Month: November 2021

Enlarge / In this artist's representation, Tetrapodophis amplectus glides through a tangle of branches from the conifer Duartenia araripensis that have fallen into the water, sharing this habitat with a water bug in the family Belostomatidae and small fish. (credit: Julius Csotonyi)

The discovery of a rare Cretaceous fossil that could have been a missing link in the evolution of modern snakes made headlines in 2015. It was dubbed Tetrapodophis amplectus ("four-footed serpent") and proved controversial from the start, with some paleontologists questioning the interpretation that it was a protosnake. Now there is strong evidence that this latter view may be the correct one and that the specimen is more likely an early type of lizard, according to a a new paper published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.

Paleontologists have long suspected that snakes evolved from lizards at some point in the distant past, gradually losing their limbs. Thus, there should be an evolutionary predecessor with four limbs. This prediction was bolstered in 2006 with the discovery of a transitional snake-like fossil (Najash rionegrina) with two hind limbs dating back some 95 million years. There is also an ongoing debate about whether snakes originated in a marine or terrestrial environment, and the 2006 fossil supported the latter hypothesis.

Then, in 2015, the University of Portsmouth's David Martill and co-author Nicholas Longrich of the University of Bath published a description of a four-legged fossil they claimed was the first known example of a four-legged protosnake with forelimbs and hindlimbs in the fossil record. Martill had stumbled across the fossil at the Museum Solnhofen in Germany, part of a larger exhibition of fossils from the Cretaceous Period.

Real Water sold in jugs. (credit: FDA)

At least 25 people in two states were likely poisoned by toxic batches of the "Re²al Alkalized Water," including five children who suffered acute liver failure and one person who died.

That's according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday, which lays out the findings of a multistate investigation into the toxic water. Health investigators suspect additional poisonings went undetected. They noted in their report that hospital records indicated an unusual spike in unexplained "toxic liver diseases" around the time of the poisonings.

The toxic water made headlines earlier this year when health investigators initially linked alkalized water sold by Nevada-based water company Real Water to severe illnesses in five children in Clark County, Nevada. But the new report from the CDC offers the most complete look at the identified cases and illnesses.

Enlarge / Hubble Space Telescope above Earth, photographed during STS-125, Servicing Mission 4, May 2009. (credit: NASA)

Earlier this month, NASA announced that the scientific instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope had been left in safe mode after a series of problems with the timing signals that coordinate their activity. While NASA is still uncertain about the cause of the problem, it has already returned one camera to operations and plans to bring a second online shortly.

Meanwhile, the agency is making plans for updates that would make all instruments less sensitive to failures of the timing signals. But, since it can't figure out the source of the problems, and the problem hasn't recurred recently, it's moving very cautiously.

It’s all in the timing

Each of the Hubble's four major scientific instruments has its own control hardware; to get all of them to play nicely with each other, the telescope uses a synchronization signal to ensure that all activities operate on the same timeline. Late in October, some of these synchronization messages weren't received, which caused the instruments to go into what's called safe mode, meaning they stop collecting data. After the problem recurred, the instruments were left in that mode while controllers tried to discern what was happening.