Best view yet of merging galaxies in distant universe

An international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) -- among other telescopes -- has obtained the best view yet of a collision between two galaxies when the Universe was only half its current age.

To make this observation, the team also enlisted the help of a gravitational lens, a galaxy-size magnifying glass, to reveal otherwise invisible detail. These new studies of galaxy HATLAS J142935.3-002836 have shown that this complex and distant object looks surprisingly like the comparatively nearby pair of colliding galaxies collectively known as the Antennae.

"While astronomers are often limited by the power of their telescopes, in some cases our ability to see detail is hugely boosted by natural lenses created by the Universe," explains lead author Hugo Messias of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile and the Centro de Astronomia e Astrofísica da Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal. "Einstein predicted in his theory of General Relativity that, given enough mass, light does not travel in a straight line but will be bent in a similar way to a normal lens."

Cosmic lenses are created by massive structures like galaxies and galaxy clusters, which bend light from objects behind them due to their strong gravity -- an effect called gravitational lensing. The magnifying properties of this effect allow astronomers to study objects that would otherwise be invisible and to directly compare local galaxies with much more remote ones, when the Universe was significantly younger.

For these gravitational lenses to work, however, the foreground lensing galaxy and the one beyond need to be precisely aligned.

"These chance alignments are quite rare and tend to be hard to identify," adds Messias, "but, recent studies have shown that by observing at far-infrared and millimeter wavelengths we can find these cases much more efficiently."

HATLAS J142935.3-002836 (or H1429-0028 for short) is one of these sources and was found in the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (HATLAS). It is among the brightest gravitationally lensed objects in the far-infrared regime found so far, even though we are seeing it at a time when the Universe was just half its current age.

To study this object in further detail, the astronomers started an extensive follow-up campaign using an impressive collection of incredibly powerful telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, ALMA, the Keck Observatory, and the VLA, among others.

The Hubble and Keck images revealed a detailed gravitationally induced ring of light around the foreground galaxy. These high resolution images also showed that the lensing galaxy is an edge-on disc galaxy -- similar to our Milky Way -- which obscures parts of the background light due to the large dust clouds it contains.

But this obscuration is not a problem for ALMA and the VLA, since these two facilities observe the sky at longer wavelengths, which are unaffected by dust. Using the combined data, the team discovered that the background system was actually an ongoing collision between two galaxies. From this point on, ALMA and the VLA played a key role in further characterizing this object.

In particular, ALMA traced carbon monoxide, which allows detailed studies of star-formation mechanisms in galaxies. The ALMA observations also allowed the motion of the material in the galaxy to be measured. This was essential to show that the lensed object is indeed an ongoing galactic collision forming hundreds of new stars each year, and that one of the colliding galaxies still shows signs of rotation; an indication that it was a disc galaxy just before this encounter.

The system of these two colliding galaxies resembles a spectacular object that is much closer to us: the Antennae, which is the closest ongoing merger of two spiral galaxies. While the Antennae system is forming stars with a total rate of only a few ten times the mass of our Sun each year, H1429-0028 each year turns more than 400 solar masses of gas into new stars.

Read more at Science Daily

Sleep Disorder Makes People Appear 'Totally Drunk'

If you've ever woken from a deep sleep in a confused state and didn't remember the experience later, you may have a condition known as "sleep drunkenness."

According to a new study, as many as 1 in 7 people may have this disorder, properly known as "confusional arousal," which can lead to confused or inappropriate behavior — such as answering the phone when an alarm goes off — or even violence.

The episodes usually happen when a person is woken suddenly, and people sometimes have no memory of these incidents, said Dr. Maurice Ohayon, a sleep psychiatrist at Stanford School of Medicine and co-author of the study, detailed today (Aug. 25) in the journal Neurology.

"It's like they are totally drunk — they don't know where they are or what they are doing," Ohayon told Live Science.

Confusional arousal is distinct from night terrors and sleepwalking, Ohayon said. It is often seen in children, but has not been well studied in adults.

In the study, the researchers interviewed a random sample of more than 19,000 American adults about their sleep habits and history of confusional arousal, as well as any mental illness and any medications they were taking.

About 15 percent of those surveyed said they had experienced at least one bout of this "sleep drunkenness" in the previous year, more than half of whom said they suffered at least one episode per week. Slightly fewer than 10 percent of those who had had an episode couldn't remember part or all of the experience, and 15 percent of them also had sleepwalking episodes.

