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New DNA 'hard drive' could keep files intact for millions of years  

Microsoft and genetics boffins predict genetics in the datacenter

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Microsoft have managed to write data directly onto DNA, a format with dramatic storage densities and a very long life.…

 
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Science non-fiction: Newly spotted alien world bathes in glow of three stars  

First planet spotted by SPHERE is a weird one

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Dying satellite sends scientists one last surprise before vanishing  

To wit: Pics of a burping supermassive black hole

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Synthetic Stingray May Lead To A Better Artificial Heart  

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Giant planet orbits three stars and enjoys multiple sunsets  
Young gas giant is the smallest planet to be imaged directly  
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These Photos of Reptiles and Amphibians Will Transport You to Another World  






YASUNI NATIONAL PARK, Ecuador -- Ecuador is a beautiful country on South America's west coast, and despite its small size, it has an extremely diverse landscape -- including the Amazon rainforest, the Andean highlands and the Galápagos Islands. I recently conducted a research expedition to Ecuador, and it was an unforgettable experience to say the least.

During our travels through the mainland and the Galápagos, we encountered an incredible diversity of frogs, snakes, lizards and salamanders. Without further ado, here are my top 10 favorite amphibian and reptile encounters:

1. Rain Frogs

2. Fringed Leaf Tree Frog

3. Banded Tree Anole

4. Amazon Tree Boa

5. Glass Frogs

6. Tropical Salamander

7. Geckos

8. Galápagos Iguanas

9. Giant Galápagos Tortoise

10. The Rare Pinocchio Lizard

I hope you enjoyed these incredible reptiles and amphibians as much as we did. Special thanks to Lucas Bustamante from Tropical Herping and thanks to TROPIC for hosting us during our visit to the Galápagos. If you want to plan your own trip, visit Destination Ecuador.

For more you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram!

An Ecuadorian, a Californian and a Venezuelan walk into a jungle...My first time in the field with Lucas Bustamante and Alejandro Arteaga, two amazing researchers and photographers who have traveled through the most remote parts of Ecuador's rainforests in search of new frog and reptile species. #Ecuador #TropicalHerping #snake #reptile #amphibian #research #Herpetologist #expedition #explore #discover #herpetology #journey #rainforest #science

A photo posted by Aaron Pomerantz (@nextgenscientist) on Jun 14, 2016 at 5:14pm PDT

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Pathway to Planet Nine  
Konstantin Batygin explains what led him and astronomer Mike Brown to propose the existence of a ninth planet in our solar system  
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Pathway to Planet Nine  
Konstantin Batygin explains what led him and astronomer Mike Brown to propose the existence of a ninth planet in our solar system  
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George Graham Scientist of the Day George Graham, an English...  

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George Graham Scientist of the Day

George Graham, an English clock- and instrument-maker, was born July 7, 1673.

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The Great Brain Scan Scandal: It isn't just boffins who should be ashamed  

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Loose wrists shake chips: Your wrist-job could be a PIN-snitch  

Smart watch, dumb botch: sensor sensitivity equals insecurity say boffins

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Fractals help solve 'wiggly' problems  

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The idea of a platform between two whole numbers might seem impossible to imagine. However, for someone working with fractals in math, the challenge is not so different. Fractals are used to measure things between dimensions, as in something that's more than 2-D, but not quite 3-D. A National Science Foundation mathematician created this fractal to better understand how wind would move oceanographic sensors in an eddy. This is just a snapshot in time, but wind would push the sensors back and forth, making it uncertain where they might go. Because of the stochastic nature -- a kind of organized randomness -- this fractal helps visualize the scenario and come up with an optimal control so sensors use as little battery as possible and minimize displacement.

Image credit: Lora Billings

 
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Scientists isolate, culture elusive Yellowstone microbe  

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A microbial partnership thriving in an acidic hot spring in Yellowstone National Park has surrendered some of its lifestyle secrets to researchers. The team isolated the archaeon Nanopusillus acidilobi and cultured these tiny microbes just 100 to 300 billionths of a meter in size and can now study how they interact with their host, another archaeon (Acidilobus). The relationships between these two organisms can serve as a valuable model to study the evolution and mechanisms of more complex systems.

Image credit: Mircea Podar

 
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NASA curious about Curiosity's fourth 'safe mode' event  

My safe word is 'camera', what's yours?

