World cup soccer players tend to be born with sun and moon in adjacent zodiacal signs.

“The ecliptic elongation of the moon with respect to the sun does not show uniform distribution on the birth dates of the 704 soccer players selected for the 1998 World Cup. However, a uniform distribution is expected on astronomical grounds. The World Cup players show a very pronounced tendency (p = 0.00001) to be born on days when the sun and moon are in adjacent zodiacal signs.”

Image: flickr/wakanmuri

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Is mulitcellular life like us just the new kid on the biological block, a latecomer to a world dominated by single-celled organisms like bacteria? Perhaps not—multicellular life could be nearly half as old as the Earth itself.

A new study out today in Nature identifies fossils from Gabon in Africa that date back 2.1 billion years. The organic material is long gone, but the scientists say these are the oldest multicellular organisms ever found. That date takes them way back before the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago that made multiple-celled life widespread on the planet.

“We have these macrofossils turning up in a world that was purely microbial,” says Stefan Bengtson, a palaeozoologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and a co-author on the report. “That’s a big deal because when you finally get big organisms, it changes the way the biosphere works, as they interact with microbes and each other” [Nature].

It’s hard to know for sure that these specimens—which don’t have a name yet and grew up to five inches across—are truly multicellular, because no organic material remains. Sometimes bacteria live in larger sheets, and those aren’t true multicellular organisms. But in this case, study author Abderrazak El Albani says, the complex structure shown by the fossil remains show signs of communication between cells.

And, he says, the timing of these fossils suggests why the organism was able to become more complex: There was suddenly lots of oxygen back then.

Just a few million years before … the newly discovered fossils appear in the fossil record, Earth experienced what’s called the Great Oxidation Event. The sudden evolution of photosynthesizing bacteria radically changed Earth’s atmosphere, kick-starting its transformation from nearly oxygen-free into today’s breathable air [Wired.com].

With all that oxygen just waiting to be breathed, this was probably just one of many times multicellular life took off independently, according to paleontologist Philip Donoghue.

Importantly, even if these fossils are the oldest-known multicellular organisms, that doesn’t mean they were the ancestors of all multicellular life, Donoghue said. “Multicellularity hasn’t evolved just once; it’s evolved almost 20 times even amongst living lineages,” he said. “This is probably one of a great number of extinct lineages that experimented with [increased] organismal complexity” [The Scientist].

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Image: Abderrazak El Albani and Arnaud Mazurier

Twelve million years ago, one sperm whale was king. Between 40 and 60 feet in length the beast scientists named Leviathan melvillei wasn’t any bigger than today’s sperm whales, but look at those teeth!

As described in a paper published in Nature today, Olivier Lambert discovered the whale’s fossils in a Peruvian desert. The creature’s name says it all:

[It] combines the Hebrew word ‘Livyatan’, which refers to large mythological sea monsters, with the name of American novelist Herman Melville, who penned Moby-Dick — “one of my favourite sea books”, says lead author Olivier Lambert of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. [Nature News]

The prehistoric sperm whale may have eaten baleen whales, and its largest chompers are a foot long and some four inches wide. For all the details, check out Ed Yong’s post on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Image: Nature

A Spitzer Space Telescope image of a Brown Dwarf (?), Click for larger. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/P. Eisenhardt (JPL)

This image shows what astronomers think is one of the coldest brown dwarfs discovered so far (red dot in middle of frame). The object, called SDWFS J143524.44+335334.6, is one of 14 such brown dwarfs found by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope using infrared light. Follow-up observations are required to nail down this “failed” star’s temperature, but rough estimates put this particular object at about 700 Kelvin (800 degrees Fahrenheit).

In this image, infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is color-coded blue; 4.5-micron light is red. The brown dwarf shows up prominently in red because methane is absorbing the 3.6-micron, or blue-coded, light.

The Spitzer Space telescope has found 14 brown dwarfs using its infrared vision.  The image shows (they think) one of coldest found so far, it’s the red star in the center of the image.  Cool in this case is only about 800 degrees, certainly no where near a true star.  It has a name too: SDWFS J143524.44+335334.6, catchy eh?  To be sure more observations will be necessary.

Brown dwarfs you will recall are essentially failed stars, they are small in terms of stellar mass and not hot enough to trigger the required thermonuclear reactions in their cores or if they manage a reaction they cannot sustain them.  Why?  Again they are too small and the heating creating by gravitational contraction just doesn’t make it.

Brown dwarfs are quite interesting objects.  They are pretty much invisible because they are cool and just don’t give off much light.  There is speculation that a brown dwarf might even be closer than the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light-years.  If there is one, the WISE spacecraft will hopefully find it.

Visit the Spitzer website.

The nation’s political focus this week is on the plodding confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan to become a Supreme Court justice. But if you need a break from choreographed political spectacle, it’s a good time to remember that the man she would replace, Justice John Paul Stevens, casts a long shadow over science and tech.

Ars Technica revisits Justice Stevens’ legacy—he was a onetime Navy cryptographer who helped Internet freedom by ruling against parts of the Communications Decency Act and opposing software patents. And if you still have drawers full of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes you taped off TV, you have Stevens’ decision in Sony v. Universal to thank for that (as well as setting the precedent that stopped the music industry from suppressing mp3 players).

In that 1984 case, the Supreme Court came just one vote short of banning the Betamax VCR on the grounds that taping television shows off the air was an infringement of copyright. Justice Stevens wrote for a 5-4 majority that “time shifting”—the practice of recording shows for later viewing—was a fair use under copyright law. Stevens concluded that manufacturers were not liable for their customers’ infringement if their devices were capable of “substantial non-infringing use.” He noted that Congress was free to amend copyright law to give Hollywood control over VCR technology, but concluded that the courts shouldn’t do so unilaterally [Ars Technica].

You, sir, shall be missed.

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Image: Library of Congress

Once reserved for those who couldn’t pay their electricity bills or wanted to grow weed inside, snagging some free power via grappling hook is now a military operation. As described on the National Defense Education Network website, the Air Force has designed a “Bat Hook” which soldiers can heave into the air — action-hero style — to steal some juice from suspended power lines.

“We work very closely with Special Operations,” says Dave Coates, lead engineer on the project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (in the video below, and as shown by Popular Science). Their request? “Is there a way that you could possibly give us something like Batman?”

The Bat Hook system, technically called Remote Auxiliary Power System (RAPS), pierces the power line’s insulation to draw current directly where it’s needed, to charge batteries on the ground, for example.

Surprisingly this isn’t the only power line research ongoing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and RASP isn’t the only comic book gadget that can perform on high wires. Air Force engineers are also in the midst of designing robotic flying cameras that can perch on the power lines. The parasitic cameras get their power from currents induced by the alternating magnetic fields surrounding the lines. Once they finish surveying, and charging their batteries (also from the stolen electricity), they can fly to another location.

Note: As warned in the film and suggested in our man-with-meat-hook vs. power line story, trying to Batman your own power line is just plain stupid.

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Image: Department of Defense