Today's Globe: ancient flutes, mosquitoes, artificial-heart milestone, Genzyme scrubdown, hospice house, health benefits tax, Jerri Nielsen

Archeologists said yesterday that they had unearthed the oldest musical instruments ever found - several flutes that inhabitants of southwestern Germany laboriously carved from bone and ivory at least 35,000 years ago.

The endless June drizzle has not produced enough rain to bring a massive onslaught of mosquitoes this summer, but populations will probably be slightly above average and public health officials will be on the lookout for spikes in cases of West Nile virus and Eastern equine encephalitis, specialists say.

A self-contained artificial heart made by Abiomed Inc., a Danvers cardiac device company, has been successfully implanted in a patient at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., marking the first commercial implantation of the device.

Dozens of decontamination specialists are busy stripping insulation from pipes at Genzyme Corp.’s drug plant overlooking the Charles River in Allston.

The $8.5 million Merrimack Valley Hospice House, set on 39 acres in Haverhill, began accepting terminally ill patients June 10. It's the fourth hospice house in the state to open and one of only two licensed to care for pediatric patients, the other being in Worcester.

President Obama left the door open to a new tax on healthcare benefits yesterday, and officials said top lawmakers and the White House were seeking $150 billion in concessions from the nation’s hospitals as they sought support for legislation struggling to emerge in Congress.

Fresh from a painful divorce and ready for a new chapter in her life, Dr. Jerri Nielsen spotted a want ad for a physician to work at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station. In March 1999, a couple of weeks after the last plane left before the Antarctic winter settled in, she found a lump in her breast that turned out to be an aggressive cancer. Dr. Nielsen, who had remarried and lived in Southwick in recent years, died in her house Tuesday of complications from cancer that recurred five years after she left Antarctica. She was 57.