One punk rocking deep-sea snail

Scientists have named a spiky shelled, deep-sea snail after Joe Strummer, the late lead vocalist and guitarist from the famed British punk band the Clash.

The researchers say the name highlights the "hardcore" nature of the snail, now known as Alviniconcha strummeri, which lives in one of the hottest, most acidic environments on the planet — right up against hydrothermal vents in the Indian and western Pacific oceans.

A paper describing the Joe Strummer snail and four similar species was published this month in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity.

"When I talk to kids I always tell them these snails are punk rock," said Shannon Johnson, a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and the lead author on the paper.

Strummer, who died in 2002, strove to be a carbon-neutral artist. Scientists have also named an ancient, giant lizard after the "lizard king" Jim Morrison.

Hadron Collider ready to fire up

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is once again getting ready to smash protons together, hoping to find evidence of elusive and exotic particles.

The largest and fastest particle accelerator in the world, in Geneva, will start up again in March. Scientists say the two beams of protons that fly around its 17-mile loop at close to the speed of light will collide with nearly double the energy of the previous run.

The collider's first stint of proton smashing led to the discovery of the Higgs boson or Higgs particle — a long-theorized but never before seen subatomic particle. It exists for just a fraction of a second, and yet its discovery helps explain the existence of all the mass in the universe.

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