Does Micro-CT scanning damage DNA in museum specimens?

X-ray micro-computed tomography and DNA sequencing are useful and increasingly common tools in taxonomy and collections research. Whilst the benefits of each method are continually evaluated and debated individually, how the methods impact each other requires more attention. We compared DNA fragment length and the barcode sequence CO1 in samples throughout a CT-scanning protocol, for a range of X-ray exposures and energies. We found no evidence of DNA damage, but advise caution when using precious or archival material, highlighting the need for further investigations and considering potential areas for research.NatSCA supports open access publication as part of its mission is to promote and support natural science collections. NatSCA uses the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ for all works we publish. Under CCAL authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in NatSCA publications, so long as the original authors and source are cited. The attached file is the published version of the article

Novel techniques to cool and rotate Bose-Einstein condensates in time-averaged adiabatic potentials

We report two novel techniques for cooling and rotating Bose-Einstein condensates in a dilute rubidium vapour that highlight the control and versatility afforded over cold atom systems by time-averaged adiabatic potentials (TAAPs). The intrinsic loss channel of the TAAP has been successfully employed to evaporatively cool a sample of trapped atoms to quantum degeneracy. The speed and efficiency of this process compares well with that of conventional forced rf-evaporation. In an independent experiment, we imparted angular momentum to a cloud of atoms forming a Bose-Einstein condensate by introducing a rotating elliptical deformation to the TAAP geometry. Triangular lattices of up to 60 vortices were created. All findings reported herein result from straightforward adjustments of the magnetic fields that give rise to the TAAP.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally to this wor