The Cassini probe has officially entered the final phase of its 13-year mission studying Saturn, as it executed the first of five planned ultra-close passes of the gas giant this past weekend – a series of dives that will allow it to travel through the top portion of the planet’s atmosphere.

According to BBC News, the NASA spacecraft is currently encircling Saturn along a pattern that will see it travel along the gap between its rings and its atmosphere – a course which will allow it to collect vast amounts of data on the chemical composition of both the planet and its rings.

“As it makes these five dips into Saturn… Cassini will become the first Saturn atmospheric probe,” Dr. Linda Spilker, a project scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, explained in a statement. “It’s long been a goal in planetary exploration to send a dedicated probe into the atmosphere of Saturn, and we’re laying the groundwork for future exploration with this first foray.”

On Sunday, Cassini came to within just 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) of Saturn’s cloud tops at 9:22 pm PDT on Sunday (12:22 am EDT/04:22 GMT on Monday). This flyby enabled Cassini to directly samples the gases of the planet’s upper atmosphere, which is believed to be roughly 75% hydrogen and 25% helium and trace gases.

“It’s expected that the heavier helium is sinking down,” European Space Agency (ESA) Cassini project scientist Nicolas Altobelli stated in an interview with BBC News. “Saturn radiates more energy than it’s absorbing from the Sun, meaning there’s gravitational energy which is being lost. And so getting a precise measure of the hydrogen and helium in the upper layers sets a constraint on the overall distribution of the material in the interior.”

NASA hoping to determine precise length of Saturn’s day

Cassini was launched in 1997 and arrived in the Saturn system seven years later, according to CNN. For the past 13 years, it has been studying the gas giant and its moons, but as the mission winds down, the spacecraft is completing final maneuvers before plunging into the atmosphere, where it is expected to burn up on September 15.

Before that can happen, however, the spacecraft has one final phase of its mission to complete – a phase which started on Sunday and will continue over the next month. Data from the first pass through Saturn’s atmosphere is expected to be sent back to Earth when Cassini once again makes contact with ground control on Tuesday, according to BBC News.

Among the information NASA is hoping to ascertain as a result of these final flybys is the actual length of a day on Saturn. While they know it is approximately 10.5 hours long, NASA scientists are hopeful that they will be able to  come up with a more precise figure by looking for an offset between the planet’s magnetic field at its rotational axis. While such an offset should exist, so far scientists thus far have not been able to detect one.

“All magnetic field theory as we know it requires an offset. To generate a field, you need to keep the currents in the metallic hydrogen layer inside Saturn flowing, and without the offset the thinking is that the field would simply go away,” Dr. Spilker told BBC News. “What’s going on? Is something shielding our ability to see the offset, or do we simply need a new theory?”

“Without the tilt, without being able to see the tiny wobble, we cannot be more precise about the length of a day,” she said, adding that her team would keep working on the issue. In addition, the researchers hope to be able to use Cassini’s ion and neutral mass spectrometer (INMS) to collect atmospheric data from the region around Saturn’s cloud tops, NASA said in a statement.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If there’s one thing science enthusiasts love, it’s getting a glimpse of a hard-to-find creature, and a new video that has gone viral this month shows a rare white moose – believed to be just one of an estimated 100 living in Sweden – as it walks through the grass and wades across a stream.

The video, which was posted by BBC News, explained that the white moose – which was spotted in the Varmland province of western Sweden – is not albino. Rather, its white coat is the result of a genetic mutation which causes it to be born with an predominantly unpigmented coat of fur.

This condition is known as piebaldism, and according to the US National Library of Medicine, it occurs a creature lacks the cells that produce melanin (the pigment which produces hair, skin and eye color). Piebaldism can affect humans, as well as horses, dogs, pigs, cats, birds and cattle.

The term piebaldism dates back to the 16th century, and was a combination of the word ‘magpie’ and the older meaning of the term ‘bald’ (‘spotted’ or ‘white’) in reference to the magpie’s black and white colored plumage. Unlike albino creatures, piedbald animals do not have red eyes, and they often have at least some blackish specks or patches of fur mixed into their coats.

How rare are piebald moose, and are they in greater danger?

Earlier this summer, two young, all-white twin moose were captured on video (along with their mother) in Norway, according to National Geographic. Experts are uncertain whether those two moose were albino or piebald, but in either case, their sighting was a rare occurrence indeed.

