Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Current and planned future experiments with relativistic high harmonic generation using the JETI200 laser

High-order harmonic generation (HHG) through nonlinear interaction of intense laser beams with different systems is a promising source of bright, ultra-short bursts of extreme-ultraviolet radiation. High harmonics arise since the radiation is emitted as a train of attosecond pulses. A key objective is to achieve a single isolated pulse to allow time resolved measurements characterized by these pulses on an attosecond scale. We carried out experiments into JETI200 facility in Jena, Germany in order to characterize the properties of the harmonic radiation generated from a solid surface interaction, with the ultimate goal of employing temporal gating schemes to reduce the attosecond pulse train to a single pulse. The reason this laser is well suited for such experiment is a combination of its high power and the fact it is “quasi”-few-cycle (6.39 cycles) ideal for trying out gating scheme