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Well Preserved- the Problem with Landfills  
Here is a picture I took at our regional landfill



If you were curious about back to school fashions in 1965- just have a look. I live in Seattle and our solid waste goes to a very well run landfill, operated by people who are consciously trying to do the right thing for our planet (http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/index.asp). Gas is collected at the landfill and used to generate energy. Landfill gas is touted as a source of green energy and often used as an excuse/ justification to landfill wastes that can produce gas. The gas in question is primarily methane (CH4). Methane is famous in the greenhouse gas world for having the 23 times the impact of CO2 on a 100- year basis. It only lasts in the atmosphere for 10 years so getting rid of it now has a potential for a big impact (https://www.britannica.com/science/greenhouse-gas). Methane is formed when microbes try to get energy from eating in an atmosphere without oxygen. Sanitary landfills typically fit that bill. The larger ones are required to collect methane. This was done primarily to prevent the gas from migrating from the landfill into the basements of neighboring homes. Methane is also full of energy and highly explosive. Lighting a cigar in the basement while watching the game before the regulations were put into place could have set off a very big bang. Captured, this gas is also known as natural gas and is a great source of energy.

The point of the picture though is that the newsprint in the landfill (and this is from a landfill cell made in 1965) does not decompose and does not generate methane.

Here is a picture of my food waste.




I took this right after breakfast. We had just cracked the eggs and peeled the grapefruit. The colors were vibrant. You could still tell what had been on the menu. By the next day the colors had faded but the smell had just started to ripen. If left in the bin the mold would have been in full bloom within the week. I am very lucky because I can put this into the compost bin that gets collected and taken to the compost facility once a week. If this had been taken to the landfill instead, you would not find any trace of the grapefruit in 50 days, let alone the 50 years that the newsprint had been sitting there.

Food waste contains all of the water and all of the nutrients, plus the carbon that the microbes in the landfill need to make a solid meal and plenty of methane. The problem is that food waste is so easy to decompose (just look in the back of your refrigerator) that the methane is formed long before the gas collection switch goes on. Landfilled food waste has a very high methane generation potential and that is why it is so bad to put food waste into them. The US EPA recently recognized this with a revision of their Waste Reduction Model, known as the WARM model (https://www.epa.gov/warm). In the new model landfilling food scraps generates about ¾ of a ton of CO2 for each wet ton. On a dry weight basis- that is more than 3 tons of CO2 per ton of scraps. If you take it to a compost facility instead- you get carbon credits for enriching the soil- 0.2 tons of CO2 credit for each ton of food scraps that are made into compost.

Plus if you use them in your garden you get a whole lot more food to eat next time around. Take my onions as proof.

If you want to compost your food scraps and collection isn't offered where you live- you can look for a compost facility here http://www.findacomposter.com/

You can also make your own or start a community compost pile- https://ilsr.org/initiatives/composting/

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Juno's Waves Instrument Will Map Jupiter's Magnetic Field  
Juno team member William Kurth offers an exclusive tour of the instruments the spacecraft will use to study Jupiter's intense magnetic waves. Produced with support from Explore Scientific

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Molecules break up under quantum control  
New technique could provide entangled atoms for matter-wave experiments  
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What a 99 Million Year Old Dinosaur Wing in Amber Tells Us  
This article was originally posted on Inverse.



By Jacqueline Ronson

The world's two most adorable fossils have been recovered in Myanmar.

Two partial wings were found encased in amber, left behind 99 million years ago after baby winged dinosaurs got stuck in tree resin. Unfortunately, the little guys never got a chance to grow up, flap their cute wings around, find a mate, and hatch eggs of their own. But their tiny bodies are now a remarkable contribution to shaping our modern understanding of their prehistoric world.

The wings are microscopic -- less than half an inch long from end to end. They are incredibly well preserved, showcasing details of the feathers, skin, and even coloration. Never before has the construction of bird-like dinosaur wings been found in such detail, according to an article published this week in Nature Communications.

Just a few decades ago, the idea of feathered, warm-blooded dinosaurs was a matter of fringy speculation. Since then, troves of evidence of feathered dinosaurs have been unearthed, particularly in the well-preserved fossil beds of China and Mongolia. But these sedimentary fossils preserve only 2D feather impressions and provide a frustratingly limited snapshot of how the animal was held together. Fossil feathers preserved in amber can provide additional information, but until now those have only been found detached from the skin and bones of the species they came from.


Those scale bars are just 1/5 of an inch long.

These little creatures are both similar to -- and different from -- modern birds. The authors place the species in the clade Enantiornithes, which went extinct with most of the rest of the dinosaurs after the asteroid strike 65 million years ago, but are closely related to the dinosaurs that survived to become modern birds. The Enantiornithes looked a lot like birds with a couple key differences: They had two claws on the end of each wing, and they had teeth rather than beaks.

The researchers note that the wings show several types of feathers, and in a similar arrangement to what is seen on today's birds, indicting that features of modern bird wings evolved many millions of years before the Tyrannosaurus rex walked the planet. (An important digression: the T. Rex was very likely at least partially feathered, too.)

