This week in science news, we discovered how most of the world’s pink diamonds formed, cooked up some nuclear ‘pasta’ in dead stars and watched a slime-covered ‘penis’ mushroom do its thing.
If you picture a diamond, one that is crystal clear usually springs to mind, but Australia’s Argyle formation produces pink diamonds. We now know their distinctive color comes from the breakup of the planet’s first supercontinent 1.3 billion years ago. More recently, just 66 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction led to the loss of three-quarters of Earth’s species. But one thing that did survive was flowers — and they thrived because of it.