Mineralized fossils have been described from late Ediacaran rocks all over the world, and have been interpreted as the first metazoans capable of secreting a mineralized skeleton. Among these early biomineralizers, the tubular Cloudina has a cosmopolitan distribution. It often occurs in association with other mineralizing organisms, such as Sinotubulites and Namacalathus, which show a more restricted, and seemingly non-overlapping, distribution. Many aspects of the biology of these organisms remain poorly known, in particular the structure and composition of the ecosystems they formed part of. Here we report a diverse fossil assemblage from the Ibor Group of Villarta de los Montes of the Central Iberian Zone, Spain. The assemblage includes the first material of Sinotubulites baimatuoensis from Spain, which is found in association with Cloudina hartmanae and Cloudina carinata. Also found are small tubular fossils and a flask-shaped form comparable to Protolagena. Among previously described assemblages of late Ediacaran skeletal fossils, the Villarta assemblage, unique in Europe, most closely compares to that from the Dengying Formation of South China.
Ctenophores are traditionally regarded as “lower” metazoans, sharing with cnidarians a diploblastic grade of organization. Unlike cnidarians, where skeletonization (biomineralization and sclerotization) evolved repeatedly among ecologically important taxa (for example, scleractinians and octocorals), living ctenophores are characteristically soft-bodied animals. We report six sclerotized and armored ctenophores from the early Cambrian period. They have diagnostic ctenophore features (for example, an octamerous symmetry, oral-aboral axis, aboral sense organ, and octaradially arranged ctene rows). Unlike most modern counterparts, however, they lack tentacles, have a sclerotized framework, and have eight pairs of ctene rows. They are resolved as a monophyletic group (Scleroctenophora new class) within the ctenophores. This clade reveals a cryptic history and sheds new light on the early evolution of this basal animal phylum. Skeletonization also occurs in some other Cambrian animal groups whose extant members are exclusively soft-bodied, suggesting the ecological importance of skeletonization in the Cambrian explosion.
Sedimentary rocks deposited across the Proterozoic–Phanerozoic transition record extreme climate fluctuations, a potential rise in atmospheric oxygen or re-organization of the seafloor redox landscape, and the initial diversification of animals. It is widely assumed that the inferred redox change facilitated the observed trends in biodiversity. Establishing this palaeoenvironmental context, however, requires that changes in marine redox structure be tracked by means of geochemical proxies and translated into estimates of atmospheric oxygen. Iron-based proxies are among the most effective tools for tracking the redox chemistry of ancient oceans. These proxies are inherently local, but have global implications when analysed collectively and statistically. Here we analyse about 4,700 iron-speciation measurements from shales 2,300 to 360 million years old. Our statistical analyses suggest that subsurface water masses in mid-Proterozoic oceans were predominantly anoxic and ferruginous (depleted in dissolved oxygen and iron-bearing), but with a tendency towards euxinia (sulfide-bearing) that is not observed in the Neoproterozoic era. Analyses further indicate that early animals did not experience appreciable benthic sulfide stress. Finally, unlike proxies based on redox-sensitive trace-metal abundances, iron geochemical data do not show a statistically significant change in oxygen content through the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, sharply constraining the magnitude of the end-Proterozoic oxygen increase. Indeed, this re-analysis of trace-metal data is consistent with oxygenation continuing well into the Palaeozoic era. Therefore, if changing redox conditions facilitated animal diversification, it did so through a limited rise in oxygen past critical functional and ecological thresholds, as is seen in modern oxygen minimum zone benthic animal communities.
Let us return to the signs of the impending Robopocalypse, when the bots will take a jobs and change our world.
That gun toting drone which stirred up so much controversy has provoked the ire of the FAA. The local cops where it was done have stated no laws have been broken, but the FAA has stated regulations may have been broken and started an investigation. Let's see what they do.
One of the things I said about gun-drone was at some time someone was going to be murdered by such a weaponized drone. While there's been no 'death-by-drone' as yet, the bizarro Gone-Girl kidnapping on Mare Island here in the SF Bay Area actually had planned to pick up randsom using a drone.