The other thing that the scientists learned from these little wings is that these babies had adult-like feather structures at a very young age, suggesting that they perhaps skipped the downy phase that today's birds grow through altogether. Speculatively, this might mean these ancient critters had less parental care or had to be prepared to take off on their own shortly after birth -- a hard thing to do for a tiny thing smaller than a hummingbird, especially if the tree you find yourself on is booby-trapped with sticky puddles of resin.


The tiny dinosaur wings are preserved in exquisite detail.

The wings feed into a wider debate about the evolution of animal coverings in tetrapods. While many people still think of dinosaurs as reptilian, scaly things, there's plenty of evidence that suggest they were actually covered in everything from scales and hair-like filaments to downy feathers and quilled feathers.

In other words, try this thought experiment. Imagine the common ancestor of these creatures in all their diversity -- what would it look like? How about the common ancestor of all birds and reptiles, what characteristics of both would it display? And one more wild thought: What would the common ancestor of all birds, reptiles, and mammals look like?

A study published Wednesday in Science Advances has shed new light on this question. Both mammal fur and bird feathers share a characteristic anatomical placode, a skin thickening in the embryonic stage that gives rise to the follicle that allows for hair or feather growth. That's a curious thing, because reptiles are more closely related to birds than mammals, and until now there was no evidence that they had these placodes. Two ways around this: Either birds and mammals evolved this same structure independently, as a matter of convergent evolution, or their common ancestor had some genetic trait that gave rise to both hair and feathers.


A scaleless bearded dragon.

And lucky us, we have an answer to this puzzler, thanks to a surprising source: a scaleless bearded dragon. While some reptiles are born without scales in a rare genetic mutation, made less rare by the fact that exotic pet breeders select for it, the scaleless bearded dragon has, well, no scales. Lead author and geneticist Michel Milinkovitch saw a naked lizard up for sale and wondered about its special genes. He bought it and studied it, discovering that a similar genetic mutation can lead to baldness in humans and mice.

It turns out that reptiles had placodes all along; they're just a little trickier to spot. Placodes exist only at a specific time and place in the embryonic development of scaled reptiles, and Milinkovitch was able to document them in bearded dragons, Nile crocodiles, and corn snakes. What this means is that 300 million years ago, a creature walked the earth who developed the first placodes, which gave rise to scales and eventually all fur and feathers.


This adorable little pangolin is, believe it or not, a mammal.

Scientists have yet to discover an in-between state that links scales with feathers or scales with fur, but this research adds weight to the argument that more complex body coverings evolved from reptilian scales. This makes an intuitive sort of sense -- dinosaurs, after all, were probably covered in an assortment of these things. And although mammals are largely hairy beasts, you can still find the odd scaly mammal, too.

Birds are the only living creatures with feathers, and they are also the only living dinosaurs, suggesting that feathers are a specifically dinosaurian trait that evolved only once. (Pterosaurs, which were not dinosaurs, had fur-like filaments covering the skin on their wide wings.)

And while we still think of dinosaurs as a rather homogenous bunch of primitive lizards, those tiny dinosaur wings petrified in amber are proof of how diverse -- and how exquisitely evolved -- ancient creatures really were.

MORE FROM INVERSE:

• Is Nate Murphy Holding a Dinosaur for Ransom?
• 
  
• 11 Biologists You Should Follow on Instagram
• 
  
• Google DeepMind May Scan Eyes to Spot Diseases
• 
  
• Here's the Latest Way Apple Has Tried to Kill Spotify
• 
  
• The Tyrannosaurus Rex Had Lips and It Probably Didn't Roar

Photos via Nature Communications (1, 2), CasaDeOrtiz Dragons / YouTube, Valerius Tygart / Wikimedia, R.C. McKellar / Nature

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Behold the ROBOT RECTUM... medics' relief  

Pucker up, it's for science

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William Jackson Hooker Scientist of the Day William Jackson...  

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William Jackson Hooker Scientist of the Day

William Jackson Hooker, an English botanist, was born July 6, 1785.

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Expanding Antarctic sea ice linked to natural variability  

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The recent trend of increasing Antarctic sea ice extent — seemingly at odds with climate model projections — can largely be explained by a natural climate fluctuation, according to a new study. The study offers evidence that the negative phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, which is characterized by cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific, has created favorable conditions for additional Antarctic sea ice growth since 2000.

Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr

 
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Paper wasps that lie to their mates get a right kicking, research finds  

Trial by combat and toothpick-applied war paint

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Drosophila egg chambers stained with DNA dye  

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Drosophila egg chambers stained with a DNA dye (red). Drosophila is a genus of small flies, belonging to the family Drosophilidae, whose members are often called "fruit flies" or, less frequently, pomace flies, vinegar flies or wine flies, a reference to the characteristic of many species to linger around overripe or rotting fruit. One species of Drosophila in particular, D. melanogaster, has been heavily used in research in genetics and is a common model organism in developmental biology.

Image credit: ©Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

 
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