Mars' Gale Crater could have hosted life

Scientists with NASA's Mars Curiosity rover mission have found that Gale Crater had the right physical and chemical conditions for life for 700 million years — and for part of that history, held a lake that could have hosted a wide variety of microbial life. The findings, published in the journal Science, document a long-lasting Martian environment that had the potential to host a wide variety of living things. But what was that ancient body of water like? In the new study, scientists have put together the evidence from several spots along Curiosity's journey to and up Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high mound in the middle of the crater. The results revealed a wealth of the ingredients needed for life as we know it, including organic carbon compounds, nitrogen, and phosphate minerals, as well as iron and sulfur minerals in different redox states.

T. rex had scaly skin and no feathers

Tyrannosaurus rex was an odd animal, a predator with teeth the size of bananas, a massive head and tiny arms. Given that many dinosaurs had feathers, could T. rex have been even weirder — a giant carnivore with a downy coat? A new study in the journal Biology Letters crushes any tyrant chicken dreams: T. rex was covered in scales. The new research "shows without question that T. rex had scaly skin," study author Phil Bell, a paleontologist at Australia's University of New England, said.

A fish fathers a near clone of itself

A female and male get together. One thing leads to another, and they have sex. His sperm fuses with her egg, half of his DNA combining with half of her DNA to form an embryo. As humans, this is how we tend to think of reproduction. But scientists have discovered a fish carrying genes only from its father in the nucleus of its cells. Squalius alburnoides, which inhabits rivers in Portugal or Spain, is the first documented instance in vertebrates of a father producing a near clone of itself through sexual reproduction — a rare phenomenon called androgenesis. Males produce sperm cells that do not divide, and therefore contain more than one chromosome set. On occasion, it seems, sperm with multiple chromosome sets provide all the genetic material needed for a viable offspring.

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