Metherell combines job, hobby and homework on weeklong backpacking trips in the mountains. A biology student at University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), Metherell spent most of his summer deep in Chugach State Park observing and recording Dall sheep behavior for days at a time. He spent so much time with sheep that by August he could identify individual personalities among the herd. Read more.

Two independent experiments on the isotope copper-79 confirm that its nuclear neighbor nickel-78 is indeed a doubly magic nucleus.

Nuclear physicists could easily pass for magicians. They often talk about magic nuclei as if they were about to pull these objects out of a hat and show their fuzzy long ears. This funny qualifier was coined by Eugene Wigner, who believed nuclei behave like uniform liquid droplets, but had to admit the experimental evidence pointed out by Maria Goeppert-Mayer that nuclei with neutron (NN) or proton (ZZ) numbers 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126 were more stable than their neighbors. Goeppert-Mayer and other physicists went on to explain this phenomenon on the basis of the nuclear shell model, in which protons and neutrons fill a nucleus in energy shells, or orbitals, akin to the layers of an onion. Magic numbers correspond to the greatest gaps in energy between shells, giving extra stability to nuclei in which those shells are filled completely. When both the number of protons and of neutrons fulfills this requirement, the nucleus is called doubly magic. Read more.

Techniques commonly suited to tracing robbers rather than reptiles are being used by British scientists investigating the movements of one of the planet's most cherished species. University of Exeter researchers used satellite tracking and a crime-scene method to discover which foraging ground turtles had come from to breed in Cyprus. Read more.

Photoredox catalysis shines in a reaction that swaps out hydrogen for deuterium or tritium

To follow the fate of a drug or a drug metabolite as it wends its way through the body, scientists will often label the compound by switching out a hydrogen atom for one of its heavier isotopes — deuterium or tritium. This molecular switcheroo sounds simple, but it can actually be a lot of work, requiring chemists to resynthesize a molecule so it has an atom, usually a halogen, or unsaturated bond where the heavy hydrogen can be swapped in or added. The process can take months.

Chemists at Princeton University and Merck & Co. have now come up with a way to switch hydrogen out for deuterium or tritium in a matter of moments. Read more.