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New Fossils of Ancient Snake With Hind Legs Reveals Tantalizing Details of Evolution – Scitech Daily
New fossils of an ancient legged snake, called Najash, shed light on the origin of the slithering reptiles, including how snakes got their bite and lost their legs.
The fossil discoveries published in Science Advances have revealed they possessed hind legs during the first 70 million years of their evolution.
They also provide details about how the flexible skull of snakes evolved from their lizard ancestors.
The evolution of the snake body has captivated researchers for a long time — representing one of the most dramatic examples of the vertebrate body’s ability to adapt — but a limited fossil record has obscured our understanding of their early evolution until now. -
The U.S. military believes that an unarmed American drone reported lost near Libya’s capital last month was in fact shot down by Russian air defenses and it is demanding the return of the aircraft’s wreckage, U.S. Africa Command says.
Such a shootdown would underscore Moscow’s increasingly muscular role in the energy-rich nation, where Russian mercenaries are reportedly intervening on behalf of east Libya-based commander Khalifa Haftar in Libya’s civil war. -
A Chilean military plane with 38 people aboard “lost radio communication” on Monday after taking off from the south of the country for a base in Antarctica, Chile’s Air Force said.
It said 17 of those aboard were crew and the other 21 were passengers.
A “dismayed” President Sebastian Pinera, whose country has been witnessing its worst civil unrest in decades, said in a tweet that he would fly to Punta Arenas along with Interior Minister Gonzalo Blumel.
Once there, they would meet up with Defense Minister Alberto Espina to monitor the search and rescue mission.
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Protocells — artificial cells — that are active and mimic living cells by moving independently and that are biocompatible and enzymatically active are now possible using an improved method developed by Penn State researchers.
Living cells are difficult to grow in the laboratory, so researchers sometimes work with synthetic cells, but these have had research limitations because they lack real cell characteristics.
“One of the challenges of cell research is it’s sometimes very hard to run controlled experiments on a cell’s motility, especially due to surface enzyme activity,” said Darrell Velegol, distinguished professor of chemical engineering. “The research team developed a simple way to make an artificial cell that doesn’t do everything a regular cell does, like reproduce, have genetic mutations or anything like that, but it actively moves. That’s important because how cells move is poorly understood, especially how enzymes’ activity play into cell movement.” -
Dead zones within the world’s oceans — where there is almost no oxygen to sustain life — could be expanding far quicker than currently thought, a new study suggests.
The regions are created when large amounts of organic material produced by algae sinks towards the seafloor, using up the oxygen present in the deep water.
….. a study published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles suggests that dark carbon fixation — caused by the presence of anaerobic bacteria in the deeper water column — needs to be incorporated into these models….
…..using a distinct biomarker produced by anaerobic bacteria, they suggest that around one fifth of the organic matter on the seafloor could in fact stem from bacteria living in or around these dead zones.
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