Short Science, September 14, 2014

Paypal will start accepting bitcoin payments through its subsidiary, Braintree, the company says. The firm is partnering with bitcoin payment platform Coinbase, one of the largest bitcoin companies, which handles payments for clients including Overstock and Reddit. "This is PayPal making a move to embrace bitcoin," Bill Ready, Braintree's CEO, said. Companies that already use Braintree to run their payments will be able to accept bitcoin in the coming months without changing their configuration, a move that could boost adoption of the cryptocurrency. The Guardian

Palaeontologists from Ohio University in the United States have unearthed a titanosaur from Tanzania, a new species of oversized dinosaur named Rukwatitan bisepultus, which had forelegs some two metres long and whose massive body probably weighed as much as several elephants. The discovery, described in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology, adds some much-needed diversity to the titanosaur fossil record in Africa, where such enormous sauropods have been rare finds. The fossil was spotted in the wall of a cliff in the Rukwa Rift Basin in southwestern Tanzania and dug out with the help of coal miners. The animal, a titanosaurian sauropod, died about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Los Angeles Times