Confusional arousal is different from the normal sleepiness that most people feel when they wake up, said Dr. Alan Manevitz, a clinical psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York who was not involved with the research. Most people with sleep grogginess generally remember their experience, but people with sleep drunkenness are not aware of their actions, and attempts to fully wake them usually fail, Manevitz told Live Science.

The unusual grogginess has many different causes, depending on the individual. The researchers found that among those who'd had an episode of sleep drunkenness, 70 percent also had a sleep disorder, and 37 percent had a mental illness. Only 31 percent were taking medication for these disorders, and these were mostly antidepressants.

People suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, panic or post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety seemed more susceptible to the disorder, as did those with sleep apnea, a disorder in which a person briefly stops breathing during sleep, the researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

Weird Microscopic Structure Found in Mars Meteorite

Scientists have found a strange structure resembling a microbial cell inside a Martian meteorite, but they're not claiming that it's evidence of Red Planet life.

The researchers discovered the microscopic oval object within the Nakhla Mars meteorite, which fell to Earth in Egypt in 1911. While the structure's appearance is intriguing, it most likely formed as a result of geological rather than biological processes, team members said.

"The consideration of possible biotic scenarios for the origin of the ovoid structure in Nakhla currently lacks any sort of compelling evidence," the scientists write in a new study published this month in the journal Astrobiology. "Therefore, based on the available data that we have obtained on the nature of this conspicuous ovoid structure in Nakhla, we conclude that the most reasonable explanation for its origin is that it formed through abiotic processes."

A Cell-like Structure

The hollow ovoid is about 80 microns long by 60 microns wide, researchers said — far larger than most terrestrial bacteria but in the normal size range for eukaryotic Earth microbes (single-celled organisms that possess nuclei and other membrane-bound interior "organelles"). The study team is confident that the object is native to the sample and not the result of terrestrial contamination.

The scientists studied the structure using a number of different techniques, including electron microscopy, X-ray analysis and mass spectrometry. This work revealed that the ovoid is composed of iron-rich clay and contains a number of other minerals.

The researchers run through a number of possible formation scenarios in the new study, eventually concluding that the ovoid most likely formed when materials partially filled in a pre-existing vesicle — a vapor bubble, for example — in the rock.

But this supposition doesn't rule out the possibility that Martian lifeforms had something to do with the structure, team members said.

"Despite the extremely biomorphic overall shape of the ovoid, it is highly unlikely that it itself was an organism," said lead author Elias Chatzitheodoridis, of the National Technical University of Athens in Greece.

"However, it could have been formed directly by micro-organisms, or it could trap organic material that came from elsewhere," Chatzitheodoridis told Space.com via email. "That the ovoid is hollow means that there is enough space to accommodate colonies of microorganisms."

Making a firm link to Mars life would require further study and further discoveries, he added.

"We would be happy if we could have found more than one ovoid, with exactly the same texture both in the micro and the nanoscale," Chatzitheodoridis said. "However, we require to open up enough sample in a very careful way. Compelling evidence, though, would be if we could really find many of the same, clearly in a form of a colony, together with chemical and mineralogical biosignatures that are common for terrestrial microbes."

Nakhla is a well-studied meteorite — scientists have spotted possible signs of Mars life within it before —and previous research has mapped out its history in some detail. Nakhla's parent rock apparently crystallized about 1.3 billion years ago, Chatzitheodoridis and his colleagues write in the new study, then experienced two shock events that heated it up considerably.

The first of these shocks likely occurred around 910 million years ago and the second 620 million years ago. This latter event, which was triggered by a nearby meteorite strike on Mars, apparently included the flow of hot water through Nakhla's parent outcrop, the authors write. Finally, about 10 million years ago, another impact blasted Nakhla free of Mars, sending it on a looping trip through space that ended with its arrival at Earth in 1911.

Whether or not the Nakhla ovoid has some connection to Martian life, study of the meteorite can help researchers better understand the Red Planet's past (and, perhaps, present) potential to support life, Chatzitheodoridis said.

Read more at Discovery News

Hubble Spies Dark Nebula of Stellar Creation

This thick cloud of dust and gas may look like a dark and foreboding corner of our galaxy, but it is actually a region of star birth that exhibits a smorgasbord of stellar phenomena.

