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The mosquito-borne Zika virus threat has left Brazilians rushing to purchase repellant, which has resulted into a lack of some brands on pharmacy shelves. It has boosted the sales for the industry, a trend many producers have been preparing for at other places as the outbreak spreads.

As per a consumer research firm, Nielsen, after Zika detection in April, repellant sales in Brazil went up by one-third in previous year, which doubled revenue for the sector, making it $55.7 million. The purchase was also spurred by a rise in dengue case, which is another virus spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Over 200 million girls and women in this world have faced genital mutilation. On Friday, the United Nations said that the number is quite higher than earlier estimated, highlighting the need to accelerate efforts to wipe out the practice.

Though the drive to bring female genital mutilation (FGM) to an end has grown with time, experts have cautioned that booming populations in some high prevalence nations have been undermining efforts to deal with the practice broadly condemned as a serious human rights abuse.

On the eve of International Day for Zero Tolerance of FGM, the UN children's agency UNICEF said that in case prevailing trends persist than the number of girls and women facing FGM will rise notably in the coming 15 years.

Scientists have discovered that four new species of deep-sea flatworm-like animals that appear like deflated whoopee cushions and don’t have complex organs have assisted them in solving a complex puzzle regarding the placement of their group on the tree of life.

The latest study involved 12 years of specimen collection and analysis. It has put the new species to a group earlier known by just a single species, and when scientists did so they obtained a clear picture of the evolutionary position held by these animals.

Scientists have found an insect that went extinct for over 120 million years. The insect has many of the traits linked to modern butterflies like markings on the wing known as eye spots.

They are called Kalligrammatid lacewings, and for the last 100 years paleobotanists were aware that they lived in Eurasia during the Mesozoic.

However, now after analyzing the recent discoveries of well-preserved fossils from two locations in northeastern China, paleobotanists have got to know about how alike they were to modern butterflies.

It is because of the extensive lakes that restricted oxygen exposure in these sites during mid-Jurassic through early Cretaceous time that paleontologists have got to recover exquisitely preserved fossils, preserving most of their real structure.

A team of scientists became eyewitness to a rare event: eruption of a volcano on a sub-Antarctic island while sailing in close proximity to the isolated region. The eruption took place on Heard Island, which is located only at a distance of 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the coast of Antarctica towards the northern side. The island is technically part of the Australian property and lies in the southwest direction from Australia at an approximate distance of 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers).

Scientists have discovered fossils of a creature called Rusingoryx, which is the cousin of a wildebeest, at the ancient streambed on the Rusinga Island in Kenya. The creature had an unusual nasal formation that seemed more similar to that of a dinosaur rather than a mammal. At the location, a minimum of 24 Rusingoryx individuals were discovered. The deaths might have been caused by humans, which are evident through the butchered bones and stone tools, according to Kirsten Jenkins, a paleoanthropologist from University of Minnesota.