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Jupiter's other spots. Charged particles traveling in Jupiter's magnetic fields generate an auroral light show, just like northern (and southern) lights in Earth's polar regions. Io, a Jupiter moon, actually generates its own bright spot on Jupiter, shown with an arrow in this ultraviolet image taken by the Hubble space telescope. The light comes from charged particles originating from Io's volcanoes. Now teams of scientists from Belgium and Germany have discovered a fainter dot, also produced by Io, that had not been predicted, seen to the left of the arrowed dot.

Early sex? The circles show where tubular organisms known as Funisia dorothea attached themselves to the sea floor 565 million years ago, or 20 million years before the Cambrian explosion that gave rise to a multiplicity of multicelled animals. Funisia lived in an idyllic world that lacked predators, but the organisms living then might not have been as simple as many thought. Mary Droser of the University of California, Riverside, and James G. Gehling of the South Australia Museum found fossils where Funisia were in groups of 5 to 15 individuals of similar size, suggesting that a large number of offspring were born at one time. This type of reproduction by primitive animals like sponges and corals usually involves sexual reproduction.