News in Short

• Palaeontologists have announced the discovery of organic material in 75-million year old dinosaur fossils.
• The team claims to have found evidence of cartilage cells, proteins, chromosomes and even DNA preserved inside the fossils, suggesting these can survive for far longer than we thought.
• The researchersmade the discovery in skull fragments of Hypacrosaurus, a duck-billed herbivore from the Cretaceous period.
• These particular specimens were “nestlings”, meaning that at time of death they weren’t yet old enough to leave the nest.

• Humans began developing a complex culture as early as the Stone Age. This development was brought about by social interactions between various groups of hunters and gatherers.
• The researchers mapped the social networks of present-day hunter-gatherers in the Philippines and simulated the discovery of a medicinal plant product.
• This lifestyle likely played a central role in humanity's success, as it enabled humans to start sharing and combining their individual knowledge with others and in this way come up with innovative solutions.

• A group of scientists claim to have observed what they regard as the first ever trace of protein that did not originate on Earth.
• The observation, which involved the use of a newly devised mass spectrometry method in collaboration with the PLEX Corporation, implicates the said polymer to be a protein, and the first one to be observed on a meteorite, an extraterrestrial object.
• The research found the aminoacidglycine in the meteorite Acfer 086, which was found in Algeria back in 1990.
• This is incredibly crucial towards understanding the presence of life outside Earth, since as far as our understanding goes, life cannot be created without protein.

• The Supreme Court refused to refer the issue of scrapping Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir to a larger bench. The 5-judge Supreme Court bench will continue to hear the cases related to Article 370.
• The Supreme Court order is confined to the issue of whether there a larger bench needs to hear the cases related to Article 370.
• The petitioners had sought reference to a larger bench on the ground that two judgments of the Supreme Court, Prem Nath Kaul versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1959 and Sampat Prakash versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1970,  which dealt with the issue of Article 370 are in direct conflict each other and therefore the current bench of five judges could not hear the issue.

• A small town of Sikkim is set to introduce bamboo water bottles for tourists in a bid to completely stop the use of plastic water bottles and littering.
• Lachen, arguably the first town to completely ban packaged drinking water bottles, is introducing bamboo bottles as an alternative.
• Lachen draws lakhs of tourists each year for its snow-capped peaks and picturesque views. As tourism in the town grows, so does plastic water bottles left behind by tourists.