Mars rover finds evidence for an ancient streambed

Eric Hand reveals in the News Blog, that NASA’s Mars rover, Curiosity, has found the first definitive signs that, billions of years ago, water once flowed at the bottom of Gale crater. Fast:

At press briefing on 27 September, the science team said that a layer of rock, a conglomerate containing large pieces of gravel within a matrix of sandy material, suggests that a fast moving stream once spilled over the Gale crater walls.

Project scientist John Grotzinger says the science team reached consensus after inspecting the size and texture of gravel pieces in one layer, named Hottah, that had been tilted up and exposed (pictured).  “To us, it looks like someone came along to the surface of Mars with a jackhammer,” he says.

 Find out more about this discovery in Eric’s post.

Buddhist ‘Iron Man’ found by Nazis is from space

A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin, reports Daniel Cressey in the News Blog:

Known as the ‘iron man’, the 24-centimetre-high sculpture may represent the god Vaiśravaṇa and was likely created from a piece of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across the border region between Russia and Mongolia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Elmar Buchner, of the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and his colleagues.

In a paper published in Metoritics and Planetary Science, the team reports their analysis of the iron, nickel, cobalt and trace elements of a sample from the statue, as well as its structure. They found that the geochemistry of the artefact is a match for values known from fragments of the Chinga meteorite. The piece turned into the ‘iron man’ would be the third largest known from that fall.

More information can be found in the post.

Choosy females speed speciation of poison dart frogs

Strawberry dart frog, Dendrobates pumilio, photographed at La Loma Jungle Lodge on Isla Bastimentos, Panama. Image: Cori Richards-Zawacki.

SciLogs blogger GrrlScientist explains in her latest post how female poison dart frogs’ distinct preferences for mates with particular colours may be a first step in the process of speciation:

This frog species has an amazing variety of vibrant colours, including red, yellow, blue, green, orange and white, along with various combinations and patterns, known as colour morphs. Yet surprisingly, all of these colour morphs comprise the same species: the males all have similar mating calls and lab studies have found minimal genetic divergence in a number of genes that are known to change rapidly.

Depending upon where in their range they are seen, these frogs have different colour combinations and patterns that are characteristic for that area. But in a few areas, such as the Panamanian island of Bastimentos, frogs of two colour morphs, red and yellow, live side by side.

Laboratory studies indicated that female choice is the driving force that maintains both colours in this population.

Continue to the post to learn more about these frogs.

Sexism in science means men more likely to get hired

Corinne Moss-Racusin, a psychology postdoc at Yale University and her colleagues, devised a simple test to work out whether there is any bias against women applying for a job in science:

The team got 127 university professors working across biology, chemistry and physics, to give feedback on what they believed were the application materials from a real student applying for a job as a laboratory manager.

Each professor received exactly the same application materials, except for the name of the applicant. Half of the professors were told they were reviewing an application from somebody called John, whilst the other half were told the applicant’s name was Jennifer. Apart from the name, all the other information was identical.

The professors were asked to rate how likely they would be to hire the applicant, as well as how competent they thought the applicant was. They were also asked to suggest a starting salary  and say how much mentoring they would offer the applicant in their new role.

Despite the fact that the application materials were identical apart from the applicant’s name, the professors – regardless of whether they were men or women – were significantly more likely to hire the applicant when they thought he was called John. Although they said they liked the female applicant, the scores suggest she was rated as less competent than the man, even though they had identical skills.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this post in the Nature Jobs  blog.

Migrating Butterflies Are A Sign Of Global Warming

Scitable’s blogger Samantha J reveals that after 18 years of observation and nearly 20,000 surveys, a very interesting study was published in Nature Climate Change about the effects global warming has on Massachusetts’s butterflies:

Conducted by amateur scientists of the Massachusetts Butterfly Club, the study supported the hypothesis that global warming is the culprit when it comes to the changes in the “distribution and abundance” of butterfly populations on the Northeast Coast. As the temperature is rising, populations of warm-adapted butterflies are increasing in size and moving farther north, whereas populations of cold-adapted butterflies in Massachusetts are decreasing in size.

Over the past 100 years, the temperature of Massachusetts has risen 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Although this may not seem like a huge increase, the effects it has on northern butterflies can be deadly. Of the 21 northern butterfly species reported in the study, a whopping 17 were in decline. That is 81 percent! One particular Massachusetts butterfly population of the species Speyeria atlantis, for example, declined by 90% in just 17 years.

Learn more about this research in Samantha J’s post. 

September’s SoNYC: The $1,000 genome is here – are we ready? 

Last Thursday evening, we hosted the fourteenth installment of the monthly Science Online NYC (SoNYC) discussion series. This month’s event was back at the Rockefeller University and the topic for discussion was the $1,000 genome – are we ready? Panelists included: Matthew Herper who covers science and medicine for Forbes, Ronald Crystal, the Chairman of the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, who has had his genome sequenced and analyzed it himself, Virginia Hughes, a freelance author who has written about her experience with the 23andMe genotyping service and Manish Ponda, of Rockefeller University, who has experimented with other -omic type analyses.

To read the online conversation around the event, check out our Storify collating all the tweets and pictures. We also live-stream each SoNYC event to give as many people as possible the chance to take part in the debate. Check out this month’s livestream, or take a look at our archives where you can view the previous meetings.

Cheaper Genomes Should Enhance Undergraduate Education

In a related post, Scitable’s Eric Sawyer explains how cheaper genomes should enhance undergraduate education:

It’s not that farfetched. Genome sequencing has already found its way into high school and undergraduate biology curricula. The HHMI-funded Phage Hunters program gives undergraduates and high school students the opportunity to discover new mycobacteriophages-a group of viruses that infect bacteria-in their local soils. Viral genomes are small, and thus cheap to send away to be sequenced. Plus, it’s fun to name the new phages you discover (the tradition is quirkiness, with names like Corndog, Pumpkin, and Banjo), and you can compare your phage’s genome to others in the database.

Now imagine being able to sequence the bacteria in the same soil sample. That increases the level of sophistication dramatically, allowing students to understand the microbial ecology of their local soils. If the bacteria were cultured beforehand, it would also allow students to go deeper into studying a newly-sequenced (newly-discovered, even) organism.

Love

Viktor Poór‘s latest cartoon: How seemingly irreconcilable loves are possible