Bird watchers walking along the beach on the Baltic island of Öland off Sweden’s southeastern coast were puzzled by an unusual natural phenomenon recently when they stumbled across dozens of football-sized balls of ice lying on the shore.

A week before Christmas, Magnus Bladh of the Ottenby bird station, located on Öland’s southern cape, was strolling along the beach with a colleague when he saw something he’d never seen before.

“Temperatures were below freezing and there was a light wind, but it was very cold! In the seaweed we noticed at least 200 large ice balls,” he said in a report to Swedish meteorological agency SMHI.

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The discovery of the “pacemaker gene” could lead to new drug treatments to avoid heart attacks and disease, say experts.

A person’s heartbeat is controlled by electrical signals, which start in one central place – the heart’s pacemaker – and travel around the heart muscle.

And now, a team at Imperial College London have found the gene that controls those electrical signals and thus the rhythm of the heart.

The researchers claimed that the damage or mutations to the gene – known as SCN10A – increase the risk of heart disease.

The researchers believe that the finding could help them to understand how the body’s heartbeat is controlled and could ultimately help them come up with new treatments for heart rhythm disturbances.

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