May 15, 20253 min readNewly Discovered Fossil Tracks May Rewrite Early History of ReptilesFossilized claw tracks discovered in Australia show that the animal group that includes reptiles, mammals and birds formed earlier than expectedBy Rita Aksenfeld & Nature magazine Illustration of an amniote animal thought to have left fossilized claw prints in Victoria, Australia. Marcin AmbrozikFossil claw prints found in Australia were probably made by the earliest known members of the group that includes reptiles, birds and mammals, according to a study published in Nature today. The findings suggest that this group — the amniotes — originated at least 35 million years earlier than previously thought.Early amniotes evolved to lay eggs on land, because they were encased in an amniotic membrane that stopped them drying out. Before this study, the earliest known amniote fossils had been found in Nova Scotia, Canada, and were dated to the mid-Carboniferous period, about 319 million years ago. The latest findings suggest that amniotes also existed in the early Carboniferous period, around 355 million years ago.“This discovery is exciting, and if the tracks have been interpreted the right way, the findings have important implications for our understanding of tetrapod evolution,” says Steven Salisbury, a palaeontologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The tracksThe claw tracks were found in a sandstone block on the bank of the Broken River at Barjarg in the state of Victoria, by two co-authors of the paper who are not professional scientists. This area of the river is known as Berrepit to the Indigenous Taungurung people who own the land.The sandstone block is part of a larger structure that had already been dated to the early Carboniferous on the basis of radiometric and tectonic evidence. Fossilized tracks of aquatic invertebrates and fish found in the same layer were also dated to this time period.The Snowy Plains Formation trackway slab with footprints and trackways highlighted. Manusprints are shown in yellow; pesprints are shown in blue.Grzegorz NiedzwiedzkiThe three sets of tracks in the study have clear footprints with indentations from claws, a feature of reptiles but not of amphibians. “Having these hooked claws on the trackways indicates they’re definitely a reptile-like animal,” says John Long, a palaeontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.There are no marks of dragging bellies or tails, and the authors suggest that the amniotes that left the tracks were able to keep their bodies and tails off the ground while they walked on land. But Salisbury questions that interpretation, because it would mean the animals had developed sophisticated structures for complex locomotion, which would be surprising given how early they are. “It seems more likely that the tracks were made by an animal that was ‘punting’ in shallow water, rather than walking on land,” he says.Common ancestorUntil now, evidence suggested that the last common ancestor of modern amphibians and amniotes lived around 352 million years ago. But if the ancestors of reptiles existed during the early Carboniferous, their split from amphibians must have occurred even earlier, says Long. Dating by the team suggests that the groups diverged in the Devonian period, about 380 million years ago.To estimate the probable time of divergence, Long and his colleagues used several dating methods. One included geological evidence from radioactive decay in volcanic rock layers above and below the fossil tracks. They also used molecular phylogenetics, which compares similarities and differences in the DNA of living species to estimate their evolutionary relationships and how recently their last common ancestor lived.The discovery could also shift the origin of amniotes to the Gondwana landmass. This formed the southern portion of the Pangaea supercontinent and gave rise to multiple current landmasses, including Africa and Australia. Previously, the earliest known amniotes were found in North America, leading palaeontologists to think that the group originated in the Northern Hemisphere. But more evidence from Australian fossils is needed before definitively shifting their origin site, says Long. “Australia is a vast area with fewer palaeontologists on the ground,” Long says. “We’ve got a lot more unexplored fossil sites where new things like this keep turning up.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on May 14, 2025. #newly #discovered #fossil #tracks #rewrite

