How To Fall Asleep And Why We Need More 

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2,000-Year-Old Killer Whale Geoglyph Found in Peru Desert

Archaeologists rediscovered a giant geoglyph of a killer whale, etched into a desert hillside in the remote Palpa region of southern Peru, after it had been lost to science for more than 50 years.

The 230-foot-long (70 meters) figure of an orca — considered a powerful, semimythical creature in ancient Peruvian lore — may be more than 2,000 years old, according to the researchers.

They said it may be one the oldest geoglyphs in the Palpa region, and older than those in the nearby Nazca region, which is famous for its vast collection of ancient ground markings — the Nazca Lines — that include animal figures, straight lines and geometrical shapes.

Archaeologist Johny Isla, the head of Peru’s Ministry of Culture in Ica province, which includes the Palpa and Nazca valleys, explained that he saw a single photograph of the orca pattern for the first time about four years ago. He’d seen it while researching studies of geoglyphs at the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn. Read more.

A paper published this week confirmed a piece of speculation going all the way back to Darwin.

Chemistry and Corpses: The Science of Bog Studies

Biologists create beetle with functional extra eye

On “Game of Thrones,” a three-eyed raven holds the secrets of the past, present and future in a vast fantasy kingdom. But for real-world biologists, a “three-eyed beetle” may offer a true glimpse into the future of studying evolutionary development.

Using a simple genetic tool, IU scientists have intentionally grown a fully functional extra eye in the center of the forehead of the common beetle. Unraveling the biological mechanisms behind this occurrence could help researchers understand how evolution draws upon pre-existing developmental and genetic “building blocks” to create novel complex traits, or “old” traits in novel places.

The study’s results appear in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work also provides deeper insights into an earlier experiment that accidentally produced an extra eye as part of a study to understand how the insect head develops.

“Developmental biology is beautifully complex in part because there’s no single gene for an eye, a brain, a butterfly’s wing or a turtle’s shell,” said Armin P. Moczek, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Biology. “Instead, thousands of individual genes and dozens of developmental processes come together to enable the formation of each of these traits.

Eduardo E. Zattara, Anna L. M. Macagno, Hannah A. Busey, Armin P. Moczek. Development of functional ectopic compound eyes in scarabaeid beetles by knockdown oforthodenticle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 114 (45): 12021 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1714895114

The creation of three-eyed beetles through a new technique developed at IU provides scientists a new way to investigate the genetic mechanisms responsible for the evolutionary emergence of new physical traits.Credit: Photo by Eduardo Zattara

Sand Dollar: It’s Alive!

I did not know that either. That is one HUGE sea turtle.

Drilling Through Ice in the Hunt of Celestial Life

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