Oldest Embryonic Dinosaur Bones Discovered

Scientists digging in China have discovered the earliest fossil embryos to date. The find includes
remains from many animals at different stages of development providing a unique opportunity to investigate the embryonic development of a prehistoric species.

the fossils were discovered in a bone bed in Lufeng County that dates to the Early Jurassic between 197 million to 190 million years ago.  The site contained more than 200 various bones as well as pieces of fossilized eggshells.

To put this discovery in perspective most of the dinosaur embryos on record are concentrated in the Late Cretaceous period.  This discovery  takes a detailed record of dinosaur embryology and pushes it back over 100 million years!

From the Nature.com article:

• But it is not just the age of the fossils that is notable, the researchers say. Spectroscopic analysis of bone-tissue samples from the Chinese nesting site revealed the oldest organic material ever seen in a terrestrial vertebrate.

Navy Tests Ship Based Laser System

Below is a short video of the Laser Weapon System which the Navy temporarily installed aboard an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey built by Ingalls Shipbuilding..

 The laser is a technology demonstrator built by the Naval Sea Systems Command from commercial fiber solid state lasers. The unit is aimed by the MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon system of which the Aegis system is famous for.

The LaWS Close-In Weapon system uses the Solid State Laser (SSL) which can provide a ship with a quick reaction capability for defense against small boats and planes.

The LaWS weapon is still in its' prototype stage, however it is already showing its' merit as. This capability provides Navy ships a method for Sailors to easily defeat small boat threats and aerial targets without using bullets. (U.S. Navy video by Office of Naval Research/ Released)

The Office of Naval Research announced that they plan to deploy the system next year.

 From the Boing Boing article:

• "Our conservative data tells us a shot of directed energy costs under $1," Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder said. "Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to fire a missile, and you can begin to see the merits of this capability."

Don't Look Now, But We Have 2k Rogue Black Holes Tailing Us!

Does the thought of this kinda give you nightmares?  It should...you know that horrid old gag they still pull in scary movies?  You know, when someone calls on the phone to say the killer is right there in the house!  Well we may have 2 thousand of the worst type of  dealers of death practicably in the same room with us! And are we talking about your average singularity?  nope Galaxy class Black Holes.

How is this possible?  Haven't we been told that when a galaxy starts to form, its the central black hole that is powering the growth, right?  Well yeah, up to a point.  But when galaxies merge, the complex gravitational dance that can eject one of the massive central black holes.

Implausible as that sounds, astronomers have found evidence that in the space just outside the Milky-way of thousands of orphan black holes.


IO9 article

 Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA.

Analog Cells -Mimic Life

Xnewsman sent in this url that describes an experiment run by  scientists at the University of Oxford

in England using a 3D printer to build a network of thousands of water droplets, connected through lipids.  It is hoped that similar structures as these will serve as scaffolding for failing tissues or be used to deliver drugs to places in the body.

In the Vimo video below, you can see the network that was created.  The "programming" is different concentrations of salt strategically placed through out the network which then attracts water.   The net effects is very life-like behavior into complex structures.

"Missing Link" Between Humans and Monkeys Found

Hows that for a headline!?  You want to start a riot you can always count on this one to really come with emotional baggage big time! But still......

The "missing link" comes in from an unexpected direction when scientists discovered a link between human speech and monkey chatter.    The "chatter" in question is a distinctive lip-smacking sounds 

made by baboons in the Ethopian highlands.  Researchers  found striking similarities between these lip-smacking sounds and human speech.

The sounds that these gelada baboons make are often so human sounding that researchers often are fooled into thinking there are humans close by talking. 

What this ability demonstrates is that the ability to make complex sounds may have developed well before speech.  When  the need to communicate complex ideas, the ability was already in place.  However the need to communicate complex ideas possibly drove the evolutionary process. 

It should also be noted that monkeys in general smack their lips when eating, it seems to only the gelada who use the "sounds" for communication or the males calling to the females.

link to the Register file