Ida: The Missing Link?

So, this 47 million year old fossil from the Eocene Era was recently discovered in Germany. Darwinius Masilae or Ida as it's affectionately being called is amazingly complete (95%) and is being hailed as the "Holy Grail" by some scientists.

The lemur-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs.

"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us ...is one of the important branching points on the evolutionary tree but it's not the only branching point."
[Biological Anthropologist Brian Richmond]

Or to put it more clearly, a missing link between higher primates (ie monkeys) and their more distant distant cousins (ie lemurs and such)

As is the S.O.P. for science, their is some disagreement about just how significant this discovery is. Some are saying that it's more of a "third cousin twice removed" than any sort of direct ancestor.

And predicatively the reactionary right perceives this, as well as any other evolutionary discovery, as threatening to their world view. Check out this Freeper article (and the comments below if you want a laugh)

Here's another righty website that says more or less the same thing. And quotes something called the Institute for Creation Research. LOL!

National Geographic Story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/fossil-ida

http://darwiniusmasillaelink.com/darwinius-masillae/

So I guess the ultimate implications of this discovery remain to seen and will most likely fall somewhere between missing link and media hoax.

GRB 090423

NERD ALERT:

NASA's Swift satellite last week recorded what they think is the most ancient event yet witnessed by man- GRB 090423, a burst of gamma radiation released in the annihilation a star some 30 to 100 times the mass of our sun. GRB 090423 was thought to have collapsed into a black hole some 13.1 billion years ago, when the universe was a mere 5 % of the age it is now, providing astronomers with a tantalizing glimpse into the distant past. With a redshift of 8.2, GRB 090423 is also the most distant visible object ever observed (the previous record was . Astronomers are counting this as conclusive proof of the existence of massive stars in the reionization period, and hoping it will help them to ascertain exactly when in the evolution of the universe galaxies formed.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17035-most-distant-object-in-the-universe-spotted.html

Crikey!!! Ancient Hollywood sized snake discovered in coal mine

      

Scientists have discovered the remains of a pre-historic monster in the rain forests of northern Columbia.  Titanboa Cerrejonensis, a snake so big it snacked on crocadiles, is believed to have existed 58-60 million years ago when tempuratures  were considerebly warmer (10 degrees on average) than they are now.  Being the largest animal during this era it reigned supreme as defacto king of the jungle.

"Truly enormous snakes really spark people's imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood," said Jonathan Block, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Florida, who co-led the work.

"The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie Anaconda is not as big as the one we found." 

"At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips," said David Polly, a geologist at the University of Indiana at Bloomington.

Yikes! 

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090204/tod-oukoe-uk-snake-giant-cb1d00a.html

Black Holes...

This is something interesting I just found.

It seems that barely a month after the confirmation of the existence of a super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy (something that had been suspected for quite some time), a team of Finnish scientists have proved that black holes "preceded galaxies"

"We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang," said co-author Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany.

"The evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen [in nearby galaxies] may not hold in the early Universe."

He added: "The implication is that the black holes started growing first."

Read the full BBC artical here

LHC to be continued....

So the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)- the biggest super collider ever, at over 27 KM long(!)- was switched on back in September. September 8 to be exact. This event, which is the culmination of years of research and development and upwards of $10 Bil., was heralded as a breakthrough in modern physics. Located in parts of Switzerland and France (yes it's that big), the LHC is supposed to prove the existence the elusive higgs-boson particle which gives everything its mass (this illustration dumb the concept down considerably http://www.coimbra.lip.pt/atlas/higgsmec.htm). This can only be achieved by recreating conditions similar to those shortly after the big bang. And that is exactly what scientists built
the LHC to do.

Unfortunately for us, due to a large helium leak thought to be caused by an electrical short, the massive atom smasher went off line after less than two weeks in operation. And it will most likely be out of commission until the spring of '09. I guess this is all part of the beta stage in development, but I have to admit, that after all the hype- some people went so far as to claim that it would destroy the earth- I was disappointed by this seeming anti-climax.

Make no mistake, though, finding the higgs-boson would be huge. It is believed that the discovery of this particle, which has been theorized but never observed, would offer conclusive proof to the theory of super symmetry thus completing the standard model- somewhat of a holy grail to particle physicists.

As Michael Dine, professor of physics at the Santa Cruz Institute of Particle Physics (UCSC) explains:

"Much of today's research in elementary particle physics focuses on the search for a particle called the Higgs boson. This particle is the one missing piece of our present understanding of the laws of nature, known as the Standard Model. This model describes three types of forces: electromagnetic interactions, which cause all phenomena associated with electric and magnetic fields and the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation; strong interactions, which bind atomic nuclei; and the weak nuclear force, which governs beta decay--a form of natural radioactivity--and hydrogen fusion, the source of the sun's energy. (The Standard Model does not describe the fourth force, gravity.)"

[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=what-exactly-is-the-higgs]

I guess spring is not all that far away when one considers the magnitude of looking into an abyss this profound.