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Microscopic dust particles have been detected in Earth’s meteoritic material, particles that have probably formed in stellar explosions that took place much before the formation of the sun.

The focus of ongoing experimental nuclear physics research at Michigan State University’s the National Superconducting Cyclotron laboratory is that whether some of the particles of stardust, called ‘pre-solar grains’, belonged to classical nova explosions or not.

The research has led to exciting subatomic hints regarding these grains’ origin. The results have now appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters. The lead author of the paper is Michael Bennett, an MSU doctoral student at the NSCL.

Restaurant chain Chipotle Mexican Grill has temporarily closed an outlet in Massachusetts following concerns over the outbreak of a food-borne illness as four employees at the eating joint have reported ill. The latest setback has come even as the food chain was already striving hard to recover from a series of related illness outbreaks which impacted its business few months back.

The restaurant has been closed voluntarily and so far there are no known customers who have suffered any illness, said the Massachusetts health department.

Chipotle Mexican Grill spokesman Chris Arnold said in an e-mail that the restaurant where the employees fell ill has been located in the town of Billerica outside Boston and the facility has been closed for a full cleaning.

A 23-foot-long dead humpback whale was found dead on Silver Strand State Beach in Coronado. The whale washed ashore at the beach on Tuesday morning at around 10 am, as per officials of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The one-year-old mammal, weighing over 2,000 pounds, was first spotted by the Coast Guard four days back about 9 miles offshore in Point Loma. The NOAA team reached the scene and inspected the dead whale. It’s a freshly dead whale, said the NOAA team.

As expected, space rock 2013 TX68 whizzed by earth safely on Monday night. The 100-feet-wide asteroid passes about 2.5 million miles from our planet, and posed no harm to earthlings. Does it mean earth is safe now? The yacht-sized space object is predicted to make a return next year, as per the latest NASA release.

This was not the first time when the TX68 asteroid made a close approach to earth. About two years ago, it zoomed past the planet at a distance of about 1.3 million miles, the US space agency said.

NASA also revealed that the rock will make a comeback in 2017, but that time, it will be no closer than 15,000 miles. There is less than one-in-250-million chance that TX68 will hit earth during its next year flyby, predicted the NASA release.

Till now, researchers relied on the coastal lake sediments or coral isotopes to date hurricanes which took place in past, but now shipwrecks are also seen as evidence of hurricane activities. The researchers at Arizona State University examined data from 657 shipwrecks. They compared the data collected with tree ring data to give precise date to hurricanes. The study results have been published in the journal PNAS.

“We found that in the years when many ships wrecked in the Caribbean, the trees in the Florida Keys showed the same signal that trees show during hurricanes. So, that gave an indication that we could use shipwreck records as a proxy for hurricane activity”, said Jason Thomson, author of the new paper.

Supersonic volcanoes in past have caused devastating destruction to both life and property on the planet. But in such a case, saving wealth would hardly matter as the need is to protect human life from becoming a prey to killer lava. It is believed that lava is less dangerous at such a time than a pyroclastic flow, fast moving current of hot gas and rock. A research published in journal Nature Communications on March 7 claimed that it would not be easy to outrun an erupted volcano.