A 200 million-year-old parasite has been discovered in fossilised poo, in the latest not-at-all-scary instance of scientists unearthing a species which blighted the Earth in ancient times. Researchers found that the earliest predators on the planet were infested with roundworm, also known as nematodes, among multiple other parasites. The fossilised poo, which is known to palaeontologists as coprolite, is thought to belong to a type of semi-aquatic phytosaur, which was a crocodile-like predator. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It comes weeks after another team revived a prehistoric worm – the catchily named Panagrolaimus kolymaensis – which was found dormant in the Siberian permafrost in a state of “cryptobiosis”. The latest study saw researchers from Mahasarakham University, Thailand, analyse a three-inch-long portion of ancient poo and discover five types of parasitic remnants. The group sliced open the parasitic egg fossils with a diamond saw using a “standard thin section method,” their report said. The ultra-thin slices allowed the palaeontologists to look at cross-sections of the ancient infectious microbes under a microscope. One was identified as a nematode worm egg, while the others are thought to be either more eggs, protozoan cysts or spores from moss and ferns. While modern parasites are often an important part of ecosystems, it is usually more difficult to work out what their ancient equivalents did, because there are so few examples in the fossil record. The creatures often inhabited the soft tissues of their hosts, but are rarely preserved as fossils, making the latest discovery all-the-more significant. This fossilised late Triassic-era coprolite (the poo), was shielded from the elements in the Huai Hin Lat geological formation in Thailand, which is over 200 million years old. It was found by local villagers, according to the study's lead author, paleontologist Thanit Nonsrirach. “The peculiar appearance of these findings intrigued the villagers, who considered them potentially auspicious and capable of bestowing good luck if repurposed as talismans,” Nonsrirach told news outlet Inverse. “In 2010, our team received word of this discovery and embarked on a field expedition, guiding the villagers to the actual fossil site.” The discovery is the first record of parasites in a terrestrial vertebrate host from the late Triassic period in Asia, and provides a rare look at the life of an ancient creature that was infected by multiple species. This discovery also adds to the few known examples of nematode eggs preserved within the coprolites of Mesozoic animals. “Parasites of several species, including Ascaridida (roundworm) eggs were found in a coprolite, probably produced by a crocodile-like reptile and possibly a phytosaur,” said Nonsrirach, who works at Mahasarakham University's Palaeontological Research and Education Center. “This is therefore the first discovery of Ascaridida eggs and evidence of multi-infection in a host assignable to the Crurotarsi from the Late Triassic of Asia. “Coprolite is a significant palaeontological treasure trove, containing several undiscovered fossils and expanding our understanding of ancient ecosystems and food chains. “These findings are therefore a significant contribution to scientific understanding of the distribution and ecology of parasites of the distant past.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Adin Ross and IShowSpeed are apparently in the same height bracket, though Ross appears to have a slight advantage

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ARLINGTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 8, 2023--

(Reuters) -Meta Platforms is considering paid versions of Facebook and Instagram with no advertisements for users residing in the European

Nasa has “inadvertently” lost contact with Voyager 2, its pioneering spacecraft. The space agency said that it had sent a series of planned commands to the probe on 21 July. But those moves left Voyager 2 pointing in the wrong direction: its antenna is now pointing two degrees away from Earth, and so it has lost contact with its engineers. It cannot either receive commands or send back data, Nasa said. Ordinarily, it would do so by establishing contact with the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which is a set of ground-based antennas that allow for communications with distant spacecraft. But the data being sent by Voyager 2 is not reaching that network. Voyager 2 is now floating on its own, almost 20 billion kilometres from Earth. Nasa still hopes to be able to re-establish contact with the probe, however. It is programmed to automatically reset its orientation a number of times each year, to push its antenna back to Earth. The next reset is expected to happen on 15 October, Nasa said. Until then, the space agency expects the probe to “remain on its planned trajectory during the quiet period”, it said. As its name suggests, Voyager 2 was part of a pair, both of which were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is floating even further from Earth – at 24 billion kilometres – and Nasa says it is continuing to operate as normal. The Voyager programme brought with it a host of records: Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune, and together they are the only spacecraft made by humans to ever have entered interstellar space. Even almost 50 years since they were launched, the pair of Voyager spacecraft have continued to send back useful and important information to Nasa for examination by scientists on Earth. They have contributed to a host of new findings about the very distant edges of our solar system. Read More How to take the perfect picture of tonight's supermoon Elon Musk installs huge, glowing letter on top of his office A game where you go to sleep in real life is one of the most popular in the world