To be sure, the Gone Girl kidnapping was far from the first use of drones in illegal operations. Drones have been muling over the border for drug cartels.
Drugs are not the only thing being delivered by drone: Uber started delivering ice cream to its customers in Singapore!
New Zealand has passed some very restrictive laws regarding drones, so don't bother bring your drone to NZ unless you want to take the time to get a license and that costs $600 (NZ, I think). In Thailand, mere civvies are banned from flying drones at all.
In California, due to the problems drones have caused to fire fighters, etc. a bill was introduced to allow first responders to disable, even strike down drones.
And a man rescued his drone stranded atop a roof...with another drone.
Shifting away from drones, to the second most visible sign of the Robopocalypse, the self driving car, the University of Michigan has opened 'MCity' a driving course which simulates a city for self driving cars and connected car technologies.
Then there is Faraday Future's electric car, which is supposed to be a new electric car company. Its being billed as the most connected car yet and given the trends in the automotive industry, it better be working the self driving option.
However, being connected is not necessarily a good idea and why I think the Internet of Things is scary as frack. Hackers ate 'connected' jeeps, even turning off the engine while on the freeway and demoed this to Wired. Fiat Chrysler has recalled 1.4 *MILLION* vehicles to get a bug fix in.
On a more positive note, Brad Templeton wonders when self driving cars will become cheaper than traditional cars. Right now, they are more expensive.
While the Robopocalypse's face is normally the self driving car, drone or one of DARPA funded ATLAS, it has other aspects as well. One of the sure signs of the Robopocalpse (other than Merrill Lynch noticing and giving robot related investment advice) is crowd funding efforts are turning out to be rather successful for bot startups.
Are programs for manufacturing fighter planes “a blessing” or “a curse” for countries eager to join the elite circle of five advanced nations capable of producing them for profit?
That’s the question as South Korea weighs the odds on plunging into a program for manufacturing the Korean Fighter Experimental — the KFX — with stealth capabilities and the ability to retaliate against North Korean missile and nuclear facilities.
Marc DeVore, a lecturer from the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland, notes the extremes in meetings with experts and defense officials in Seoul while South Korean engineers begin the arduous process of designing the plane at a projected R&D cost of $8 billion. That’s far below the tens of billions of dollars that Lockheed-Martin has spent developing the F35 — about 60 of which South Korea is considering buying for a cool $100 million apiece.
The fact is that manufacturers in only five countries, the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, France, Sweden and Britain, have had the background, skills and expertise to develop, make and market a fighter that can operate effectively and sell enough on global markets to justify the enormous costs at every stage of the process.
DeVore offers a disturbing picture of the perils and pitfalls that have forced others to abandon dreams of producing their own fighter planes over the past 40 or so years.
“There have been 20 distinct attempts at market entry,” he says. While countries ranging from Argentina to Israel to Yugoslavia to India and Canada and even Japan have jettisoned multi-billion-dollar programs, only China “seems to have been a success.” China can produce an imitation of the Russian Sukhoi, more or less the equivalent of the American F15, he believes, but he’s still not sure about its quality and durability.
Proterosuchids represent the earliest known radiation of the highly diverse and important clade Archosauriformes (Gauthier et al., 1988; Nesbitt, 2011; Ezcurra et al., 2013). Huene (1908) erected Proterosuchidae as a monotypic Linnean family containing only Proterosuchus fergusi from the lowermost Triassic of South Africa, and several other species have been referred to this group in the subsequent century. However, phylogenetic analyses have provided only partial support for the existence of a diverse proterosuchid clade, and it is possible that some or even most putative proterosuchids form a series of outgroups to more derived archosauriforms rather than a monophyletic group (Ezcurra et al., 2010, 2013). Proterosuchids were historically classified alongside erythrosuchids in the Proterosuchia (e.g., Charig and Reig, 1970), but cladistic analyses (e.g., Benton, 1985; Gauthier et al., 1988; Gower and Sennikov, 1997; Ezcurra et al., 2010; Nesbitt, 2011) have uniformly found erythrosuchids to be phylogenetically closer to Archosauria (using a crown-group definition for the clade) than are any putative proterosuchids. Many of the species that have been assigned to Proterosuchidae require anatomical and taxonomic reevaluation (e.g., Ezcurra et al., 2010, 2013, 2014; Ezcurra, 2014), a research effort that is essential in order to clarify the phylogenetic relationships of the earliest archosauriforms and patterns of character evolution in taxa of this grade.
