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If you never understood what “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” meant in high school, don’t worry: biologists no longer think that an animal’s “ontogeny”, that is, its embryonic development, replays its entire evolutionary history. Instead, the new way to figure out how animals evolved is to compare regulatory networks that control gene expression patterns, particularly embryonic ones, across species.

(Phys.org) —A small team of researchers with members from several countries has identified the oldest known instance of a type of mite fossil. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, the team describes how they obtained a piece of amber with an ant embedded inside of it along with a mite that was attached to the ant’s head, and what their work revealed.

The Information Technology Research Institute of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has developed a technology with which once an environment to perform high-performance computing has been established, a virtual cluster-type computer can easily be built on a different cloud and made available for immediate use.

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers with members from Rutgers University and Los Alamos National Laboratory has found a way to get around the problem of metals forming high-resistance when deposited on 2H phase molybdenum disulphide (MoS2). In their paper published in the journal Nature Materials, the team describes how they came up with a process for inducing 2H phase nanosheets to the metallic 1T phase, thereby reducing contact resistance.

Experts defend operational earthquake forecasting (OEF) in an editorial published in the Seismological Research Letters (SRL), arguing the importance of public communication as part of a suite of activities intended to improve public safety and mitigate damage from earthquakes. In a related article, Italian scientists detail the first official OEF system in Italy.

The chemical uniformity of stars in the same cluster is the result of turbulent mixing in the clouds of gas where star formation occurs, according to a study by astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their results, published August 31 in Nature, show that even stars that don’t stay together in a cluster will share a chemical fingerprint with their siblings which can be used to trace them to the same birthplace.

(Phys.org) —A multinational team of researchers has published a paper in the journal Nature, offering a way towards better global planning for road construction. They highlight the benefits of road building along with detriments and include maps of the world they’ve constructed that indicate where road building would be economically beneficial, where it would be ecologically harmful and where it would be both

Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ), and the University of Vienna have developed a fundamentally new quantum imaging technique with strikingly counterintuitive features. For the first time, an image has been obtained without ever detecting the light that was used to illuminate the imaged object, while the light revealing the image never touches the imaged object.

In recent years, increasing pressure from policymakers, consumers, and suppliers has prompted manufacturers to set environmental targets that go beyond reducing the pollutants they emit from their smokestacks or discharge into rivers and lakes. Today companies must also assess environmental performance at every step in their process, from the mining of primary materials to the use and recycling of their products.

(Phys.org) —Graphene has already been demonstrated to be useful in Li-ion batteries, despite the fact that the graphene used often contains defects. Large-scale fabrication of graphene that is chemically pure, structurally uniform, and size-tunable for battery applications has so far remained elusive