One of the more fascinating objects is the star in the center of the frame that appears to be sitting atop a column of smokey material. This is in fact a young stellar object (YSO) — basically a star’s embryo — that is slowly forming from the collapsing gas in its nebula. Called SSTC2D J033038.2+303212, this object has a disk of material seen edge-on that it continues to form from. The YSO seems to be generating its own hot jets of gas that light up the top of the dark nebulous column.

Below the YSO, however, there’s a huge, glowing ball of gas that brightens the scene. This is a reflection nebula — dust and gas that is lit up by numerous bright baby stars cocooned within — called [B77] 63.

Yet amongst the bright stellar birth is the pitch black object that seems to trail from [B77] 63. This dark nebula is called Dobashi 4173 and it blocks all light from any stars it may contain. The stars that overlay the nebula are actually foreground stars between us and Dobashi 4173.

This dramatic view was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) that views the cosmos in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light.

From Discovery News

Zombie ant fungi 'know' brains of their hosts

A parasitic fungus that reproduces by manipulating the behavior of ants emits a cocktail of behavior-controlling chemicals when encountering the brain of its natural target host, but not when infecting other ant species, a new study shows.

The findings, which suggest that the fungus "knows" its preferred host, provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, according to researchers.

"Fungi are well known for their ability to secrete chemicals that affect their environment," noted lead author Charissa de Bekker, a Marie Curie Fellow in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, and Ludwig Maximilian of the University of Munich. "So we wanted to know what chemicals are employed to control so precisely the behavior of ants."

The research focused on a species from the genus Ophiocordyceps -- known as "zombie ant fungi" -- which control their ant hosts by inducing a biting behavior. Although these fungi infect many insects, the species that infect ants have evolved a mechanism that induces hosts to die attached by their mandibles to plant material, providing a platform from which the fungus can grow and shoot spores to infect other ants.

To study this mechanism, the researchers combined field research with a citizen-scientist in South Carolina, infection experiments under laboratory conditions and analysis using metabolomics, which is the study of the chemical processes associated with the molecular products of metabolism.

The scientists used a newly discovered fungal species from North America -- initially called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sensu lato while it awaits a new name -- that normally controls an ant species in the genus Camponotus. To test whether a species of fungus that has evolved to control the behavior of one ant species can infect and control others, they infected nontarget hosts from the same ant genus and another genus (Formica).

They found that this obligate killer can infect and kill nontarget ants, but it cannot manipulate their behavior. "The brain of the target species was the key to understanding manipulation," de Bekker said.

The researchers next removed ant brains, keeping the organs alive in special media. The fungus then was grown in the presence of brains from different ant species to determine what chemicals it produced for each brain.

"This was 'brain-in-a-jar' science at its best," said co-author David Hughes, assistant professor of entomology and biology, Penn State. "It was necessary to reduce the complexity associated with the whole, living ant, and just ask what chemicals the fungus produces when it encounters the ant brain.

"You don't get to see a lot of behavior with fungi," he said. "You have to infer what they are doing by examining how they grow, where they grow and most important, what chemicals they secrete."

He explained that fungi are nourished via osmotrophy, by which they secrete compounds that degrade the bigger molecules in their environment into smaller ones that then can be taken up by the fungus. Using metabolomics, the researchers could determine precisely the chemical crosstalk between the fungus and the ant brain it grew alongside.

"We could see in the data that the fungus behaved differently in the presence of the ant brain it had co-evolved with," said de Bekker, whose Penn State co-authors also included Andrew Patterson, assistant professor of molecular toxicology, and Phil Smith, director of the Metabolomics Core Facility.

The researchers found thousands of unique chemicals, most of them completely unknown. This, according to Hughes, is not surprising, since little previous work has mined these fungi for the chemicals they produce.

But what did stand out were two known neuromodulators, guanobutyric acid (GBA) and sphingosine. These both have been reported to be involved in neurological disorders and were enriched when the fungus was grown in the presence of brains of its target species.

"There is no single compound that is produced that results in the exquisite control of ant behavior we observe," de Bekker said. "Rather, it is a mixture of different chemicals that we assume act in synergy.

"But whatever the precise blend and tempo of chemical secretion," she said, "it is impressive that these fungi seem to 'know' when they are beside the brain of their regular host and behave accordingly."

Noted Hughes, "This is one of the most complex examples of parasites controlling animal behavior because it is a microbe controlling an animal -- the one without the brain controls the one with the brain. By employing metabolomics and controlled laboratory infections, we can now begin to understand how the fungi pull off this impressive trick."