Electronic waste is one of the top contributors to the world’s ever-growing trash problem. As long as we keep producing new gadgets and devices, there will be all kinds of waste that will probably end up in the landfill eventually once they reach end of life. Good thing there are designers that are constantly seeking innovative ways to integrate sustainability into their creations. One of those designers is Joe Doucet, known for his thought-provoking and often minimalist aesthetic. This time he has taken this sustainability challenge by creating a piece of furniture that is also a compelling statement about the potential for repurposing discarded materials and transforming them into objects of beauty and functionality. The OLO Table is constructed from discarded electronic waste with old refrigerators, keyboards, and computer mice are given a new lease on life. Designer: Joe Doucet The material at the heart of this innovative table is Polygood Oyster, a testament to the transformative power of recycling. This unique material is meticulously crafted from polystyrene, carefully extracted from a diverse range of electronic waste. Once harvested, the polystyrene undergoes a process of thermoforming, where heat and pressure are applied to shape it into the desired forms, in this case, the table’s base. The inherent beauty of Polygood lies in its composition. The recycling process leaves behind a captivating tapestry of colorful flecks and fragments, remnants of the electronics from which it originated. These visual inclusions aren’t imperfections; they serve as a tangible layer of history, each table subtly narrating the story of its past life. This intriguing visual element adds depth and character to the piece, making it a unique object of conversation. Furthermore, the fluid geometry of the OLO table, with its seamless and monolithic top flowing into semi-circular legs, directly embodies the closed-loop design philosophy championed by both Joe Doucet and The Good Plastic Company, the manufacturers of Polygood. This continuous form visually represents the cyclical nature of the material, where discarded resources are given new purpose in a closed system, minimizing waste and maximizing material value. The OLO table is more than just an aesthetically pleasing piece of furniture; it embodies a powerful message about circularity and the value of waste. By utilizing discarded electronics, Doucet addresses the growing problem of e-waste, transforming what is typically considered refuse into a desirable and functional object. This approach challenges our perception of waste and highlights the potential for innovative upcycling in the design industry. However, you probably won’t be able to add this to your space as it’s a one-off creation and there are no plans to produce more in the future. The post Terrazzo-like table brings electronic waste to life with closed-loop design first appeared on Yanko Design. #terrazzolike #table #brings #electronic #waste

An illustration of what the Amniotewould look like from 350 million years ago. CREDIT: Martin Ambrozik. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. One of the most impactful stories in evolution is getting a rewrite, thanks to the exciting discovery of the earliest known set of reptile footprints. Craig A. Eury and John Eason, two amateur paleontologists exploring the fossil-rich Snowy Plains Formation in Australia, found a rock with an intriguing set of fossilized prints. They brought the intriguing specimen to professional paleontologists, who soon discovered that the roughly 356 million-year-old fossilized claw prints likely belong to an amniote–an early reptile relative.  Though small in stature, amniotes were a large evolutionary leap forward towards land-dwelling, four-limbed animals called tetrapods. The age of these prints suggest that amniotes evolved millions of years earlier than expected, according to a study published May 14 in the journal Nature.  “I’m stunned,” Per Ahlberg, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who coordinated the study, said in a statement. “A single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when modern tetrapods evolved.” When fish grew legs Tetrapods include all vertebrates with four limbs that primarily live on land, including everything from frogs to turtles to eagles, to tigers to humans. Their story began as fish left the water between 390 and 360 million years ago. Their descendants began to diversify into the ancestors of modern amphibians and amniotes–the group that includes birds, reptiles, and mammals. Originally, the timeline for how this massive diversification of life occurred was fairly clear-cut. The first tetrapods evolved roughly 390 million years ago during the Devonian period. Amniotoes and the earliest members of the modern groups of animals we see today followed fishapods during the Carboniferous period. Previously, the earliest amniote fossils dated back to  about 320 million years old to the late Carboniferous. Based on this new evidence, researchers concluded the start of the point on the evolutionary tree where the ancestors of amphibians and amniotes split actually happened in the earliest days of the Carboniferous or 356 million years ago.   Proof in the prints The newly discovered 356 million-year-old sandstone slab from this new study potentially changes this entire timeline by about 35 to 40 million years. The well-preserved footprints of long-toed feet with distinct claw impressions at the tips dot the stone and are the earliest known clawed footprints. Two sets of tracks were identified on the stone, seemingly from the same animal.  