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Scientists have just created an entirely new state of matter made out of subatomic particles. The bosonic correlated insulator, to be precise, is both a new material and a new state of matter, said researchers from California, Arizona and Japan. There are four fundamental states of matter, liquid, solid, gas and plasma – an electrically charged gas found in situations like stars and lightning strikes. But there are many others when you drill down to quantum level (that means at an atomic and subatomic level). The scientists said this is a new one. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The new material is a lattice-shaped pattern, formed from a layer of the two different types of subatomic particles: bosons and fermions. Bosons are a type of particle which is difficult for scientists to create and manipulate because they do not interact with each other. Fermions are more stable – particles such as electrons – and interact through electrostatic force. The material sees the two different types of particle combining and interacting in a new way, with the particles eventually form into a crystalline state, which in turn creates a material which has an insulating effect. “Conventionally, people have spent most of their efforts to understand what happens when you put many fermions together,” says condensed matter physicist Chenhao Jin from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “The main thrust of our work is that we basically made a new material out of interacting bosons.” The new material doesn’t yet have any practical uses, but exotic creations like this help scientists understand how the universe is put together, the team said. “What happened here is that we discovered the correlation that drove the bosons into a highly ordered state,” said physicist Richen Xiong, from UCSB. The scientists think the discovery could lead to them finding more materials like this further down the line. “We know that some materials have very bizarre properties,” said Xiong. “And one goal of condensed matter physics is to understand why they have these rich properties and find ways to make these behaviours come out more reliably.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Anyone who has braved a stroll along England's coastline will be aware of seagulls' tyrannical regime. They prey on people eating chips, they swoop down on unsuspecting holidaymakers licking an ice cream, and they can be quite aggressive indeed. And now, terrifying research has revealed that they are more calculating than you may have previously thought. A University of Sussex study on herring gulls at Brighton beach found that the birds choose what to eat by watching what humans are enjoying. Scientists taped green (salt and vinegar) and blue (cheese and onion) packets of Walkers crisps to tiles and placed them a few metres from gulls on Brighton beach and filmed the birds’ behaviour from a distance. In some cases, the researchers ate from one of the bags of crisps. When the scientists didn't eat, less than a fifth of gulls approached the crisp packets placed nearby. But when the researchers were snacking on crisps, 48 per cent of the birds came to check out the packets. Nearly 40 per cent of such approaches ended with gulls pecking at the crisp packets, and of these, 95 per cent were directed at the same colour packet as the scientist was eating from. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “We’ve shown that adult gulls are able to pay attention to the behaviour of humans and apply that to their own foraging choices,” said Franziska Feist, a biologist and first author on the study. “Given that the urbanisation of gulls is very recent, this ability must come from the gulls’ general smartness and behavioural flexibility.” “It is likely that simply deterring the public from directly feeding gulls may not be enough,” Feist said. “They are still able to observe what we eat and that would inform their ability to target waste, litter and so on.” Dr Madeleine Goumas, an expert on herring gulls at Exeter University who was not involved in the study, said: “We already know from previous research that gulls use information from people when they’re searching for food. “This study shows that we aren’t only drawing gulls’ attention to where food is, but they also learn about the type of food we’re eating. Knowing this may have implications for how we reduce negative interactions between humans and gulls, as we seem to be inadvertently teaching gulls to exploit new food items.” Meanwhile, past alarming research revealed that gulls prefer food that has been touched by people. Overall, it's giving Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.