Coral skeletons are composites of aragonite and biomolecules. We report the concentrations of 11 amino acids in massive Porites spp. coral skeletons cultured at two temperatures (25 °C and 28 °C) and 3 seawater pCO 2 (180, 400 and 750 µatm). Coral skeletal aspartic acid/asparagine (Asx), glutamic acid/glutamine (Glx), glycine, serine and total amino acid concentrations are significantly higher at 28 °C than at 25 °C. Skeletal...

Industrialized environments, despite benefits such as higher levels of formal education and lower rates of infections, can also have pernicious impacts upon brain atrophy. Partly for this reason, comparing age-related brain volume trajectories between industrialized and non-industrialized populations can help to suggest lifestyle correlates of brain health. The Tsimane, indigenous to the Bolivian Amazon, derive their subsisten...

Trade in pangolins is illegal, and yet tons of their scales and products are seized at various ports. These large seizures are challenging to process and comprehensively genotype for upstream provenance tracing and species identification for prosecution. We implemented a scalable DNA barcoding pipeline in which rapid DNA extraction and MinION sequencing were used to genotype a substantial proportion of pangolin scales subsampl...

Fluorite is one of the most common minerals in the crust and is of widespread economic importance. It shows strong UV-excited luminescence, variously attributed to defects within the fluorite structure and lanthanide substitutions. We present here a detailed chemical characterisation of a suite of natural fluorite samples, chosen to represent the range of compositions observed in nature. We perform X-ray excited luminescence s...

Ocean acidification alters the dissolved inorganic carbon chemistry of seawater and can reduce the calcification rates of tropical corals. Here we explore the effect of altering seawater pCO 2 on the skeletal morphology of 4 genotypes of massive Porites spp. which display widely different calcification rates. Increasing seawater pCO 2 causes significant changes in in the skeletal morphology of all Porites spp. studied regardle...

Ocean acidification typically reduces the calcification rates of massive Porites spp. corals, but increasing seawater temperatures (below the stress and bleaching threshold) can offset this effect. Here, we use δ 11 B to reconstruct the pH of the calcification media (pH ECM ) used to precipitate the skeleton in poritid corals cultured over a range of seawater pCO 2 and at 25 °C and 28 °C. Increasing temperature had no signific...