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At marine cold seeps, gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons migrate from deep subsurface origins to the sediment-water interface. Cold seep sediments are known to host taxonomically diverse microorganisms, but little is known about their metabolic potential and depth distribution in relation to hydrocarbon and electron acceptor availability. Here we combined geophysical, geochemical, metagenomic and metabolomic measurements to profile microbial activities at a newly discovered cold seep in the deep sea. Metagenomic profiling revealed compositional and functional differentiation between near-surface sediments and deeper subsurface layers. In both sulfate-rich and sulfate-depleted depths, various archaeal and bacterial community members are actively oxidizing thermogenic hydrocarbons anaerobically. Depth distributions of hydrocarbon-oxidizing archaea revealed that they are not necessarily associated with sulfate reduction, which is especially surprising for anaerobic ethane and butane oxidizers. Overall, these findings link subseafloor microbiomes to various biochemical mechanisms for the anaerobic degradation of deeply-sourced thermogenic hydrocarbons. Describing anaerobic short chain alkane degrading archaea at a newly discovered cold seep, the authors here suggest that these organisms play much more important roles in submarine carbon cycling globally than previously thought.

The Scotian Slope in the North Atlantic Ocean extends for ∼ 500 km along the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Its surface sediments host microbial communities, which respond to complex geochemical drivers that not only include communication with the overlying water column, but also potential advection from deeper basinal fluids. Archaea are fundamental components of these communities, and their lipids act as important historical indicators of environmental geochemical change and microbial interactions within marine sediments. This study evaluates the spatial abundance and diversity of archaeal lipids preserved in shallow Scotian Slope sediments to better understand processes. Seventy-four sediment samples from 32 gravity and piston cores, reaching a maximum of 9 m below seafloor (m b.s.f.) were collected during three survey cruises. In total, 14 archaeal lipid classes comprising 42 unique compounds were detected. The lipid distributions reflect a high contribution of anaerobic methanotrophic (ANME) archaeal groups, such as ANME-1 to -3. Hierarchical cluster analysis and principal components analysis were used to show varying contributions of four lipid classes that included distinct assemblages of intact polar lipids (IPLs), core lipids (CLs), and their degradation products (CL-DPs). IPL to CL and CL to CL-DP turnover rates were estimated for the various lipid classes. Four stratigraphically distinct archaeal lipidomes were observed. The first, reflects a unique community influenced by a nearby cold seep. Three additional ambient sediment lipidomes were detected with overlapping depth intervals. These lipidomes contained varying abundances of IPL, CL, and CL-DPs, which likely mark geochemically controlled, microbial community variations that are further accompanied by a systematic increase to the stockpile of diagenetically altered lipids. The ambient sediment lipidomes appear to be highly spatially conserved across the latitudinal extent of the study area marking a resolvable shallow sediment lipostratigraphy that occupies a sediment stratigraphy that spans ∼ 27 000±4000 years of basin evolution for the Scotian Slope.

Forty years after they were originally acquired for intelligence purposes, declassified US photographs from the KH-7 GAMBIT photo reconnaissance satellite programme, together with contemporary declassified intelligence reports, are being used to shed light on Cold War sites in the former Soviet Union. The method should have a great future for understanding the changes to the landscape in Europe over the last 60 years. The material impact of the Cold War was no less fundamental than other wars hotter in nature.

Architecture is a word used when people want to talk about design but want to puff it up and make it sound important. However, as so often occurs, inside the blighted cynicism is a pinch of truth.

