Sci + Tech News: First Pictures of a Planet Being Born, Rats Communicate Mind to Mind, and ‘Metro: The Last Light’ Gets a Release Date

Science

• A physicist in Australia proposed to his physicist girlfriend by publishing a paper on “Two Body Interactions.” Awwwww nerd love! [CNET]
• We posted a link a couple of weeks ago about the American Museum of Natural History using DNA technology to try to figure out what the mother of placental mammals would have looked like. Now, Radiolab wants you to help them name the creature. You can tweet your nomination using the #nameyourancestor hashtag, or send them an email at comments@amnh.org. You have until March 5th to send in a suggestion, and after that they will be put into a March Madness style bracket and voted on. May I suggest Khaleesi? [Geekosystem]
• For the first time in history, scientists have managed to snap a picture of an exoplanet being born. It is seriously cool stuff. [io9]
• There’s a new theory being proposed for why dinosaurs, particularly sauropods (those are the ones with the long necks) grew so big: their air sacs. Sauropods had respiratory air sacs that allowed them to breathe more efficiently. The soft tissues invaded the bone structure as well, meaning that while sauropods were huge, they were relatively light for their size. This allowed them to grow so big, because they weighed less than they would have if they didn’t have these air sacs. They also had a stable, sturdy body which allowed them to support such long necks, necks that often account for 50% of their total length. [National Geographic]
• Scientists have also discovered a lost continent underneath the Indian Ocean, called Mauritia. It lies beneath the lava flows that created the islands of Reunion and Mauritius, and dates back 170 million years to when two of the Earth’s super continents, Laurasia and Gondwana, broke apart into the continents we more or less know today. Mauritia broke away from Madagascar between approximately 83.5 and 61 million years ago, and was shredded as it passed over mid-ocean ridges. [Discovery News]

Gaming

• Metro: The Last Light, despite original developer THX going under a few months ago, has a release date: May 14th. [Gameranx]
• Willem Defoe has joined the cast of Heavy Rain developer’s latest, Beyond: Two Souls. Now I’m even more excited! [The Verge]
• Square Enix trademarked something called Deus Ex: Human Defiance this week, which turned out to be the name of the film based on the game series, and not another game. [VG24/7]
• JRPG lovers rejoice! NIS America announced a trio of PS3 JRPGS that are going to be brought to the west, most notably Time and Eternity, an RPG game that does away with polygon sprites and uses hand-drawn animated graphical style that makes it feel like you’re playing an interactive anime. [Destructoid]

Technology

• A new urine sample app lets you analyze your own pee with your phone. Don’t worry though, you don’t actually pee on it — instead you take a picture of your pee in a cup and Uchek can analyze it and tell you if you have anything from diabetes to a urinary tract infection. [CNET]
• Duke University has managed to make neural implants that let two rats communicate brain to brain. WHAT!?? So it’s not telepathy exactly, but it’s the closest we’ve come. Frankly, I do not want these things near me (because who needs extra people in their head?) but it’s still very, very cool. [Discovery News]

Other big news on the gaming front includes the announcement of a new Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but we’re waiting until Monday to give you a full post on all the details when Ubisoft releases them!