Jeremy DeSilva of Dartmouth College gave an evening presentation at the end of this year’s week-long American Society of Mass Spectrometry conference. As a human fossil expert, DeSilva’s lecture discussed a different topic than what these engineering-oriented scientists typically study. Whether technician or homemaker, everyone wants to understand more about where we all came from.

Scientists described the first evidence of a possible respiratory illness in a fossil. The common soil fungus Aspergillis can infect birds and reptiles today. The resulting disease, also called aspergillosis, causes the trachea’s soft tissues to attach to nearby bones. This causes odd bone bumps—the subject of discovery in a dino nicknamed Dolly.

Graduate student Shiuan-Tze Wu led a study of some ingenious organization into the odor-sensing cells of fruit flies. He and his collaborators at the La Jolla campus of UC San Diego found that the odor-detector cells in the insects’ antennae talk to one another in a way that saves brainpower.