Dogs were the first domestic animal, but little is known about their population history and to what extent it was linked to humans. We sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes and found that all dogs share a common ancestry distinct from present-day wolves, with limited gene flow from wolves since domestication but substantial dog-to-wolf gene flow. By 11,000 years ago, at least five major ancestry lineages had diversified, demonstrating a deep genetic history of dogs during the Paleolithic. Coanalysis with human genomes reveals aspects of dog population history that mirror humans, including Levant-related ancestry in Africa and early agricultural Europe. Other aspects differ, including the impacts of steppe pastoralist expansions in West and East Eurasia and a near-complete turnover of Neolithic European dog ancestry.

The negative exponential distribution is reconsidered as a description of pressure ridge spacings and drafts. It is found to give an excellent fit for drafts but not for spacings. The spacing distribution is found to be fitted much better by a three‐parameter lognormal distribution, of which the third parameter (the threshold) is dependent on the beam width of the instrument used to collect the ice bottom profile.

In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind (Pasteur). Impressive developments in genomics have led microbiology to its third "Golden Age". However, conventional metagenomics strategies necessitate retrograde transfer of samples from extreme or remote environments for later analysis, rendering the powerful insights gained retrospective in nature, striking a contrast with Pasteur's dictum. Here we implement a highly portable USB-based nanopore DNA sequencing platform coupled with field-adapted environmental DNA extraction, rapid sequence library generation and off-line analyses of metagenome profiles to characterize the microbiota of a High Arctic glacier. The profile of the microbial communities produced by this approach are coherent with those from conventional amplicon and shotgun metagenome sequencing of glacier environments, and prompt testable hypotheses regarding microbial community structure and function on the basis of data generated and analysed while in the field. Moreover, we highlight the potential for oligonucleotide mixture model based metagenomic profiling of nanopore reads to deliver off-grid metagenomics analyses. Ultimately, in-field metagenomic sequencing potentiated by nanopore devices raises the prospect of considerably enhanced agility in exploring Earth's microbiomes.not peer-reviewed)