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Researchers at the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute in France, have found that not only do aphids produce carotenoids, but the amount they produce seems to be directly influenced by the amount of sunshine they receive in their daily life

Carotenoids are pigments that in most animals are obtained via consumption of other organisms that create it via photosynthesis

Aphids

are able to synthesize them all by themselves, making them stand out

Researchers aren’t sure why they do so, but many other animals rely on carotenoids to help bolster a strong immunity system

carotenoids in aphids are responsible for their color

high levels are green, those with very low levels are white, and those in-between are orange.

In this new research the team found that the levels of carotenoids in the aphids appeared to correlate with levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP),

the way to measure the transfer of energy in living things

higher the level of carotenoids were the more ATP was present

when the team moved orange aphids in and out of direct sunlight, levels of carotenoids and ATP rose and sunk

suggesting the insect was getting energy directly through such exposure

stopped at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to shoot prototype shuttle Enterprise before it was moved to New York City

we had written the Chasing Atlantis Twitter account and site URL on our cars

A NASA software engineer, Ryan Horan, saw our car with Paul shooting out the window as we passed by the sign for the Kennedy Space Center. He was interested in our project and sent us a tweet.

arranged

to join one of the first tours following the reopening of the Vehicle Assembly Building to the public.

The building is monstrously huge. It will generate its own weather system inside, sometimes producing micro-rain clouds.

The film was completely self-funded

posting an Indie-Go-Go or Kickstarter profile up in hopes of helping to cover the post-production costs

Martian day

is about 24 hours, 39 minutes

Mars Clock, by SunlightAndTime, is a 99-cent app that displays Mars time and a host of other Mars time goodies

for your Apple device

Features include local mean solar time for the rover, coordinated Mars time, sunrise and sunset times for the Curiosity landing site (I think this might be the coolest feature), current season, a countdown to landing feature (which is counting up since MSL landed on Mars on August 5th), current Earth time, a distance calculator between the Earth and Mars and radio communications delay estimate.

also has additional color calibration tools for the rover’s Mastcam

; in addition to the words “Mars 2012″ and “To Mars, To Explore” around its top bezel,

along its edge

Along with line drawings and the word for “Mars” in sixteen languages, Curiosity’s sundial bears the following inscription

“For millennia, Mars has stimulated our imaginations. First, we saw Mars as a wandering star, a bringer of war from the abode of the gods. In recent centuries, the planet’s changing appearance in telescopes caused us to think that Mars had a climate like the Earth’s. Our first space age views revealed only a cratered, Moon-like world, but later missions showed that Mars once had abundant liquid water. Through it all, we have wondered: Has there been life on Mars? To those taking the next steps to find out, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.”

lowest frequency in sound

crucial for speech and music perception, allowing recognition of sounds in complex and noisy auditory environments.

musical training as children makes better listeners later in life

the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning

For the study, young adults with varying amounts of past musical training were tested by measuring electrical signals from the auditory brainstem in response to eight complex sounds ranging in pitch

Forty-five adults were grouped into three

matched groups based on histories of musical instruction

One group had no musical instruction

another had 1 to 5 years

the other had to 6 to 11 years

Both musically trained groups began instrumental practice around age 9

musical training during childhood led to more robust neural processing of sounds later in life

Prior research on highly trained musicians and early bilinguals revealed that enhanced brainstem responses to sound are associated with heightened auditory perception, executive function and auditory communication skills.

we infer that a few years of music lessons also confer advantages in how one perceives and attends to sounds in everyday communication situations, such as noisy restaurants

Dinosaur tracks are far more common

Stanford may have discovered a footprint of an adult ankylosaur in an unexpected place.

the print sits on the property of a NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

Stanford stumbled across the lone track earlier this summer and recently led NASA scientists out to the site to show them the fossil depression

the track has started to erode, and may have been damaged by a lawnmower, the roughly 112-million-year-old track still shows four toe imprints

member of the heavily-armored ankylosaur subgroup that lacked tail clubs but often sported prominent spikes along their sides

Officials

are already moving to protect the fossil, and they plan to bring in paleontologists to look for other dinosaur tracks

it seems that there is more than just a lone track at the spaceflight facility. When Stanford took the NASA scientists out to the site, he and other researchers found several more possible dinosaur tracks. The high-tech NASA facility may have been founded on a Cretaceous dinosaur stomping ground.

The second track is a smaller version of the first.

, the smaller print was discovered within the first, evidence that they were made around the same time and leading researchers to suggest it may have been a mother-and-child pair.