Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Despite their size, pumas aren't technically "big cats," a title reserved for the family Pantherinae. (credit: By Wolves201 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60454559)

When you’re an 80kg (180lb) apex predator with massive teeth and claws, the world is your litter box—but you might have to wait a few thousand years for someone to come along and clean it up. Archaeologists recently scooped up a dried piece of 16,500-year-old puma feces (called a coprolite) from the floor of the Peñas de las Trampas rock shelter in the mountains of northwest Argentina.

The cold, dry environment helped preserve the material, along with its cargo of a few dozen roundworm eggs, well enough for parasitologist Romina Petrigh and her colleagues to sequence DNA from the eggs. The result is the oldest DNA ever recovered from feces and the oldest parasite DNA ever sequenced.

Big cats and tiny worms

Mitochondrial DNA from the coprolite itself revealed what had left the evidence behind: a puma, the largest member of the family Felidae, which also includes domestic cats. The dried-up calling card showed that Ice Age pumas shared the southernmost reaches of South America with giant ground sloths, now-extinct American horses, and the relatives of modern alpacas and llamas. It also offers a sample of the less-charismatic part of the ecosystem: the parasites that infected the local megafauna. The combination is a snapshot of the complex, untouched world people first walked into around 15,000 years ago (as far as we know based on current evidence; the human settlement timeline is regularly revised as new sites turn up).

Enlarge / Paul Martin, then the nominee for Inspector General for NASA, answers questions during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in 2009. (credit: NASA)

On Tuesday, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin wrote a rather extraordinary letter to the US senators who determine the budget for the space agency. In effect, the independent NASA official asked Congress to kindly not meddle in decisions that concern actual rocket science.

The letter addressed which rocket NASA should use to launch its multibillion dollar mission to explore Jupiter's Moon Europa, an intriguing ice-encrusted world that likely harbors a vast ocean beneath the surface. NASA is readying a spacecraft, called the Europa Clipper, for a launch to the Jupiter system to meet a 2023 launch window.

Congress, in appropriations legislation, has for several years mandated that the space agency launch the Clipper mission on the Space Launch System rocket—the large, powerful, and very costly heavy-lift rocket that has earned the sobriquet Senate Launch System because its design and construction was mandated by senators nearly a decade ago. However, the rocket remains under development and probably will not fly for the first time until mid- or late 2021 at the earliest. And NASA has said that if it is to have any chance of landing humans on the Moon by 2024, the goal set by US Vice President Mike Pence, it must have the first three SLS rocket launches for the Artemis Moon program.