Monday, marvelous Monday and time for science talk has arrived. Time to brighten your day with selections from science sites across the globe. New discoveries, new takes on old knowledge, and other bits of news are all available for the perusing in today's information world. Today's tidbits include Cope's rule and dinosaur body size, NASA rover finds clues to changes in Mars' atmosphere, a new order in the quantum world, why seas are rising ahead of predictions, climate change is leading to dwindling mountain meadows in the Pacific Northwest, U.S., and the effects of prehistoric nocturnal life on mammalian vision.
Pull up that comfy chair and grab a spot on the porch. There is always plenty of room for everyone. Another session of Dr. Possum's science education, entertainment, and potluck discussion is set to begin.
Featured Stories
According to Cope's rule (named after paleontologist Edward Cope) small creatures evolve into larger creatures over time. In the case of dinosaurs the rule appears to be correct at least some of the time.
To see if Cope's rule really applies to dinosaurs, Hunt and colleagues Richard FitzJohn of the University of British Columbia and Matthew Carrano of the NMNH used dinosaur thigh bones (aka femurs) as proxies for animal size. They then used that femur data in their statistical model to look for two things: directional trends in size over time and whether there were any detectable upper limits for body size.
"What we did then was explore how constant a rule is this Cope's Rule trend within dinosaurs," said Hunt. They looked across the “family tree” of dinosaurs and found that some groups, or clades, of dinosaurs do indeed trend larger over time, following Cope's Rule. Ceratopsids and hadrosaurs, for instance, show more increases in size than decreases over time, according to Hunt. Although birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs, the team excluded them from the study because of the evolutionary pressure birds faced to lighten up and get smaller so they could fly better.
As for the upper limits to size, the results were sometimes yes, sometimes no. The four-legged sauropods (i.e., long-necked, small-headed herbivores) and ornithopod (i.e., iguanodons, ceratopsids) clades showed no indication of upper limits to how large they could evolve. And indeed, these groups contain the largest land animals that ever lived.
NASA rover, Curiosity, is finding clues to changes in
Mars' atmosphere.
Scientists theorize that in Mars' distant past its environment may have been quite different, with persistent water and a thicker atmosphere. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission will investigate possible losses from the upper atmosphere when it arrives at Mars in 2014.
With these initial sniffs of Martian atmosphere, SAM also made the most sensitive measurements ever to search for methane gas on Mars. Preliminary results reveal little to no methane. Methane is of interest as a simple precursor chemical for life. On Earth, it can be produced by either biological or non-biological processes.
Scientists generate
novel quantum matter with crystal-like properties using lasers.
Both high-valued diamond and low-prized graphite consist of exactly the same carbon atoms. The subtle but nevertheless important difference between the two materials is the geometrical configuration of their building blocks, with large consequences for their properties. There is no way any kind of matter could be diamond and graphite at the same time. However, this limitation does not hold for quantum matter...A future challenge for the scientists is the deterministic preparation of Rydberg crystals with a well defined number of excitations. Combining the blockade effect with the single-atom addressing one could engineer quantum gates which can serve as an experimental toolbox for a variety of quantum simulations. Several Rydberg-atoms could be connected to a scalable quantum system for quantum information processing.
The current rate of
sea level rise is at or above the high end of predictions.
What's missing from the models used to forecast sea-level rise are critical feedbacks that speed everything up," says (researcher) Hay...
One of those feedbacks involves Arctic sea ice, another the Greenland ice cap, and another soil moisture and groundwater mining...
All of these are positive feedbacks speeding up the changes in climate and sea-level rise.
High mountain meadows in the Pacific Northwest, U.S., are dwindling as a result of climate change.
In this study, it appears that snowpack was a bigger factor than temperature in allowing mountain hemlock tree invasion of Jefferson Park, a 333-acre meadow which sits at the northern base of Mount Jefferson, a towering 10,497-foot volcano northwest of Bend, Ore. Seedlings that can be buried by snow many months every year need only a few more weeks or months of growing season to hugely increase their chance of survival.
The study also found surprising variability of tree invasion even within the meadow, based on minor dips, debris flows or bumps in the terrain that caused changes in snowpack and also left some soils wetter or drier in ways that facilitated tree seedling survival.
Most day-active mammals retain the imprint of
nocturnal life in their eye structures.
Using a sample of eyeballs from 266 mammal species, the researchers used a multivariate statistical method to show that mammals active by day or night show only minor differences in eye morphology.
The researchers then compared the eyes of mammals, birds and lizards using the ratio of cornea size and eye length — two functionally important measures of the eye’s ability to admit light and form sharp images. These analyses showed that diurnal (only active by day) and cathemeral (active by both day and night) mammals don’t differ in their eye shapes. At the same time, both groups have eye shapes that are very similar to those of nocturnal birds and lizards. These results reveal that most day-active mammals have eye shapes that appear “nocturnal” when compared with other vertebrates.
Knucklehead's Photo of the Week
Pygmy Angel Fish
©Knucklehead, all rights reserved, presented by permission. (Click on the image to see more in the same series.)
Other Worthy Stories of the Week
The oldest trees on the planet
The physics of daylight-saving time
Early sketches of iconic objects
A next generation X-ray telescope ready to fly
Super rare, superluminous supernovae are likely explosion of universe's earliest stars
Physicists confirm first planet discovered in a quadruple star system
Our solar system is not quite as special as once believed
Scientists monitor comet breakup
Predicting what topics will trend on Twitter
Grey friars female skeleton is possibly of founder
Super-massive black hole inflates giant bubble
Poverty leads people to focus on the short-term while ignoring the long view
Quantum communication without entanglement could perform faster than previously thought possible
Psychics fail tests of their abilities in academic setting
First all carbon solar cell
For even more science news:
General Science Collectors:
Alpha-Galileo
BBC News Science and Environment
Eureka Science News
LiveScience
New Scientist
PhysOrg.com
SciDev.net
Science/AAAS
Science Alert
Science Centric
Science Daily
Scientific American
Space Daily
Blogs:
A Few Things Ill Considered Techie and Science News
Cantauri Dreams space exploration
Coctail Party Physics Physics with a twist.
Deep Sea News marine biology
List of Geoscience Blogs
Science20.com
ScienceBlogs
Space Review
Science Insider
Scientific Blogging.
Space.com
Techonology Review
Tetrapod Zoologyvertebrate paleontology
Wired News
Science RSS Feed: Medworm
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe--a combination of hard science and debunking crap
At Daily Kos:
This Week in Science by DarkSyde
Overnight News Digest:Science Saturday by Neon Vincent. OND tech Thursday by rfall.
Pique the Geek by Translator Sunday evenings about 9 Eastern time
All diaries with the DK GreenRoots Tag.
All diaries with the eKos Tag
A More Ancient World by matching mole
Astro Kos
SciTech at Dkos.
Sunday Science Videos by palantir
NASA picture of the day. For more see the NASA image gallery or the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
NASA, Public Domain