Footprints are important for paleontologists, as they can indicate the types of behaviors an extinct animal may have exhibited. The team compared the ancient tracks with a modern water monitorlizard, since they have similarly shaped feet to what is seen on the footprints. They examined the spacing between the front and hind footprints against that living lizard’s feet. With these measurements, the team estimates that the ancient amniote may have been around 2.5 feet long, but that the exact proportions of the animal are still unknown. “Claws are present in all early amniotes, but almost never in other groups of tetrapods,” Ahlberg said. “The combination of the claw scratches and the shape of the feet suggests that the track maker was a primitive reptile.” If this new interpretation is correct, it pushes the origin of reptiles, and thus amniotes as a whole, back by roughly 40 million years to the earliest Carboniferous. A new set of fossil reptile footprints uncovered all the way across the globe in Poland are also detailed in the study and bolster the evidence. These European footprints are not as old as the ones from Australia, but are still older than previous specimens.  “The implications of this discovery for the early evolution of tetrapods are profound,” John Long, a study co-author and paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia, said. “All stem-tetrapod and stem-amniote lineages must have originated during the Devonian period – but tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete than we have believed.” A place on the evolutionary tree According to the team, this recalibration of the origin of reptiles has a ripple effect on the whole timeline of tetrapod evolution. Tetrapods must be older than even the earliest amniotes, since it has a deeper branching point on the evolutionary tree.  “It’s all about the relative length of different branches in the tree,” said Ahlberg. “In a family tree based on DNA data from living animals, branches will have different lengths reflecting the number of genetic changes along each branch segment. This does not depend on fossils, so it’s really helpful for studying phases of evolution with a poor fossil record.” The fossil trackways with the different tracks on it highlighted. CREDIT: Flinders University The team believes that amphibians and ammonites split apart further into the Devonian period and were likely a contemporary of the primitive, transitional “fishapod” called Tiktaalik. This evidence indicates that a diverse group of tetrapods existed when only transitional “fishapods” were believed to be dragging themselves around muddy shorelines and starting to explore the land.  If this new theory holds, it is likely that the evolution of tetrapods from aquatic creatures to those fully living on land may have occurred even faster than previously believed.   “The Australian footprint slab is about 50 cmacross,” said Ahlberg, “and at present it represents the entire fossil record of tetrapods from the earliest Carboniferous of Gondwana – a gigantic supercontinent comprising Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India. Who knows what else lived there?”   “The most interesting discoveries are yet to come and that there is still much to be found in the field,” added study co-author and paleontologist Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki. “These footprints from Australia are just one example of this.”  #amateur #paleontologists #uncover #earliest #known

OpinionMay 14, 20254 min readScience Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a DictatorshipThe red flags abound—political research tells us the U.S. is becoming an autocracyBy Dan Vergano President Donald Trump delivers address to a joint session of Congress, split image seen from watching television, March 4, 2025. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty ImagesAs president, Donald Trump pretty much checks all the warning boxes for an autocrat. Last September Scientific American warned of Trump’s “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies,” that he “ignores the climate crisis” and has fondness for “unqualified ideologues,” whom he would appoint should he become president again. It’s now May and sadly, that all checks out.The U.S. is in a bad place, and scholars warn, looks to be headed for worse.Worse even than Trump’s relentless attacks on science have been his administration’s assaults on the law. His officials have illegally fired federal workers, impounded congressional appropriations and seized people off the street for deportations to foreign prisons, threatening the same for all U.S. citizens. “The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime,” law professor David Pozen of the Columbia University School of Law told the New York Times in April.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We should all be worried that the U.S. is headed toward an autocracy—government by one person—even without political science offering a warning. But scholarship on how nations descend into this unfortunate state, seen in places like Turkey and Hungary, might not surprise you with what it suggests about the U.S.“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the country has embarked on the slippery slope toward autocracy,” concludes political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa, in a May report in Politics & Policy. Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of TU Dresden. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power.“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail. “If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. The courts would likely resist such a move, as the Supreme Court did under the Bush administration in 2008, and whether the Trump administration abides by judicial decisions will determine whether the fourth step has occurred.Warnings of the fifth step on the road to autocracy, securing long-term power, come in Trump’s musing of seeking an unconstitutional third term as president. The final step, the infringement of basic rights and freedoms, also is flashing warning signs, says Stockemer. These are already evident in executive orders that disengage the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, remove transgender service members from the military and privilege Christianity. He predicts that attacks on minority voting rights in 2026 and 2028 would be an expected outcome of this step.A simpler “competitive authoritarianism” yardstick for measuring democratic collapse comes from political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt earlier this month. “We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government,” they write in the New York Times. By that measure, they add, the U.S. has already crossed that line, ordering Department of Justice investigations into perceived political enemies, donors to the Democratic Party and news outlets ranging from CBS News to the Des Moines Register. “The administration’s authoritarian offensive has had a clear impact. It has changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice,” they added.The good news is that the slide into autocracy isn’t inevitable for the U.S. The courts may hold, Congress may start listening to protestors as Trump’s approval rating slides, and the Republican coalition, described as “Big Tech on one side, white nationalists on the other,” in the Boston Review, may fracture.Even so, the damage already done is real: “It is very easy to destroy something such as USAID, but it takes a long time to rebuild it both physically and also in a trust sense, both in America and abroad,” says Stockemer, noting the rapid plummet of Canadian attitudes toward the U.S., from positive to sharply negative. “I can tear down a house in a day, but it will take a year or longer to rebuild it.”This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. #science #tells #heading #toward #dictatorship

May 14, 2025Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Network Security Fortinet has patched a critical security flaw that it said has been exploited as a zero-day in attacks targeting FortiVoice enterprise phone systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32756, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.0. "A stack-based overflow vulnerability [CWE-121] in FortiVoice, FortiMail, FortiNDR, FortiRecorder, and FortiCamera may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via crafted HTTP requests," the company said in an advisory. The company said it observed the flaw being exploited in the wild on FortiVoice systems, but did not disclose the scale of the attacks and the identity of the threat actors behind them. It further noted that the threat actor performed device network scans, erased system crash logs, and enabled fcgi debugging to log credentials from the system or SSH login attempts. The issue affects the following products and versions - FortiCamera 1.1, 2.0 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiCamera 2.1.x (Upgrade to 2.1.4 or above) FortiMail 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.9 or above) FortiMail 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.8 or above) FortiMail 7.4.x (Upgrade to 7.4.5 or above) FortiMail 7.6.x (Upgrade to 7.6.3 or above) FortiNDR 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 7.1 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiNDR 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.7 or above) FortiNDR 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.5 or above) FortiNDR 7.4.x (Upgrade to 7.4.8 or above) FortiNDR 7.6.x (Upgrade to 7.6.1 or above) FortiRecorder 6.4.x (Upgrade to 6.4.6 or above) FortiRecorder 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.6 or above) FortiRecorder 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.4 or above) FortiVoice 6.4.x (Upgrade to 6.4.11 or above) FortiVoice 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.7 or above) FortiVoice 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.1 or above) Fortinet said the vulnerability was discovered by its product security team based on the threat actor activity that originated from the below IP addresses - 198.105.127.124 43.228.217.173 43.228.217.82 156.236.76.90 218.187.69.244 218.187.69.59 Users of FortiVoice, FortiMail, FortiNDR, FortiRecorder and FortiCamera are recommended to apply the necessary fixes to secure their devices from active exploitation attempts. If immediate patching is not an option, it's advised to disable the HTTP/HTTPS administrative interface as a temporary workaround. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE     Source: https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/fortinet-patches-cve-2025-32756-zero.html #fortinet #patches #cve202532756 #zeroday #rce #flaw #exploited #fortivoice #systems

