Links 14/06/13

NASA research indicates hunks of frozen carbon dioxide -- dry ice -- may glide down some Martian sand dunes on cushions of gas similar to miniature hovercraft, plowing furrows as they go.




A 4-billion-pixel panorama from the Curiosity Mars Rover.


The “dark matter of life” describes microbes and even entire divisions of bacterial phyla that have evaded cultivation and have yet to be sequenced. We present a genome from the globally distributed but elusive candidate phylum TM6 and uncover its metabolic potential. TM6 was detected in a biofilm from a sink drain within a hospital restroom by analyzing cells using a highly automated single-cell genomics platform. We developed an approach for increasing throughput and effectively improving the likelihood of sampling rare events based on forming small random pools of single-flow–sorted cells, amplifying their DNA by multiple displacement amplification and sequencing all cells in the pool, creating a “mini-metagenome.” 

The Hawaiian bobtail squid has an alarm clock made of symbiotic bacteria.