Following Proterosuchus, the next proterosuchid genera to be erected were Chasmatosaurus, established by Haughton (1924) for the new species C. vanhoepeni, and Elaphrosuchus, established by Broom (1946) for the new species E. rubidgei. A second species of Chasmatosaurus, C. alexanderi, was subsequently added (Hoffman, 1965). Chasmatosaurus vanhoepeni, C. alexanderi, and E. rubidgei were all based, like P. fergusi, on specimens from the Lower Triassic of South Africa, and more recently all of them have been suggested to represent subjective junior synonyms of P. fergusi (Welman, 1998). Occurrences of Chasmatosaurus have also been reported outside South Africa, including C. yuani (Young, 1936, 1963, 1978) from the Lower Triassic of China, Chasmatosaurus sp. from the Lower Triassic of India (Satsangi, 1964), and C. ultimus from the Middle Triassic of China (Young, 1958, 1964). The last of these species has the distinction of being one of only two putative proterosuchids from above the Lower–Middle Triassic boundary, the other being Sarmatosuchus otschevi from the Anisian of Russia (Gower and Sennikov, 1997, 2000; Ezcurra et al., 2013). However, the proterosuchid affinities of S. otschevi are questionable (Ezcurra et al., 2010, 2013), with S. otschevi having been recovered closer to erythrosuchids and archosaurs than to proterosuchids by Ezcurra et al. (2010). Thus, C. ultimus is the only generally accepted proterosuchid record younger than Early Triassic.
The holotype of C. ultimus is a partial skull including parts of the preorbital region preserved together with the anterior ends of the lower jaws, collected from the upper member of the Ermaying Formation of Shanxi Province in northern China, which is Anisian in age (Liu et al., 2013). This fragmentary specimen was originally assigned by Young (1958) to C. yuani, but later used by Young (1964) to erect C. ultimus based on differences in size and tooth curvature from the former species. Here we redescribe the specimen and show that ‘C. ultimus’ is not a proterosuchid but rather an indeterminate crown archosaur. An important implication of this revision is the absence of any confirmed record of proterosuchid archosauriforms from rocks of Middle Triassic age or younger.
Fe-(oxyhydr)oxide-encrusted filamentous microstructures produced by microorganisms have been widely reported in various modern and ancient extreme environments; however, the iron-dependent microorganisms preserved in hydrothermal quartz veins have not been explored in detail because of limited materials available. In this study, abundant well-preserved filamentous microstructures were observed in the hydrothermal quartz veins of the uppermost dolostones of the terminal-Ediacaran Qigebulake Formation in the Aksu area, northwestern Tarim Basin, China. These filamentous microstructures were permineralized by goethite and hematite as revealed by Raman spectroscopy and completely entombed in chalcedony and quartz cements. Microscopically, they are characterized by biogenic filamentous morphologies (commonly 20–200 μm in length and 1–5 μm in diameter) and structures (curved, tubular sheath-like, segmented, and mat-like filaments), similar to the Fe-oxidizing bacteria (FeOB) living in modern and ancient hydrothermal vent fields. A previous study revealed that quartz-barite vein swarms were subseafloor channels of low-temperature, silica-rich, diffusive hydrothermal vents in the earliest Cambrian, which contributed silica to the deposition of the overlying bedded chert of the Yurtus Formation. In this context, this study suggests that the putative filamentous FeOB preserved in the quartz veins might have thrived in the low-temperature, silica- and Fe(II)-rich hydrothermal vent channels in subseafloor mixing zones and were rapidly fossilized by subsequent higher-temperature, silica-rich hydrothermal fluids in response to waning and waxing fluctuations of diffuse hydrothermal venting. In view of the occurrence in a relatively stable passive continental margin shelf environment in Tarim Block, the silica-rich submarine hydrothermal vent system may represent a new and important geological niche favorable for FeOB colonization, which is different from their traditional habitats reported in hydrothermal vent systems at oceanic spreading centers or volcanic seamounts. Thus, these newly recognized microfossils offer a new clue to explore the biological signatures and habitat diversity of microorganisms on Earth and beyond.
