Scientists have discovered sudden underwater blackouts that can plunge the seafloor into darkness and threaten marine life.
Category: futurism
Fossil may solve mystery of what one of the weirdest-ever animals ate
One of the weirdest animals that ever lived may have been a scavenger. A re-examination of fossils first described in the 1970s seems to show a swarm of Hallucigenia feeding on the corpse of a comb jelly.
Hallucigenia was a small animal, up to 5 centimetres long. It had a worm-like body with multiple legs, as well as long, sharp spines on its back. Because of its peculiar appearance, palaeontologists at first reconstructed the animal upside-down, supposing the spines to be legs.
It lived in the deep seas during the Cambrian period (about 539 million to 487 million years ago), when many major animal groups emerged. Hallucigenia was first identified in rocks from the Burgess Shale deposits in British Columbia, Canada. It is related to velvet worms, tardigrades and arthropods (the group that includes insects and spiders).
Image: Alamy
Hallucigenia was such an odd animal that palaeontologists reconstructed it upside-down when they first analysed its fossils — and now we may know what it ate.
An IL-12 partial agonist sustains intratumoral lymphocyte activation and detoxifies systemic IL-12 therapy
IL-12 is a promising tumor immunotherapy, but its therapeutic use is limited by acute NK cell-associated toxicity. Koliesnik et al. report the discovery of STK-026, an IL-12-Fc partial agonist that preferentially drives effector function in T cells, which express high levels of IL-12 receptors, and avoids NK cell-associated toxicity.
Self-Assembling Wires
An exploration of a fascinating self-organizing system. Created by the Stanford Complexity Group
Tiny earthquakes reveal hidden faults under Northern California
The work, by researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of California, Davis and the University of Colorado Boulder, is published in Science.
“If we don’t understand the underlying tectonic processes, it’s hard to predict the seismic hazard,” said co-author Amanda Thomas, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis.
It Shouldn’t Exist: Scientists Find Signs of Ancient Life in the Most Unlikely Place
Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was hiking through Morocco’s Dadès Valley in the Central High Atlas Mountains when an unusual detail in the rocks made her stop.
She and her team, including Stéphane Bodin of Aarhus University, were moving through the rugged landscape to investigate the ecology of ancient reef systems that once lay beneath the sea.
Reaching those reefs meant crossing repeated stacks of turbidites, sediments left behind by powerful underwater debris flows. Turbidites often preserve ripple marks, but Martindale noticed something else layered on top of the ripples. The surface showed small, irregular corrugations that did not fit what she expected to see.