“In 2011, mammoth ivory hunters in northeastern Siberia discovered a mummified wolf puppy that had lain frozen for 14,400 years. An autopsy of the permafrost-preserved pup revealed another surprise: its gut contained chunks of grayish meat covered with strands of golden hair.

‘The tissue was so intact, it looked like the wolf had just swallowed it before it died,’ says Camilo Chacón-Duque, an evolutionary geneticist who previously worked at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm and is now at Uppsala University in Sweden. 

Ancient DNA retrieved from the wolf cub’s final meal revealed the tissue belonged to a woolly rhinoceros. Chacón-Duque and his team used the devoured morsel to reconstruct the woolly rhino’s entire genome—the first time scientists have sequenced an Ice Age animal’s complete genome from the contents of another animal’s stomach. They published their findings on Wednesday in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.”

From National Geographic.

“Scientists have detected some of the oldest signs of life on Earth using a new method that recognizes chemical fingerprints of living organisms in ancient rocks, an approach that also holds promise in the search for life beyond our planet.

The researchers found evidence of microbial life in rocks about 3.3 billion years old from South Africa, when Earth was roughly a quarter its current age. They also found molecular traces left by microbes that engaged in oxygen-producing photosynthesis – conversion of sunlight into energy – in rocks about 2.5 billion years old from South Africa.

The scientists developed an approach, harnessing machine learning, to distinguish in ancient rocks between organic molecules with a biological origin – like from microbes, plants and animals – and organic molecules with a nonliving origin at greater than 90% accuracy. The method was designed to discern chemical patterns unique to biology.”

From Reuters.

“In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antimatter Factory report a new technique that allows them to produce over 15 000 antihydrogen atoms – the simplest form of atomic antimatter – in a matter of hours.

“These numbers would have been considered science fiction 10 years ago,” said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment. “With larger numbers of antihydrogen atoms now more readily available, we can investigate atomic antimatter in greater detail and at a faster pace than before.”

To create atomic antihydrogen (a positron orbiting an antiproton), the ALPHA collaboration must produce and trap clouds of antiprotons and positrons separately, then cool them down and merge them so that antihydrogen atoms can form. This process has been refined and steadily improved over many years. But now, using a pioneering technique to cool the positrons, the ALPHA team has increased the rate of production of antihydrogen atoms eightfold.”

From CERN.

“Scientists may have ‘seen’ dark matter for the first time, thanks to NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. If so, this would mark the first direct detection of the universe’s most mysterious substance…

A team of researchers, led by Tomonori Totani from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo, trained the Fermi spacecraft on the regions of the Milky Way where dark matter should congregate, namely at the center of our galaxy, and hunted for this telltale gamma-ray signature.

Well, Totani thinks we finally found that signature.

‘We detected gamma rays with a photon energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (or 20 billion electronvolts, an extremely large amount of energy) extending in a halolike structure toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy,’ Totani said. ‘The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo.’

And this isn’t the only close match. The energy signature of these gamma-rays closely matches those predicted to emerge from the annihilation of colliding WIMPs, which are predicted to have a mass around 500 times that of a proton, the ordinary matter particles found at the heart of atoms. Totani suggests there aren’t any other astronomical phenomena that easily explain the gamma-rays observed by Fermi.”

From Space.com.