Blogger Aleksandr Shishkin recently offered his rationale (and that of other navy advocates) for repairing and modernizing Admiral Nakhimov.
As a shipbuilder, Shishkin says the “enemies of these monster-ships” think that the extraordinary expenditures required to renovate Nakhimov could be redirected to better use for the Russian military. But he contends that Russia’s nuclear-powered guided missile cruisers have a disproportionate military-political effect when compared to other ways of spending this part of the MOD budget.
[...]
It’d be interesting to read an argument for Admiral Nakhimov addressing how the ship will figure in future Russian fleet operations and larger military strategy. How will it operate in defense of Moscow’s naval strategic nuclear forces, or in more likely contingencies short of this?
THE great 20th-century conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter thought the left had overlooked a major selling point in pressing the case for public — i.e., government — control over productive capital. “One of the most significant titles to superiority,” he suggested, was that public ownership produced profits, which means not having to depend on taxes to raise money.
The bulk of the left never took up Schumpeter’s argument. But in an oddly fitting twist, these days the mantra of public control in exchange for lower taxes has been embraced by a surprising quarter of the American political leadership: conservatives.
The most well-known case is Alaska. The Alaska Permanent Fund, established by a Republican governor in 1976, combines not one, but two socialist principles: public ownership and the provision of a basic income for all residents. The fund collects and invests proceeds from the extraction of oil and minerals in the state. Dividends are paid out annually to all state residents.
Texas is another example of conservative socialism in practice. Almost 150 years ago the Texas Permanent School Fund took control of roughly half of all the land and associated mineral rights still in the public domain. In 1953, coastal “submerged lands” were added after being relinquished by the federal government. Each year distributions from the fund go to support education; in 2014 alone it gave $838.7 million to state schools. Another fund, the $17.5 billion Permanent University Fund, owns more than two million acres of land, the proceeds of which help underwrite the state’s public university system.
Similar socialized funds — sometimes called sovereign wealth funds — are common in other conservative states. The Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund, with a market value of more than $7 billion accumulated from mineral extraction, is almost a direct expression of Schumpeter’s doctrine: Socialized ownership has helped to eliminate income taxes in the state.
Such “socialism, American style,” can produce odd reversals of conservative-liberal political alignments. One of the largest “socialist” enterprises in the nation is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a publicly owned company with $11 billion in sales revenue, nine million customers and 11,260 employees that produces electricity and helps manage the Tennessee River system. In 2013 President Obama proposed privatizing the T.V.A., but local Republican politicians, concerned with the prospect of higher prices for consumers and less money for their states, successfully opposed the idea.
I live in Texas and hear a lot of conspiracy theories. The one about a North American Union is popular. Radio demagogues such as Alex Jones and the recent Jade Helm military exercises keep it alive and the public afraid.
The entire continent of North America — so the tale goes — will soon be one giant country. Washington will force Mexico and Canada, at the point of a double-bladed economic spear, to join their land masses with the United States and create a super country.
This merging will make it easier for the powers that be — the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group, take your pick — to control humanity and impose authoritarian rule. The NAU leaders will put checkpoints on highways, require GPS trackers in all newborns, eliminate personal firearms and outlaw dissent.
It’s a fanciful tale, easily traded over drinks at a bar and rife for exploitation as an adventure comic or action-oriented T.V. series. That’s just what the authors of the comic book The United States of North America aimed to do.
