There is a mysterious animal prowling the fields of North Carolina, according to National Geographic News.  Employees of Tyco Electronics noticed a queer fox-like animal with extremely short hair roaming outside in the grasses, who is now watched from company windows when he (or she) regularly passes.  The thing looks like a whippet to me, but this Tyco Animal (as Tyco employees affectionately call it) is most likely a red fox with a genetic disorder, according to biologist Perry Sumner.  A disorder called Sampson causes animals to be born without the thick outer layer of "guard hair" that coats them, and this fox is probably a rare example.  Plain kind-heartedness is keeping the animal from being trapped and investigated.  According to Jerri Durazo, whose picture of the creature brought it to the news, "Half the [Tyco employees] want to hunt it and study it postmortem. The other half says it looks skinny and we need to feed it."

 Chemists at Harvard University have created videos of protein production during cell division.  They've posted online two short Quicktime clips (here1 and here2) that show "fluorescently tagged molecules"--proteins--developing in bursts within the cells.  Chemist Sunney Xie and his colleagues have published a paper describing their work in this week's Nature.

Speaking of Nature, news@nature.com reports on the discovery of a dinosaur that may have had one of the world's longest necks.  Found in the Gobi desert in 2002, bones from Erketu ellisoni  may give evidence of a sauropod with a neck 26 feet long (eight meters).  I have to take the announcement with a grain of salt, however; only six out of 14 or so vertebrae were actually discovered, so paleontologists must extrapolate to decide on those final neck specs.  As I noted in 2004, a scientific reappraisal of seismosaurus fossils reduced that dinosaur's overall length from 170 feet to 110.  You just never know.