The research also is notable, the scientists contend, because it is the first extensive study of zombie ants in North America. Typically assumed to be a tropical phenomenon, they exist in temperate habitats but can be hard to find.

Read more at Science Daily

Taung Child's brain development not human-like? CT scan casts doubt on similarity to that of modern humans

The Taung Child, South Africa's premier hominin discovered 90 years ago by Wits University Professor Raymond Dart, continues to shed light on human origins. By subjecting the skull of the first australopith discovered to the latest technologies in the Wits University Microfocus X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) facility, researchers are now casting doubt on theories that Australopithecus africanus shows the same cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers -- in effect disproving current support for the idea that this early hominin shows infant brain development in the prefrontal region similar to that of modern humans.

The results have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Aug. 25, in an article titled "New high resolution CT data of the Taung partial cranium and endocast and their bearing on metopism and hominin brain evolution."

The Taung Child has historical and scientific importance in the fossil record as the first and best example of early hominin brain evolution, and theories have been put forward that it exhibits key cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers.

To test the ancientness of this evolutionary adaptation, Dr Kristian J. Carlson, Senior Researcher from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, and colleagues, Professor Ralph L. Holloway from Columbia University and Douglas C. Broadfield from Florida Atlantic University, performed an in silico dissection of the Taung fossil using high-resolution computed tomography.

"A recent study has described the roughly 3 million-year-old fossil, thought to have belonged to a 3 to 4-year-old, as having a persistent metopic suture and open anterior fontanelle, two features that facilitate post-natal brain growth in human infants when their disappearance is delayed," said Carlson.

Comparisons with the existing hominin fossil record and chimpanzee variation do not support this evolutionary scenario.

Citing deficiencies in how the Taung fossil material has been recently assessed, the researchers suggest physical evidence does not incontrovertibly link features of the Taung skull, or its endocast, to early prefrontal lobe expansion, a brain region implicated in many human behaviors.

Read more at Science Daily

'Pig Perfume' Stops Dogs From Behaving Badly

Spritzing dogs with a “pig perfume” helps prevent them from barking incessantly, jumping frantically on house guests and from engaging in other unwanted behaviors, according to new research.

The eau de oink, aka “Boar Mate” or “Stop That,” was formulated by Texas Tech scientist John McGlone, who was looking for a way to curb his Cairn terrier Toto’s non-stop barking. One spritz of the pig perfume seemed to do the trick in an instant without harming his dog.

“It was completely serendipitous,” McGlone, who works in the university’s Animal and Food Sciences department of the College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences, said in a press release. “One of the most difficult problems is that dogs bark a lot, and it’s one of the top reasons they are given back to shelters or pounds.”

The key ingredient is androstenone, a steroid and pheromone produced by male pigs and released in their saliva and fat. When detected by female pigs in heat, they seem to find the male more attractive. (The females assume a mating stance.) One can imagine that dogs spritzed with the scent should not hang around amorous female pigs, but other than that, the product seems to work, according to McGlone.

Androstenone smells pungent and is not very appealing to humans, but it can have an effect on mammal behavior, he said.

He and his colleagues tested the product on four different groups of barking dogs in separate kennels. The researchers were looking at not only the possible effectiveness of the key ingredient, but also if the spritzing itself (sound and liquid around face) dumbfounded the dogs.

For the study, the first group of dogs simply had a person with another dog stand in front of the kennels. The second group of dogs was sprayed with a placebo that made a startling spritz noise. The third group of dogs was sprayed with the noise and a lower concentration of androstenone in isopropyl alcohol. The fourth group was sprayed with a higher concentration of androstenone in isopropyl alcohol that also made the spritz sound.

In the first group, 25 percent (3 out of 12 dogs) stopped barking. In the second group, 44 percent (4 of 9 dogs) stopped barking. In the third group, sprayed with the lower concentration of the pheromone, 78 percent (7 of 9 dogs) stopped barking. In the fourth group, sprayed with the higher concentration of androstenone, 100 percent (6 of 6 dogs) stopped barking.

“We sprayed it in their nose or toward their head while they were barking…barking and jumping, running back and forth,” McGlone said. “This whole behavior stopped. You could almost see them thinking, ‘What was that?’”

The good news is that the product had no impact on the heart rate/cardio function of the dogs, which was the main side effect that they were worried about. Androstenone, in addition to being a pheromone in pigs, appears to also be an intermone, which refers to a product that is, McGlone explained, a “pheromone in one species and has a behavioral effect in another species, but we do not know if it is a pheromone (naturally produced) in the other species.”