Researchers Discover That Chimps Drum Rhythmically, Suggesting Human Musicality Originated in Our Last Common Ancestor Not only do chimpanzees maintain a rhythm while drumming on tree roots, but two subspecies use distinct tempos and techniques, according to a new study A new study finds chimpanzees drum against tree roots with rhythm, suggesting they share an evolutionary trait with humans passed down by a last common ancestor. DaFranzos via Pixabay Wild chimpanzees often drum their limbs against the large roots of giant trees, sending out loud, booming sounds that resonate through the rainforest. Previous research identified the behavior as a form of communication and demonstrated that the animals have individual drumming styles. Now, a new study published Friday in the journal Current Biology shows chimpanzees also follow distinct, regular and non-random rhythms—traits that are building blocks of human music. This suggests the origin of our own musicality may have originated in a last common ancestor with chimpanzees. “They’re actually drumming often with their feet, so they’re using their hands to hold onto those roots, and then they’re kind of dancing,” Catherine Hobaiter, a co-author of the study and a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, tells NPR’s Jon Hamilton. “And sometimes they’re jumping between the roots and getting all of those different beat structures down, throwing a hand in if you want to get a little syncopated.”In the study, Hobaiter and her colleagues analyzed 371 drumming bouts produced by eastern and western chimpanzees in 11 communities across Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. The drumming “had a predictability to it,” Hobaiter tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis. “And when you’ve got predictability, you’ve got a really strong indicator that there’s rhythm there.” Though some earlier studies indicate that captive chimps can drum rhythmically, this new paper is the first to truly demonstrate that ability in wild chimpanzees, says Valérie Dufour, an animal cognition biologist at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France who did not participate in the research, to Science’s Rodrigo Pérez Ortega. “Showing that chimpanzees share some of the fundamental properties of human musical rhythm in their drumming is a really exciting step in understanding when and how we evolved this skill,” Hobaiter explains in a statement. “Our findings suggest that our ability to drum rhythmically may have existed long before we were human.” The team’s analyses revealed striking differences in drumming rhythm between the two subspecies: Western chimps used more regular intervals, while their eastern counterparts were more likely to alternate between faster and slower beats. The two groups also integrated the drumming into their vocalizations in different ways: Western chimps drummed more and faster, and they combined it into their vocalizations—known as pant-hoots—earlier than eastern chimps did. These contrasts might be linked to differences in social behaviors between the subspecies, researchers say. Eastern chimpanzees tend to be more aggressive, live in bigger groups and have more hierarchical societies than the more egalitarian western chimpanzees. The variations between their drumming styles might reflect differences in human language, reports National Geographic’s Olivia Ferrari.“This is the kind of science that wakes us up to the fact that every single population of chimpanzees is worth conserving and preserving,” Hobaiter tells National Geographic. “We’re starting to recognize that they might have cultures in their communication, in their rhythm, in their social behavior… if you lose a group, you lose the unique culture that goes with it.” In a similar way, two other recent papers are also shedding light on chimp behaviors that are uncannily close to human ones. A study published May 7 in Biology Letters suggests western chimpanzees often throw previously collected rocks against tree trunks as a form of communication. And other research published May 9 in Science Advances shows the primates communicate complex meaning by combining vocal sounds. Taken together with recent work detailing a headbanging sea lion that can keep a beat and a key linguistic pattern in whale song, the research suggests humans’ rhythm and language abilities might not be as unique as we once thought. “Humans are intrinsically rhythmic creatures,” Hobaiter tells BBC Science Focus’ Hatty Willmoth. “We have rhythm in our music and in our dance and in our song, but also in our conversations—and it’s a human universal, so it might be part of our evolutionary heritage.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-discover-that-chimps-drum-rhythmically-suggesting-human-musicality-originated-in-our-last-common-ancestor-180986607/ #researchers #discover #that #chimps #drum #rhythmically #suggesting #human #musicality #originated #our #last #common #ancestor