Last week, scientists announced the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved skeleton of what might be a new species of an ancient hominid that lived almost 2 million years ago. [See Kate Wong, http://bit.ly/dehy9Q ]
The bones were found in 2008. This February, they were analyzed by one of the highest-tech tools available, the synchrotron at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The device uses beams of x rays a trillion times brighter than medical x rays, and produces images at the atomic level.