The calves, whose sighting was reported on back in June, were believed to be less than a month old at the time due to their size and mobility, Lee Kantar, the State Deer and Moose Biologist at Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, told Nat Geo. Kantar added that he believed that the twins would have been born in mid-May, but was unsure why they were all white.

“It’s extremely rare” to spot albino moose calves, he said, and not much more common to come across piebald ones. In fact, while Kantar told the publication that he had encountered thousands of moose while working with wildlife in the US, he had never gotten a first-hand look at one that was pure white, although he typically saw photos of one “every year or two.”

According to Nat Geo, both piebald and albino moose are protected animals in much of Canada, and hunters are prohibited from killing a moose that is predominately white in color. Albino and piebald moose have also been spotted in Alaska, which is one to nearly one-sixth of all moose in North America, the publication added.

“Although they lack the typical brown coat, it’s unknown whether white and albino moose are at a disadvantage in the wild,” said Nat Geo. Kantar explained that moose that have dark fur tend to be harder to spot in their forest habitat, and that the mothers of predominantly white moose could have a much more difficult job in keeping their young offspring safe from potential predators.

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Image credit: BBC

In an attempt to learn more about how ants coordinate to complete tasks, researchers from the Rockefeller University Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior altered a gene required to sense the pheromones that the insects use to communicate with each other.

The result, as reported in the latest edition of the journal Cell, is that the ants ability to organize into groups to build tunnels, forage for food and protect the colony from potential threats became compromised, hampering the insects’ social behavior and ability to survive within a colony.

“It was well known that ant language is produced through pheromones, but now we understand a lot more about how pheromones are perceived,” Dr. Daniel Kronauer, head of the laboratory and lead author of the new study, explained in a statement. “The way ants interact is fundamentally different from how solitary organisms interact, and with these findings we know a bit more about the genetic evolution that enabled ants to create structured societies.”

Ants rely upon a  class of pheromones called hydrocarbons to communicate information such as their species, colony and reproductive status. These pheromone signals are detected by a series of porous hairs on their antennae that contain proteins known as odorant receptors, the authors said. These receptors recognize specific chemicals and communicate information to the brain.

Findings suggest odorant receptors play a key role in ant communication

As part of their research, Dr. Kronauer, grad student Sean McKenzie and their colleagues studied a group of ants belonging to the species Ooceraea biroi and found that these ants used a group of odorant receptor genes identified as 9-exon-alpha ORs to detect hydrocarbons. Next, they studied the genomes of related insects to determine where these receptor genes emerged in these ants.

What they discovered was that the gene had undergone a tremendous amount of duplication in a relatively short period of time. While ancestral ants had a maximum of three copies of the gene, the Ooceraea biroi had approximately 180, the researchers said. Furthermore, the expansion of these receptors happened at the same time that complex social behaviors started evolving in the species, indicating that these genes were an essential to ant communication.

The study authors then disrupted a gene known as orco, which is necessary for the function of odorant receptors, using the CRISPR genome modification tool. The challenge, they explained, was convincing the rest of the colony to accept these mutants rather than killing them off when they were larvae. The researchers then observed those that managed to make it to adulthood.

“We noticed a shift in their behavior almost immediately,” said co-author and graduate fellow Waring Trible. While ants typically follow a single-file route by detecting pheromones left by other members of the colony, the modified insects were unable to do so. Furthermore, the ants who lacked odorant receptors experienced changes in the shape of their brains, indicating that odorant receptors are essential to proper brain development in the species.

“Our findings suggest that ants… need functional odorant receptors for the brain to develop correctly,” Trible said, adding that the discovery “points to how crucial sensing odors is to ants, an ability that may be less important in other insects.” Next, the researchers plan to explore the importance of other genes in ant communication, including those linked to the division of labor amongst members of the colony.

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Image credit: Sean K. McKenzie/The Rockefeller University

A pair of 160-million-year-old fossils recently discovered in China are believed to belong to the oldest known “winged” mammals, suggesting that the Jurassic Period creatures had the ability to glide between trees, according to new research published this week in the journal Nature.

According to BBC News, the creatures apparently possess adaptations such as long limbs, long hand and foot fingers, and wing-like membranes that would have allowed them to climb up trees, roost in branches and glide from one tree to another – meaning that ancient mammals developed these abilities far earlier than experts previously believed.

