An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of the world’s oldest known fossil primate skeleton representing a previously unknown genus and species named Archicebus achilles.

The fossil was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province, near the course of the modern Yangtze River. In addition to being the oldest known example of an early primate skeleton, the new fossil is crucial for illuminating a pivotal event in primate and human evolution—the evolutionary divergence between the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes and humans (collectively known as anthropoids) on the one hand and that leading to living tarsiers on the other. The scientific paper describing the discovery appears today in the prestigious journal Nature.

The fossil was recovered from sedimentary rock strata that were deposited in an ancient lake roughly 55 million years ago, during the early part of the Eocene epoch. This was an interval of global “greenhouse” conditions, when much of the world was shrouded in tropical rainforests and palm trees grew as far north as Alaska. Like most other fossils recovered from ancient lake strata, the skeleton of Archicebus was found by splitting apart the thin layers of rock containing the fossil. As a result, the skeleton of Archicebus is now preserved in two complementary pieces called a “part” and a “counterpart,” each of which contain elements of the actual skeleton as well as impressions of bones from the other side.

The skeleton of Archicebus is about 7 million years older than the oldest fossil primate skeletons known previously, which include Darwinius from Messel in Germany and Notharctus from the Bridger Basin in Wyoming. Furthermore, Archicebus belongs to an entirely separate branch of the primate evolutionary tree that lies much closer to the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes and humans. Darwinius and Notharctus, on the other hand, are adapiform primates that are early relatives of living lemurs, the most distant branch of the primate family tree with respect to humans and other anthropoids.

Statistical analyses aimed at reconstructing how much an adult Archicebus would have weighed in life show that it was slightly smaller than the smallest living primates, which are pygmy mouse lemurs from Madagascar. Archicebus would have weighed about 20-30 grams (~ 1 ounce).Dr. Marian Dagosto notes that, “Even though Archicebus appears to be a very basal member of the tarsier lineage, it resembles early anthropoids in several features, including its small eyes and monkey-like feet. It suggests that the common ancestor of tarsiers and anthropoids was in some ways more similar than most scientists have thought.”

The new fossil takes its name from the Greek arche (meaning beginning or first; the same root as archaeology) and the Latin cebus (meaning long-tailed monkey). The species name achilles (derived from the mythological Greek warrior Achilles) highlights the new fossil’s unusual heel bone.

For the first time, scientists have mapped the structure of a metallic glass on the atomic scale, bringing them closer to understanding where the liquid ends and the solid begins in glassy materials. The findings could help explain the mystery of why glasses, or disordered solids form.

At the liquid-glass transition, the melt doesn't become solid at a distinct point, but becomes gradually more viscous until it is rigid. When crystalline solids - such as graphite, salt and diamonds - form they become abruptly rigid as the atoms form a regular, periodic arrangement. Glass never develops into an ordered atomic arrangement,but seems to retain the disordered structure of the liquid, despite its solidity.

This disordered structure gives glasses unique properties. Metallic glasses have a higher strength-to-weight ratio than aluminium and titanium alloys and are extremely promising structural materials with unique applications as biomaterials and microelectromechanical systems.

Led by Dr Amelia Liu from Monash University's School of Physics and the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy, the researchers found that the structure of this Zr-based glass was not random, but composed in large part by efficiently arranged 13-atom icosohedral clusters. cosahedra have 20 faces, 12 vertices and 12 axes of five-fold symmetry, which means they cannot be packed into an ordered three dimensional, crystalline structure.

“It has long been theorised that icosahedra were a key atomic motif in the structure of metallic glasses and could, in fact, underlie glass formation. We have provided the first experimental confirmation of this,” Dr Liu said.“Our findings also point the way towards understanding the glass transition from liquid to solid – a grand challenge in modern condensed matter physics.”

The researchers - from Monash, the University of Melbourne, the Australian Synchrotron, Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University in the US – developed a new electron scattering technique. By analysing the diffraction patterns from nano-scale volumes in the glass, they were able to identify symmetries in individual atomic clusters in the Zr-glass. Previous techniques had not provided sufficient detail to do this.Dr Liu said that the new technique can now be used to understand the structure of other glasses and help progress the study of disordered materials.

Scientists will retrace Sir Douglas Mawson's 1911-1914 expedition to Antarctica in November, the University of New South Wales  announced Tuesday.A team of 46 researchers and would-be explorers will set out from Hobart, the capital of Australia's southern Tasmania island state, for a six-week journey to repeat measurements made by Mawson's team 100 years ago, including observations of the ocean, wildlife, weather, geology and ice cover.

"Antarctica remains one of the last, great unexplored regions on Earth. It is a unique place to monitor the health of our planet. We want to discover just how much has changed since Mawson's time, " said Chris Turney, professor at the UNSW Climate Change Research Center. The 1.5 million AU dollars (1.46 million U.S. dollars) privately-funded expedition also aims to recapture and share the excitement of scientific exploration and discovery, using the latest technologies to communicate with school children and the public back home in Australia.

The researchers will take measurements of the ocean water, visit sub-Antarctic islands where they will collect sediment cores from lakes and peat bogs, and study the wildlife.They will also drill ice cores and take geological samples to study the changing shape of the ice sheet. A drone will survey from the air and some adventurous scientists hope to venture under the ice.

Phosphorus is a precious element, with all life depending on it. It is an essential nutrient for plant growth and an important constituent of fertilizer used in agriculture.Phosphorus is often removed during waste water treatment because it can lead to algal blooms in waterways. It is traditionally removed from waste water streams using chemical or biological processes before the water is discharged to the environment.

Waste water streams typically contain low concentrations of phosphorus, making direct recovery of phosphorus both technically and economically challenging. However, a team from CSIRO has developed a technique that can recover phosphorus from these low concentrations to provide a valuable resource.The conventional biological treatment process known as enhanced biological phosphorus removal removes phosphorus from waste water by selectively enriching a group of bacteria known as polyphosphate accumulating organisms.

CSIRO’s novel approach, termed enhanced biological phosphorus removal and recovery, exploits this unique characteristic of the organisms to ‘carry’ the phosphorus from the diluted waste water stream over to a concentrated recovery stream.

The phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream was approximately four times that of the concentration in the original waste water.The result was a phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream that was approximately four times that of the phosphorus concentration in the original waste water.The novel approach has applications for waste water treatment utilities and fertilizer producers alike.Further research is underway to increase the phosphorus concentration in the recovery stream.This research is being delivered through the Urban Water Technologies Stream of CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country Flagship.