Read more at Discovery News

Cane Toad Personalities Key to Territorial Takeover

Cane toads with the personality to boldly go where no cane toad has gone before pave the way for more timid toads to rapidly take over new territories, say Australian researchers.

First introduced into Queensland in the 1930s, cane toads are now found as far south as Sydney and as far west as Kununurra. Despite originating from the rainforests of South America, the toads have managed to conquer some of the hottest and driest parts of the Australian continent.

To understand why cane toads continue to venture into new and potentially hostile environments, the scientists put cane toads from a recently established population in the Northern Territory through a mix of behavioural tests.

They found that some toads were bold and daring, while others were shy and cautious, they report in the journal PLoS One .

It is this mix of bold and shy personalities that has given the cane toads a foothold in Australia, says study co-author Professor Rick Shine of the University of Sydney.

"It is a pretty amazing situation that most frogs are stay-at-home creatures and don't really move too far from where they live, yet here we have got cane toads romping across the landscape," Shine says.

"But if cane toads were all timid then presumably they would still be sitting in Queensland."

To examine how personality traits varied within a cane toad population, the researchers set up feeding stations in the field using artificial lights to attract both insects as food and wild cane toads.

At some of the feeding stations the researchers placed a single cane toad in a mesh enclosure while the other feeding stations were left empty, allowing the wild toads to choose between an empty foraging site or one with another toad present.

A total of 95 cane toads approached the feeding stations within a two-hour period, with an almost even mix between those happy to eat on their own and those that preferred another toad to be present.

Shine says the presence of another toad in the area provided some of the toads with valuable social cues about the suitability of the area for foraging. But for those toads that fed alone, the social cues weren't needed.

To further test their personalities, the researchers placed each toad into a makeshift shelter in the laboratory and timed how long it took for the toad to leave the shelter and begin exploring its new environment.

They found the cane toads that happily ate on their own left their shelters much quicker than the more social cane toads, which tended to be more timid.

Bold v timid toads

"The bolder toads were happy to waltz out and walk around and the other guys stayed hiding," says Shine.

"It shows that some toads are prepared to leap out there into the unknown while some are scaredy-cats."

Shine believes it is the bold cane toads that venture forth and invade new areas. The shy toads follow on later, using social cues from the bolder toads to guide them. The result is a rapid swell in cane toad numbers in the first few years following the invasion into a new area.

"To boldly go where no toad has gone before is probably the sort of thing that a bolder individual is going to do better than a shy individual."

Read more at Discovery News

Online screening for rare lung cancer mutation opens door to new kind of clinical trial

In the previous few years, several breakthrough treatments have become available for key subtypes of lung cancer. Patients who may benefit from these treatments can be pre-identified by looking for defined genetic abnormalities in their cancer. For example, patients whose lung cancer is driven by rearrangement of the gene ALK derive significant benefit from the drug crizotinib, which targets this abnormality. Many ongoing clinical trials are now attempting to replicate this success by matching different drugs with specific subtypes of the disease based on the presence of such "predictive biomarkers." However, testing these new drugs in clinical trials requires finding and enrolling patients with what may be very rare molecular subtypes of a disease -- one of the challenges is discovering enough needles in enough haystacks to prove the effectiveness of each biomarker-drug pairing.

The University of Colorado Cancer Center is now taking a novel approach to this problem, reaching out via the internet to expand the pool of patients potentially eligible for just such a biomarker-preselected clinical trial. After completing the interactive online screening questions, eligible patients with advanced lung cancer will be consented via the phone to permit a pre-existing biopsy sample of their lung cancer tissue to be shipped to the CU Cancer Center for trial-specific molecular testing. The testing is designed to identify patients who may have lung cancers driven by alterations in the gene FGFR1. Patients whose tumors turn out to be FGFR1-positive and meet the other trial screening criteria will then be offered treatment for their cancer within a clinical trial at CU Cancer Center using the experimental FGFR1 inhibitor drug ponatinib. Ponatinib is already licensed for treating certain blood cancers, but work by CU scientists in laboratory models suggest it may also be a potent agent in some specific molecular subtypes of lung cancer driven by, among other things, changes in the FGFR1 gene.