PREFAB is a political modernist project whose threefold purpose, through development of a theory- in-praxis framework, is to counter the naïve assertions of the realist aesthetic (the dominance of which serves to reproduce capitalist common sense), as well as the conformism of the 'art for art's sake' avant-garde. In the third place, PREFAB wishes to repudiate the hagiographic emphasis of liberal art history & theory in the evaluation of the arts. Contrariwise, in the world of work, no less than in the academy and culture, women and men 'make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.' (Marx, 1968, p.96).1 On this model of structured agency, focusing on real social and economic determinants, PREFAB instead features an 'author as producer'2 frame of analysis, where the object of study is the materialised memories of the life and times, or lived experience (through the decades, circa 1930-95), of a working-class Edinburgh family. Namely my own. The intellectual formation of PREFAB's integrative synthesis of making and writing was informed, signally, by Marx's profound insight that social being determines thought, by Antonio Gramsci's counter-hegemonic inventory of traces - a knowing oneself as a product of the historical process to date3 - and by the dialectical distanciation techniques, or 'the separation of the elements',4 of Bertolt Brecht's anti-illusionist 'epic' theatre (and by affiliated political modernists in the interwar era and since). The project's primary sources also include the demythologising semiology of Roland Barthes, the cultural materialist5 formulations of Raymond Williams, Janet Wolff's Marxist sociology of art, Avery Gordon's exploration of the hauntological imagination, and Lukacs's critique of the ideological reproduction of the capitalist commodity-scape. Determined therefore (in paraphrase of Godard's slogan) not to make political art but to make art politically, (Godard : MacCabe, 1980, p.19)6 the PREFAB how-is-what case studies address the Scottish nativism grounded in invented traditions of neo-tartanry,7 the ideological distortions of the 'thing-world' of finance-capitalism, with especial interest in the fetish forms of reification8 evocative of the proletarian popular culture of my grandfather's prefab-worldview. Reproduced from indexical signs of post-war capitalist consumer culture, the PREFAB ready-mades accompanying the written thesis, comprise a family history of redux commodities, parodic fetishes of nation-state, and Marxist signage: a laboratory of didactic experiments in what may also be called critical realist method (in complex unity with critical realist theory) against the dominant conventions of bourgeois ways of seeing, knowing, and telling. References: 1 Marx, K., 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte', Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in One Volume, Lawrence & Wishart, 1968, p. 96. 2 Benjamin, W., Understanding Brecht, Verso, 1998. 3 Gramsci, A., Selections from Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p. 324. 4 Willet, J., ed., Brecht on Theatre, Methuen, 1978, p.37. 5 Bottomore defines materialism as: '(a) a denial of the autonomy, and then of the primacy, of ideas in social life; (b) a methodological commitment to concrete historiographical research, as opposed to abstract philosophical reflection; (c) a conception of the centrality of human praxis in the production and reproduction of social life and, flowing from this, (d) a stress on the significance of labour, as involving the transformation of nature and the mediation of social relations, in human history' (Bottomore, 1985, p.324). 6 'The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.' MacCabe, C., Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, BFI/Macmillan, 1980, p.19. 7 By coincidence, a key date in the emergence of Scottish neo-Romanticism as embodied in the invented traditions of tartanry, is marked by the visit of George IV to Scotland in August 1822. Stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott, the visit included a military review in which the British monarch, keen to improve his popularity after a series of personal scandals, appeared on Portobello beach in philabeg, sporran, and elaborate Glengarry, to inspect 3000 volunteer cavalrymen and honour the Highland clans. It is estimated that 50,000 people turned out to watch the spectacle. The event is recorded in a painting by William Turner de Lond titled George IV, 1762 - 1830. Reigned as Regent 1811 - 1820, as King 1820 - 1830 (At a military review on Portobello Sands 23 August 1822) (1828). 8 In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1983) Bottomore defines reification as: 'The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Reification is a 'special' case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society' (Bottomore, 1983, p. 411).

Due to the efforts by numerous ground-based surveys and NASA's Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of transiting exoplanets ideal for atmospheric characterization via spectroscopy with large platforms such as James Webb Space Telescope and ARIEL. However their next predicted mid-transit time could become so increasingly uncertain over time that significant overhead would be required to ensure the detection of the entire transit. As a result, follow-up observations to characterize these exoplanetary atmospheres would require less-efficient use of an observatory's time-which is an issue for large platforms where minimizing observing overheads is a necessity. Here we demonstrate the power of citizen scientists operating smaller observatories (≤1 m) to keep ephemerides \"fresh,\" defined here as when the 1 uncertainty in the mid-transit time is less than half the transit duration. We advocate for the creation of a community-wide effort to perform ephemeris maintenance on transiting exoplanets by citizen scientists. Such observations can be conducted with even a 6 inch telescope, which has the potential to save up to ∼10,000 days for a 1000-planet survey. Based on a preliminary analysis of 14 transits from a single 6 inch MicroObservatory telescope, we empirically estimate the ability of small telescopes to benefit the community. Observations with a small-telescope network operated by citizen scientists are capable of resolving stellar blends to within 5″/pixel, can follow-up long period transits in short-baseline TESS fields, monitor epoch-to-epoch stellar variability at a precision 0.67% 0.12% for a 11.3 V-mag star, and search for new planets or constrain the masses of known planets with transit timing variations greater than two minutes.

A framework for thinking about domain-specific languages (DSLs) divides them into internal DSLs, external DSLs, and language workbenches. In all cases, it's important to have an explicit semantic model so that they form a veneer over an underlying library. DSLs are valuable for increasing programmer productivity and improving communication with domain experts.