The missing link?

Today a press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York with Dr. Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo revealed that a fossil excavated 25 years ago is much more than it first appeared to be. After 2 years of study at the Oslo Natural History Museum, the cat-sized Eocene fossil named Ida, after Hurum's daughter, has been claimed to be a "missing link." However, Darwinius masillae is not quite what the media has hyped it up to be in calling it a "missing link" which would suggests an evolutionary step in the divergence of anthropoids from prosimians. Rather, it is a "missing link" in that it was a link we didn't know was there - part of a larger group Adapoidea, from which humans, great apes, and lemurs have all descended. In other words, it's not a missing link at all since it is in no way a homonid. Perhaps the fossil's greatest significance resides in that, barring human burial, never before have any primate remains been so incredibly preserved.

The remarkably intact fossil was found preserved in oil shale in the Messel Pit in Germany. The Messel Pit is known as a treasure trove of fossils today due to the formation of the pit. What was once a volcanic crater about a half-billion years ago, over time became filled with groundwater, forming a deep, still lake. Very little microbial life could survive at the depths of the lake. Surrounded by rich, diverse rainforest at the time, the accumulation of noxious gases coupled with the rainforest downpours, many helpless animals were swept into the lake (Ida appeared to have a broken wrist) to settle upon the bottom undisturbed while falling sediment covered and compressed to form the fossils that now fill the dry quarry.

Visit RevealingTheLink.com for the bizarre made-for-tv hype
Visit PLoS one for the full journal article on the findings

The Machine

Uploaded today to youtube, the below video from last Friday captures accomplished Los Angeles-based artist Llyn Foulkes performing on his "Machine" - a homemade instrument inspired by his childhood idol, Spike Jones, comprised of car and bicycle horns. Meanwhile, his feet control drums and basslines, yet he often throws in xylophone and cowbell for good measure. While the Machine may look like an invocation of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo's intonarumori, and anyone that attempts to create a whole self-sufficient ensemble out of piecemeal horns would be assumed to have a penchant for the avantgarde, indeed Foulkes dabbles in some abstract sound on occasion. Nonetheless, by and large Foulkes plays a fairly straightforward combo jazz (albeit as a soloist). He created the Machine in 1980 and now at the age of 74, has grown to focus on music and performing the Machine moreso than his visual art career. Foulkes plays his Machine on a live webcast from the Church of Art every Tuesday at 1am EST.

Wave-particle duality and the photoelectric effect

The wave-particle duality in light is a particularly mystifying problem in physics. One determining factor to demonstrate light to have particle characteristics is the photoelectric effect. The photoelectric effect is manifest as photons of a light beam with a given frequency are absorbed by a given material. When the energy of one photon is absorbed by the material, provided the net energy is greater than the electron binding force, the incoming photon will cause an electron in the outer level of an atom in the absorbing material to be ejected.

However, a recent experiment (as reported by Wired Science) conducted with FLASH, an x-ray laser in Hamburg, shot at xenon atoms yielded some interesting results. Apparently, the high frequency laser caused the inner level electrons to move violently and their displacement cascaded into a total of 21 electrons being ejected simultaneously. The common notion of a photon like a cue ball in billiards is now being reconsidered as the experiment suggests the photons working as a wave and not individual particles. Of peculiar interest is the fact that the photons penetrated to inner electron levels and not working from outside-in.

Micro-holographic storage

While it seems the reality of consumer storage devices would seem to go the way of the dodo bird with the advent of broadband internet and opensource media, one might very well be mistaken. Case in point: read the recent article "Do you think bandwidth grows on trees?" Apparently due to operating costs exceeding $700 million for Youtube, Google (as owner) is said to be losing around $470 million dollars this year. Afterall, it seems there may be a niche for storage and General Electric has just upped the ante with the development of a micro-holographic dvd, capable of storing 500 gigabytes of information. Youtube is going down the drain for you, so watch the video below.