Indentified as Maiopatagium furculiferum and Vilevolodon diplomylos, the species are believed to be the oldest known gliding mammals, the study authors explained in a statement. In fact, the discovery suggests that ancient mammals evolved the volant (or flying) way of life roughly 100 million years earlier than the first modern flying mammals.

Maiopatagium furculiferum is housed at the Beijing Museum of Natural History. (Credit: Zhe-Xi Luo/University of Chicago)

“In a way, they got the first wings among all mammals,” said study co-author Zhe-Xi Luo, a professor of anatomy and biology from the University of Chicago. “We continue to be surprised by how diverse mammalian forerunners were in both feeding and locomotor adaptations. The groundwork for mammals’ successful diversification today appears to have been laid long ago.”

“It’s amazing that the aerial adaptions occurred so early in the history of mammals,” added co-author David Grossnickle, a graduate student at the University of Chicago. “Not only did these fossils show exquisite fossilization of gliding membranes, their limb, hand and foot proportion also suggests a new gliding locomotion and behavior.”

Findings reveal that early mammals thrived, despite dinosaurs

The new species, Maiopatagium furculiferum and Vilevolodon diplomyl, belong to an extinct branch of the mammalian evolutionary tree known as the haramiyidans – creatures though to be the predecessors of the modern mammal, according to BBC News. They possessed a membrane made of skin that stretched from their fore and hind limbs and allowed them to glide.

In addition to the wing membrane, Maiopatagium had fused wishbones similar to those found in modern birds, and the creatures’ skeletons resembled the platypus, the UK media outlet reported. The fossils were discovered in the Tiaojishan Formation, northeast of Beijing, and they probably were herbivores that dined on ferns, conifers and other gymnosperms, since flowering plants had not yet started becoming prevalent (that happened during the Cretaceous Period).

For a long time, experts believed that mammals from this era had little opportunity to evolve and adapt to different environments, due primarily to competition from dinosaurs. Recently, though, a series of new discoveries – including these two gliding mammals – serve as evidence that there was actually far more variation in mammalian lifestyles at this time than previously thought.

“We think of the Jurassic as ‘dinosaur world’. But fossils keep showing us the great diversity of small mammals doing many of the ecological jobs they do today,” Oxford University vertebrate paleontologist Dr. Roger Benson, who was not involved in the study, said in an interview with BBC News.

“Mammals are more diverse in lifestyles than other modern land vertebrates, but we wanted to find out whether early forerunners to mammals had diversified in the same way,” added Luo. “These new fossil gliders… demonstrate that early mammals did indeed have a wide range of ecological diversity, which means dinosaurs likely did not dominate the Mesozoic landscape as much as previously thought.”

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Image credit: April I. Neander/UChicago

With less than two weeks until the Great American Solar Eclipse, astronomy enthusiasts from all parts of the country are scrambling to acquire eclipse glasses so they can safely view this historic event – but experts are warning that some companies are offering fake, unsafe products.

The eclipse, which will take place on August 21, will be at least partially visible throughout the continental United States and will provide some viewers with the first total solar eclipse in nearly a century, according to the Huffington Post. It will undoubtedly be a historic occasion, but sadly, some unscrupulous firms are trying to make a quick buck by putting your health at risk.

According to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) website, “the marketplace is being flooded by counterfeit eclipse glasses” which manufacturers falsely claim have been certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) when, in fact, they have not. What that means is that these products may not provide the minimum required level of eye protection.

Previously, the AAS advised people to make sure that their glasses contained the printed label “ISO 12312-2” to verify that the product complies with international safety standards for filters of direct viewing of the sun, the Palm Beach Post Weatherplus Blog explained. In light of this latest development, however, they are warning people to only purchase eclipse glasses or solar filters from one of the companies on its list of  reputable vendors.

How can you guarantee that your glasses are actually safe?

The AAS warning comes on the heels of a recent Quartz report alleging that glasses purchased online through Amazon may not necessarily be safe to use during the upcoming eclipse. In fact, just 16 of the top 140 products listed claimed to be manufactured by an AAS-approved firm.

So how do you know if your glasses are safe? The first thing that the agency recommends it to ensure that it contains the ISO 12312-2 (or ISO 12312-2:2015) certification, which should mean that it has been properly evaluated and meets the minimum safety standard for solar viewing.

Of course, as we’ve already established, just because a pair of glasses contains the label doesn’t necessarily mean that it has actually been evaluated. Unfortunately, the AAS explained, there is no easy way to check the glasses for yourself, as evaluating a solar filter requires a costly device called a spectrophotometer to shine UV, visible and infrared light through the filter to determine how much passes through at each of the respective wavelengths.

