Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Evolution of a more upright posture in mammals and birds cooccurred with warm-bloodedness: The benefits of a 252 million years old posture shift.

 






During the Triassic, from 250 to 200 million years ago, the ancestors of both mammals and birds became warm-blooded at the same time. Life was recovering from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, the greatest mass extinction of all time. It killed as much as 95 percent of life, and the very few survivors were repeatedly hit by global warming and ocean acidification. 

Warm bloodedness is an energy-requiring condition, but it permits the ability to compete better for resources and escape predators. Paleontologists identified warm-bloodedness and evidence for the early origin of feathers or hair in dinosaur and bird ancestors 250 million years ago. The origin of warm-bloodedness is connected to the exact time of the mass extinction. 

Several special features are linked to warm-bloodedness. One is the bones inside the nose and snout, called the turbinates. These bones increase the distance that air travels into the body, allowing it to warm up on the way in. There is also the bony palate, which separates the mouth from the nose and allows for continuous breathing, even while eating. Another, which is rarely preserved in the fossil records, is the presence of fur, which acts as insulation.

At the same time, an almost instantaneous posture shift happened in both mammal and bird ancestors. Amphibians and reptiles are sprawlers, holding their limbs partly sideways. Before the crisis, most reptiles had sprawling posture; afterward, they walked upright. This may have been the first sign of a new pace of life in the Triassic. Erect postures, with the limbs immediately below their bodies, allowed birds and mammals to run faster and further. However, to fuel inner temperature control, warm-blooded animals have to eat much more than cold-blooded animals. Warm bloodedness was a dramatic evolutionary innovation, which led to emotional regulation, making it possible to take care of offspring, learn, and form consciousness. 


Read more about how our mammal ancestors became warm-blooded on Phys.org.


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Sunday, October 4, 2020

Quantum entanglement between distant large objects

 





Entanglement is a link between two sister particles or objects, making them behave as a single entity. Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, entangled a mechanical oscillator—a vibrating dielectric membrane—with an atom cloud's spin (magnetic orientation).  These very different entities were possible to entangle by connecting them with photons, particles of light. Atoms can be useful in processing quantum information, and the membrane—or mechanical quantum systems in general—can be useful for the storage of quantum information.

Professor Eugene Polzik, who led the effort, states that: "With this new technique, we are on route to pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of entanglement. The bigger the objects, the further apart they are, . . . the more interesting entanglement becomes from both fundamental and applied perspectives. With the new result, entanglement between very different objects has become possible."

The experiment might be a step towards limitless precision of measurements of motion.

The work, "Entanglement between distant macroscopic mechanical and spin systems" was published in Nature Physics.  

Read the whole article in Phys.org




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