Foot in both camps
There were two kinds of hominin walking around Africa 3.4 million years ago. A fossil foot discovered in Ethiopia has an opposable big toe that would have been used to grasp tree branches. All other hominins from the time found so far have had feet more like ours (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10922).
Prize for pattern master
This year’s Abel prize, worth $1 million, was won by Endre Szemerédi. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded him the mathematics prize on 21 March for his work in combinatorics, which deals with the different ways of counting and rearranging discrete objects such as numbers or playing cards, and has provided…