The bone-bearing bed from Żyglin (S Poland), which likely represents the oldest Lower Muschelkalk accumulation of reptile remains in the SE part of the Germanic Basin, has been investigated in order to determine its genesis. The basic methods were supported by petrographic analysis of the marrow cavity and large inter-trabecular pore space fillings of fossil bones, which was used to check its usefulness to identify the environments where the bones were initially deposited and to decipher taphonomic histories of the remains. The bone-bearing bed is a composite deposit, which consists of three distinct layers (from bottom to top): micritic limestone (mudstone, bioturbated autochthonous mud), crinoidal limestone (grainstone to packstone, calcirudite), and shell-rich limestone (packstone to wackstone, calcirudite). The crinoidal limestone layer, the main bone-bearing bed, is recognised as the proximal tempestite deposited in the mid-ramp zone. The petrographic analysis of the fillings reveals the prevalence of minute ostracod carapaces, accompanied by other grains, embedded together with micrite to microspar. Such compositions suggest that these sediments may have been inserted into the bone pore spaces in lagoons and tidal-flat ponds. Features of some bones record their early diagenetic burial and lithification before the final redeposition. The isopachous spar, blocky spar and weathered pyrite document changes in the chemical composition of fluids that flowed into the bone interiors. The burrow found in the marrow cavity of specimen IGUAM-ZOV-7 provides evidence that some remains were inhabited by minute or juvenile invertebrates. All recognised features indicate that both invertebrate and vertebrate bioclasts, included in the tempestite, were initially deposited in various settings of the carbonate ramp and in the end redeposited as a result of a heavy storm or a hurricane. The examined bone-bearing bed represents time-averaged assemblage, which originated due to hydraulic concentration of the vertebrate bioclasts. The petrographic analysis of the fillings is a valuable tool to identify complex taphonomic pathways of vertebrate bioclasts.
A recent report by Chen et al. (Chen, L., Xiao, S., Pang, K., Zhou, C.M., Yuan, X.L., 2014. Cell differentiation and germ-soma separation in Ediacaran animal embryo-like fossils. Nature 516, 238-241) describes the new Ediacaran Doushantuo acritarchs with fascinating features. Nested within Megaclonophycus-like fossils that exhibit palintomic cell division are multicellular spheroid structures termed matryoshkas, which are interpreted to be germ cells. Such distinctive features of cellular differentiation and germ-soma separation suggest affinities of these with early stem group metazoans. In this commentary, I suggest some alternative interpretations to those elaborated by Chen et al. (2014).
The Air Force plans to announce a contract award for their new stealthy long-range bomber aircraft in September of this year, service officials told Military.com.
The contract award for the aircraft was initially expected to arrive earlier this summer. In fact, this new timeline comes on the heels of a series of delays for the award.
The new Long Range Strike Bomber, or LRS-B, is slated to fly alongside and ultimately replace the existing B-2 bomber.
Senior Air Force officials told Military.com that taking extra time at the front end of the process to make sure the selection is the right one will ultimately save much more time and money throughout the longer-term acquisition process. The service plans to field the new bomber by the mid-2020s.
Weeds are currently present in a wide range of ecosystems worldwide. Although the beginning of their evolution is largely unknown, researchers assumed that they developed in tandem with cultivation since the appearance of agricultural habitats some 12,000 years ago. These rapidly-evolving plants invaded the human disturbed areas and thrived in the new habitat. Here we present unprecedented new findings of the presence of “proto-weeds” and small-scale trial cultivation in Ohalo II, a 23,000-year-old hunter-gatherers' sedentary camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel. We examined the plant remains retrieved from the site (ca. 150,000 specimens), placing particular emphasis on the search for evidence of plant cultivation by Ohalo II people and the presence of weed species. The archaeobotanically-rich plant assemblage demonstrates extensive human gathering of over 140 plant species and food preparation by grinding wild wheat and barley. Among these, we identified 13 well-known current weeds mixed with numerous seeds of wild emmer, barley, and oat. This collection provides the earliest evidence of a human-disturbed environment—at least 11 millennia before the onset of agriculture—that provided the conditions for the development of "proto-weeds", a prerequisite for weed evolution. Finally, we suggest that their presence indicates the earliest, small-scale attempt to cultivate wild cereals seen in the archaeological record.
