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It took seven editors and 26 authors nine years to compile the first ever Reptile Atlas for all reptiles found in the southern tip of Africa. This huge collaborative effort resulted in the 485-page Atlas and Red List of the Reptiles of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland – a hardcover book launched recently that also contains the conservation status of the 421 recognised species and subspecies of reptiles found in these three countries.

Scientists at Tsinghua University, China, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have designed an intrinsic-disperse nanocarbon architecture hybridizing N-doped graphene and SWCNTs, which can serve as a superior bifunctional electrocatalyst for both oxygen reduction and evolution reactions.

An international team of researchers comprised of Thomas Wesener, Museum Koenig, Bonn, Daniel Le, Field Museum, Chicago and Stephanie Loria, American Museum of Natural History, New York, discovered seven new species of chirping giant pill-millipedes on Madagascar. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

The transport routes of nutrients and messenger cargos can be compared to the traffic system of a city: A worldwide unique quantitative study of cell biologists of the University of Zurich shows that cells regulate the main routes, side routes and intersections by an intricate traffic control system, which guides the spatial and temporal distribution of substances within the cell.

(Phys.org) —Astronomers studying two classes of black-hole-powered galaxies monitored by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have found evidence that they represent different sides of the same cosmic coin. By unraveling how these objects, called blazars, are distributed throughout the universe, the scientists suggest that apparently distinctive properties defining each class more likely reflect a change in the way the galaxies extract energy from their central black holes.

During the past few decades, the field of biology has dramatically expanded, incorporating many diverse sub-disciplines and specialty areas such as microbiology and evolutionary biology. However, teaching biology to undergraduate students has not kept pace with the changes, and core biology curriculum varies widely from university to university, and classroom to classroom.

A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA’s newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun’s atmosphere with better resolution than ever before

Block copolymers (BCPs) are the most attractive alternative to date for the fabrication of well-defined complex periodic structures with length scales below 100 nm. Such small structures might be used in a wide range of technological applications but current available methods are very expensive, especially when those structures present length scales under 20 nm. 

Nanoscale magnetic swirls known as skyrmions can form in certain materials such as thin magnetic films. These tiny vortices pack into dense lattices that are more stable than conventional magnetic domains and can be transported and manipulated with minimal electrical power—features that hold great promise for future information storage applications