Fossil discovered in northwestern Canada could rewrite the early history of animal life — but some palaeontologists are not convinced it’s real.

The inorganic scaffold of the spicules, the skeletal elements of the calcareous sponges, is formed of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). The growth of the approximately 300-μm large spicules, such as those of the calcareous sponge Sycon raphanus used in the present study, is a rapid process with a rate of about 65 μm/h. The formation of CaCO3 is predominantly carried out by the enzyme carbonic anhydras...

LUFFACHITIN obtained from the residue of the sponge-like dried fruit of Luffa aegyptiaca was developed as a weavable skin substitute in this study. A chemical analysis revealed that LUFFACHITIN was composed of a copolymer containing N-acetyl-glucosamine (~40%) as a major monomer with a filamentary structure as demonstrated by both optical and scanning electron microscopy. The pulp-like white re...

A novel sponge-like porous C/Sn composite is synthesized by dispersing SnO2 nanoparticles into a softtemplate polymer matrix followed by carbonization. The mesoporous C/Sn anodes can deliver a capacity as high as 1300mAh g 1 after 450 charge/discharge cycles, and provide a capacity of 180mAh g 1 even at 4000 mA g 1 charge/discharge current density. An extra reversible capacity over the theoreti...

Since Keccak was selected as SHA-3 hash function by NIST, it has attracted considerable attention from cryptographic researchers. Keccak sponge function [1] has also been used to design message authentication codes (MAC) and authenticated encryption (AE) scheme Keyak. Till now, the most efficient key recovery attacks on Keccak-MAC and Keyak are cube attacks and cube-attack-like cryptanalysis pr...

This study reveals the peculiar in vivo cell kinetics and cell turnover of the marine sponge Halisarca caerulea under steady-state conditions. The tropical coral reef sponge shows an extremely high proliferation activity, a short cell cycle duration and massive cell shedding. Cell turnover is predominantly confined to a single cell population, i.e. the choanocytes, and in this process apoptosis...

The objective of this project was to determine if removal of skin prior to evisceration lowers the number of bacteria that can be recovered by whole carcass rinse or sponge sampling. Four experiments were conducted, two with each type of sampling (rinse or sponge). New York dressed carcasses obtained from a commercial broiler processing plant were aseptically skinned or left with skin intact. T...