The Wild West is wild again.
For the first time in more than a century, a jaguar was caught and collared in the U.S.
The big cats have been photographed near the Arizona-Mexico border for years, but the newly captured specimen was found outside of its usual range, southwest of Tucson. (See an Arizona map.)
The Arizona Game and Fish Department spotted the 118-pound (54-kilogram) male during a research study of mountain lion and black bear habitat. It was later confirmed to be Macho B, an animal that has been photographed since 1996 and could be between 14 to 16 years old—making it the oldest jaguar ever collared.
The animal was released wearing a satellite-tracking collar, which will give biologists new insight into the little-studied population of northern jaguars.

With a head like a fighter-plane cockpit, a Pacific barreleye fish shows off its highly sensitive, barrel-like eyes--topped by green, orblike lenses--in a picture released today but taken in 2004.The fish, discovered alive in the deep water off California's central coast by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), is the first specimen of its kind to be found with its soft transparent dome intact. The 6-inch (15-centimeter) barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) had been known since 1939--but only from mangled specimens dragged to the surface by nets.

Down periscope!

Scientists at Vanderbilt University have built the smallest periscope yet made—about the width of a human hair.
The device, known as a mirrored pyramidal well, uses pyramid-shaped cavities molded into silicon that are then coated with a reflective layer of gold or platinum.
When a tiny object is placed inside the well and viewed through a microscope, the observer can see several sides of the object at the same time.
For example, the image above, released on Tuesday, shows a single grain of sunflower pollen from five different angles.
Scientists are already using the wells to study the structure and behavior of living cells in 3-D.
These tiny tools are much cheaper to make than traditional forms of 3-D microscopy, researchers say. The wells can also reduce the amount of damaging ultraviolet light needed to track fluorescent molecules in cells, a popular technique in gene studies.