Dust devils are common but meteorologically unique phenomena on Earth and on Mars. The phenomenon produces a vertical vortex motion in the atmosphere boundary layer and often occurs in hot desert regions, especially in the afternoons from late spring to early summer. Dust devils usually contain abundant wind energy, for example, a maximum swirling wind velocity of up to 25 m/s, with a 15 m/s ma...

The eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) is a medium-sized Australian marsupial carnivore that has recently undergone a rapid and severe population decline over the 10 years to 2009, with no sign of recovery. This decline has been linked to a period of unfavourable weather, but subsequent improved weather conditions have not been matched by quoll recovery. A recent study suggested another mechan...

Herbert et al. (1) are to be commended for their convincing and important correlation of midto late-Pleistocene California Current sea surface temperatures (SSTs), California coastal vegetation, and the paleotemperature record in vein calcite at Devils Hole, Nevada. Their intriguing notion linking California Current SSTs and the Laurentide ice sheet, however, is open to question, as is their as...

Triboelectric charging is common in desert sandstorms and dust devils on Earth; however, it remains poorly understood. Here we show a charging mechanism of sands with the adsorbed water on micro-porous surface in wind-blown sand based on the fact that water content is universal but usually a minor component in most particle systems. The triboelectric charging could be resulted due to the differ...

Emerging infectious diseases rarely affect all members of a population equally and determining how individuals' susceptibility to infection is related to other components of their fitness is critical to understanding disease impacts at a population level and for predicting evolutionary trajectories. We introduce a novel state-space model framework to investigate survival and fecundity of Tasman...

Data from the Pathfinder and Phoenix landers on Mars show transient pressure drops ( 1–4 per day) attributed to nearby encounters with dust devils or dust-free vortices. The distribution of pressure drop amplitudes is consistent with a truncated power law distribution with a slope of 2, similar to that suggested previously for the optical diameters of dust devils. Comparable data from terrestri...

The adaptive immune system should prevent cancer cells passing from one individual to another, in much the same way that it protects against pathogens. However, in rare cases cancer cells do not die within a single individual, but successfully pass between individuals, escaping the adaptive immune response and becoming a contagious cancer. There are two naturally occurring contagious cancers, D...