"FGFR1 has already been explored by the pharmaceutical industry, with rather limited success, but those approaches used a very different way of looking to see if FGFR1 was driving the lung cancer," says Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, director of the thoracic oncology clinical program at the CU Cancer Center and the trial's principal investigator. "Based on some really innovative work coming out of our own Specialized Program of Excellence in Lung Cancer, the tests we are employing in this trial seem to define a completely separate subtype of lung cancer -- one that has really not been explored before. Now the challenge is in finding enough people whose cancers are positive for our biomarkers to prove whether the markers will predict for clinical benefit from ponatinib."

Having built the infrastructure to allow nationwide molecular prescreening for the trial, Camidge's team plans to also use internet awareness to speed accrual into their trial.

"We know that the vast majority of the U.S. population now routinely uses the internet to find out about medical conditions, so we thought we'd get Dr. Google to help us out," says Camidge. "Several very high profile internet resources for lung cancer patients, including the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation (BJALCF) and the Global Resource for Advancing Cancer Education (GRACE) have helped us craft this trial and we are very grateful for their commitment to increase awareness about the opportunity it presents for lung cancer patients who might benefit from the molecular prescreening."

Indeed, Dr Jack West, the CEO of GRACE, co-wrote a position paper with Camidge in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology in 2012 titled "Have Mutation, Will Travel" to highlight the pressing need to transform the way clinical trials are conducted in the new era of molecular diversity.

"While Big Pharma sometimes spends millions of dollars to open biomarker-selected trials at hundreds of different locations to find enough patients, the kind of innovative approaches that are homegrown in university settings will never have the resource to do that," said Dr West. "Regardless of whether the FGFR1-ponatinib pairing works or not, what the Colorado team is trying to do could really change the future of clinical cancer research for the better. Patients are increasingly becoming empowered about their own cancer care. Anything we at GRACE can do to get the word out about the Colorado approach will be a very good thing."

Bonnie Addario, chair and founder of the BJALCF and a ten-year lung cancer survivor herself, is similarly enthusiastic. "If we are going to change the survival rates for lung cancer, we have to stop treating everyone the same. We have to do things differently, and if Dr. Camidge's approach can bring a little bit of Colorado's expertise into easy reach of anyone with a computer, then this is a new way of accelerating the process and much more convenient for the patient. We will do all we can to assist in getting patients involved in this exciting new approach," Addario says.

Over the next 3-5 years the Colorado team plans to screen up to 700 lung cancer patients and optimize the biomarker signatures for predicting benefit from ponatinib over time, tweaking the criteria as they go along based on the emerging results in each group of treated patients.

"Clinical research is very expensive and sources of support for this kind of clinical research, as for everything else, are rather limited," says Camidge. However, Camidge's novel approach has already allowed him to secure several hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from sponsors including the manufacturer of ponatinib, Ariad, from the CU Cancer Center and from the CU Lung Cancer Specialized Program of Excellence in Lung Cancer.

Read more at Science Daily

Fossil arthropod went on the hunt for its prey

A new species of carnivorous crustacean has been identified, which roamed the seas 435 million years ago, grasping its prey with spiny limbs before devouring it. The fossil is described and details of its lifestyle are published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

The fossils were discovered near Waukesha, Wisconsin, with the new species, Thylacares brandonesis, named after the Brandon Bridge Formation where it was found. It is the oldest known example of the Thylacocephala group -- shrimp-like creatures, mostly from the Jurassic period, known for their bulbous eyes and multiple limbs. The muscle structure and leg morphology of the new species suggests that it used its long, claw-like appendages to catch prey in a similar way to modern remipedes, blind crustaceans still found in salt water-filled caves.

Derek Briggs, Yale University, says: "This new research extends the range of this enigmatic group of fossil arthropods back to the Silurian, some 435 million years ago, and provides evidence that they belong among the crustaceans, the modern group that includes lobsters, shrimps and crabs."

Carolin Haug, LMU Munich, said: "T. brandonensis was probably an actively hunting predator, which caught the prey with its front claws and crushed it into smaller pieces with the protrusions nearer its mouthparts."

"This early, Silurian, example of Thylacocephala is in many ways much less extreme than the more recent Jurassic species. It still has normal-sized eyes in contrast to the very enlarged ones that came later, and shorter front claws in T. brandonensis compared to the extremely elongated ones in more recent Jurassic representatives."

The description of the new Silurian species was part of a wider investigation into this group of fossils, including several new Jurassic specimens. Modern imaging techniques allowed the scientists to visualise new features, such as the tiny details of the T. brandonensis muscle structure. Based on these images, they created 3D models of the new species, which help us to understand the creature's life habits.

From Science Daily