“Solar filter manufacturers send their products to specialized labs that are accredited to perform the tests necessary to verify compliance with the ISO 12312-2 safety specifications,” they noted. Once manufacturers have obtained paperwork documenting their products as ISO-compliant, the AAS said, they are legally allowed to use the ISO logo on their products and packaging.

That said, you there are things you can do that will alert you to the fact that your glasses may not be safe. If you look at something bright, such as a bright-white LED flashlight or an incandescent light bulb, and they do not appear dim through the glasses, odds are that the solar filter would not be safe for the eclipse. Likewise, if you didn’t get the glasses through a reputable source, or if the filters appear to be torn or otherwise damaged, or if the filters are coming loose from their frame, the AAS recommends discarding them.

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Image credit: Rob Stothard

A massive dinosaur some argue was the largest creature of its kind ever to roam the Earth weighed about 70 tons and was at least 20 feet long, but for several years, the gigantic plant-eater lacked a proper scientific name – an issue which has been remedied in a newly-published paper.

First discovered in 2013 and put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2016, the creature has been named Patagotitan mayorum, a moniker which means “giant from Patagonia” while honoring the family upon whose farm it was found, according to NPR.

Patagotitan was discovered on the Mayo family farm by ranch-hand Aureliano Hernandez, The Atlantic said. The fossil he discovered was an eight-foot-long thigh bone that took two weeks to excavate, and the complete specimen is so large that it could not be confined to a single room at the museum. The creature was named in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“When first news of the finding came out in 2013, the dig was still active,” lead author Dr. José Carballido, a paleontologist at the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio in Argentina, said in a statement. “We had seen many bones on the field that showed certain features that indicated this was a new species and, apparently, the largest one found until then.”

It took Dr. Carballido’s team more than four years to fully excavate and analyze the fossils, in order to determine where it belonged on the evolutionary tree. They believe that Patagotitan is part of a diverse group of sauropod dinosaurs known as titanosauria, NPR explained, and it was likely one of the biggest members of this diverse group of large, long-necked herbivores.

Completeness, not size, the biggest takeaway from the research

Although the ranch-hand died before the excavation was complete, Hernandez’s discovery led to the unearthing of more than 150 fossils belonging to at least six individual creatures, the research team explained in a statement. It led to the discovery not only of one of the largest dinosaurs, but also one of the most complete anatomical reconstructions ever, they added.

“Estimating the body weight of an extinct animal is a challenging task,” study co-author Diego Pol, also of the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio, explained in an interview with NPR. “We only have left the bones and from these remains we have to infer the body weight through the use of indirect methods.” Nonetheless, they assume that the species likely weighed at least 60 and up to 80 tons, making it at least 10% larger than any other dinosaur, The Atlantic noted.

Is it the largest dinosaur ever to roam the Earth? That is debatable, according to paleontologist Mathew Wedel, who said that it is in a “three-way tie” with fellow titanosaurs Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus in terms of overall length and girth. However, he told Smithsonian Magazine that it is “the most complete super-giant sauropod by far.”

The completeness is infinitely more important to paleontologists as they attempt to learn more about how these massive dinosaurs lived, how and why they died, and how old they were when their lives came to an end. The area where the bones were found was a floodplain, and based on their analysis, Carballido’s team concluded that the Patagotitans had visited the region on three separate occasions before ultimately dying there.

Carballido told The Atlantic that is he unsure why the creatures returned to the region, and even though his team found the teeth of carnivores in the region, he doubts that any of these predators would have been able to bring down such enormous prey. He added that he does not know why the species grew to be so large, although their growth appears to have coincided with a warming climate and an increase in the diversity of flowering plants.

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Image credit: G. Lio/PA

A newly-identified species of dinosaur used camouflage to hide from its carnivorous predators, despite the fact that it weighed more than 2,800 pounds (1,300 kg), had a heavily armored body and was essentially the “dinosaur equivalent of a tank,” researchers have discovered.

The creature in question is the Borealopelta markmitchelli, and Royal Tyrrell Museum scientist Caleb Brown and his colleagues analyzed an 110-million-year-old, 18-foot long specimen that is currently on display at the Alberta, Canada after being found in a nearby oil sand mine.

Based on their analysis of the creature’s skin Brown’s team determined that the species exhibited a form of camouflage known as countershading, meaning that its pigmentation was darker on the upper side of its body and lighter on the underside. As they wrote in this week’s issue of Current Biology, this suggests that the behemoth was hunted by even larger predators.

Yes, despite the size of the Borealopelta, its armor was apparently insufficient to protect it from some of the potential threats it face. As Brown explained in a press release, “Strong predation on a massive, heavily-armored dinosaur illustrates just how dangerous the dinosaur predators of the Cretaceous must have been.”

Researchers were stunned by the fossils’ pristine condition

According to BBC News and New Scientist, the specimen was discovered by accident in 2011 by workers at an oil sand mine near Fort McMurray, Alberta. In addition to the revelation that it depended on camouflage for safety, the find was significant because of its pristine condition.

The creature was one of just a handful of dinosaurs to have been preserved in 3D, and the group found a complete head, neck and right forelimb along with a partial left forelimb and torso, said New Scientist. It took more than 7,000 hours of painstaking work to safely retrieve the fossils.

“Normally when we find a dinosaur we find bits and pieces of skeletons and occasionally soft issue,” Brown told the website. “In this case, we have all the skin preserved in the front half of body – so it actually looks like it looked back in the Cretaceous.”

“The result is that… you don’t need to use much imagination to reconstruct it; if you just squint your eyes a bit, you could almost believe it was sleeping,” he continued in a statement. “It will go down in science history as one of the most beautiful and best-preserved dinosaur specimens – the Mona Lisa of dinosaurs.”

Thanks to the condition of the dinosaur, Brown and his colleagues were able to document the pattern and shape of its scales, spikes and armor. Furthermore, they were able to analyze organic chemical compounds in its scales to determine that it had a reddish-brown pigmentation pattern with countershading throughout its body. While countershading is not uncommon, most modern creatures that possess the trait are far smaller than Borealopelta, the authors noted.

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Image credit: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palentology 

You might want to think twice about using a kitchen sponge to clean off your dishes, as a new study published this month in the journal Scientific Reports has found that the objects could be contaminated with a plethora of potentially disease-causing bacteria and other microbes.

As part of their research, Furtwangen University Professor Dr. Markus Egert and his colleagues sequenced the microbial DNA of 14 used kitchen sponges and found high concentrations of such bacteria as Moraxella osloensis, a pathogen that can cause infections in those with weak immune systems and is known for producing a pungent odor, according to Science.

More than 360 different types of bacteria were discovered, including strains related to those that cause pneumonia and meningitis, the study authors explained in a statement. On the plus side, at least fecal bacteria and micobes responsible for causing food poisoning and dysentery were rare.

“What surprised us was that five of the ten which we most commonly found, belong to the so-called risk group 2, which means they are potential pathogens,” Dr. Egert explained, noting that there are 40 million households in Germany. If each had at least one or two kitchen sponges, that means that there could be more than 80 million miniature germ factories in that country alone.

“Sometimes the bacteria achieved a concentration of more than 5 times 10¹⁰ cells per cubic centimeter,” he added. “Those are concentrations which one would normally only find in fecal samples. And levels which should never be reached in a kitchen. These high concentrations can be explained by the optimal conditions the bacteria find in the sponge: besides the large surface area for growth, there are high levels of moisture and nutrients from food residue and dirt.”

Forget about sterilizing old kitchen sponges – just buy new ones

No big deal, right? All you have to do is periodically boil or microwave the sponges to sterilize them. Not exactly, the study authors warn: sponges that had been regularly sanitized using these methods were actually found to have a higher percentage of bacteria than uncleaned sponges.

Why? The researchers explained that while boiling or microwaving sponges does indeed result in a short-term decrease in the number of pathogens, those that survive the process become resistant to cleaning attempts, not unlike how gut bacteria become stronger after we take antibiotics.

“Our work demonstrated that kitchen sponges harbor a higher bacterial diversity than previously thought… [and] from a long term perspective, sponge sanitation methods appear not sufficient to effectively reduce the bacterial load in kitchen sponges,” Dr. Egert’s team reported. In fact, they said, such sterilization attempts “might even increase” potentially-harmful bacteria content.

Instead of attempting to boil or microwave sponges, the authors recommend regularly replacing them, perhaps on a weekly basis. This is especially true in places such as hospitals or retirement homes, where patients or residents may have weak immune systems and be more susceptible to such harmful pathogens. No microbial contamination was found in recently bought sponges.