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Researchers suggest so based on studies of early fossil rabbit and horse types. From ScienceDaily: More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, new research has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change. … Researchers propose that the body change could have been an evolutionary response to create a more efficient way to reduce body heat. A smaller body size would allow the animals to cool down faster. Read More ›

Challenges fundamentals of echinoderm evolution. From ScienceDaily: Echinoderms are among the marine invertebrates that suffered the most severe losses at the end-Permian extinction. At least that was the consensus until a team of European paleontologists — Ben Thuy, Hans Hagdorn, and Andy S. Gale — cast a critical eye on some poorly studied Triassic echinoderm fossils. The fossils turned out to belong to groups that supposedly went extinct by the end of the Paleozoic. Some ancient echinoids, ophiuroids, and asteroids had slipped the bottleneck and coexisted with the ancestors of modern-day sea urchins, brittle stars, sand dollars, and relatives, for many millions of years. These echinoderm hangovers occurred almost worldwide and had spread into a wide range of paleo-environments by Read More ›

From writer and filmmaker Paul Ratner at BigThink: Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes. Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein’s pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Animals with high cognitive ability also have relatively large brains, but the factors that drive evolution of big brains remain unclear. Scientists have hypothesized that ecological, social, and cultural factors could each play a role. Most of these hypotheses have not been formalized mathematically, but doing so would allow scientists to refine their tests. To address the issue, Mauricio González-Forero of University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues developed a mathematical model that predicts how large the human brain should be at different stages of an individual’s life, depending on different possible evolutionary scenarios. The model relies on the assumption that the brain expends some energy on cognitive skills that allow an individual to extract energy from the environment Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Nautilus: The hypothesis of a fifth force is, then, anything but exhausted. In fact it’s fair to say that any observations in fundamental physics or cosmology that can’t be explained by our current theories—by the Standard Model of particle physics or by general relativity—are apt to get physicists talking about new forces or new types of matter, such as dark matter and dark energy. That’s simply the way physics has always worked: When all else fails, you place a new piece on the board and see how it moves. Sure, we haven’t yet seen any convincing evidence for a fifth force, but neither have we seen a direct sign of dark matter or supersymmetry or extra Read More ›

Readers may remember the Darwinian icon of the Galapagos finches that were supposed to be turning into new species but then just drifted back and forth. One would think the finches didn’t give a hoot about Science. From Evolution News & Views: In a new Perspective piece in Science Magazine, “Watching Speciation in Action,” they show that they are not the only ones who have witnessed the origin of species. Beginning with the Darwin quote about “grandeur in this view of life” that evolves, they describe a number of studies like theirs that illustrate organisms that have varied and diversified from parent stock. Let’s begin by listing the examples and what is known about them, both genetically and phenotypically. These Read More ›

In a survey article of centuries of views, Jon Garvey offers at Hump of the Camel: God might indeed decide to make life on earth a unique case, and the vastness of a cosmos uninhabited by other physical beings a matter for himself alone. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of cosmic fine tuning is the realisation that a vast universe is necessary to enable the conditions a tiny inhabited world like ours requires. God’s prodigality in doing so much for us would make as plausible, and inconclusive, a case. Yet Chalmers once more shows that extraterrestrial life poses no inherent problem whatsoever for Christianity. Neither, though, does a universe in which life is unique to the earth – a Read More ›

From Mark Anderson at New Scientist: Fresh suspicions have reopened the case against dark matter, forcing a fundamental rethink of the familiar force that keeps our feet on the ground … But what if we never really knew gravity at all? What if out there, beyond where we can easily keep our eye on it, the universal force doesn’t stick to the rules? (paywall) More. It’s hard to know what to make of the question. Whatever gravity does is the rules. See also: A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion Follow UD News at Twitter!

Nick Stockton asks, at Wired, why didn’t the ice ages that began at 800,000 ago just remain? What reversed the cooling trend? A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, has a hypothesis what that something was: plants. Or, more specifically, a complicated process in which plants wear down certain kinds of rocks, and how those rocks remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they wear down—leaving just enough CO2 out there to trap solar warmth, and gradually bring summer back. More. Most ecology on the planet actually depends on plants. Everything seems organized around them, including temperatures. See also: How plants see, hear, smell, and respond without animal sense organs Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Anna Nowogrodzki at : The ability to absorb light at short wavelengths and re-emit it at longer wavelengths is called fluorescence, and is rare in terrestrial animals. Until now, it was unheard of in amphibians. Researchers also report that the polka dot tree frog uses fluorescent molecules totally unlike those found in other animals. … The researchers first thought that they might find red fluorescence in these frogs, because they contain a pigment called biliverdin. Normally, biliverdin turns the amphibian’s tissues and bones green. However, in some insects, says Carlos Taboada, a herpetologist at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, proteins bound to biliverdin emit a faint red fluorescence. But in the polka dot tree frog, biliverdin turned Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Most people are familiar with the well-known ‘X’ shape of chromosomes, but in fact chromosomes only take on this shape when the cell divides. Using their new approach, the researchers have now been able to determine the structures of active chromosomes inside the cell, and how they interact with each other to form an intact genome. This is important because knowledge of the way DNA folds inside the cell allows scientists to study how specific genes, and the DNA regions that control them, interact with each other. The genome’s structure controls when and how strongly genes — particular regions of the DNA — are switched ‘on’ or ‘off’. This plays a critical role in the development of organisms Read More ›

From Gautam Naik at Nature: An editor on the board of a journal published by the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA) has been asked to resign in a controversy over data sharing in peer review. Gert Storms — who says he won’t step down — is one of a few hundred scientists who have vowed that, from the start of this year, they will begin rejecting papers if authors won’t publicly share the underlying data, or explain why they can’t. The idea, called the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, was launched by psychologists hoping to increase transparency in a field beset by reports of fraud and dubious research practices. And the APA, which does not ask that data be made available Read More ›

From Geoffrey E. Hill at The Scientist: What defines a species? Because the boundaries between species can appear so fluid, pursuing such a question seems, at times, like academic esoterica—little different than discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But accurate species definitions lie at the heart of biological investigations and management of natural resources (e.g., the US Endangered Species Act). It is troublesome, therefore, that new information on the genetic structure of long-recognized species of birds could jeopardize their status as full species. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the DNA of many familiar species of birds holds signatures of substantial exchange of nuclear genes with other bird species. Such gene exchange matters Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Marauding across the tropical forest floor, aggressive army ant colonies harbor hidden enemies within their ranks. The impostors look and smell like army ants, march with the ants, and even groom the ants. But far from being altruistic nest-mates, these creatures are parasitic beetles, engaged in a game of deception. Through dramatic changes in body shape, behavior, and pheromone chemistry, the beetles gain their hostile hosts’ acceptance, duping the ants so they can feast on the colony brood. This phenomenon did not evolve just once. Instead, these beetles arose at least a dozen separate times from non-ant-like ancestors. This discovery, published March 9 in Current Biology, provides evidence that evolution has the capacity to repeat itself in an Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dolphins and crocodiles now live in rivers and oceans, but each evolved from land-based animals. Feeding in water has many new challenges. This new study shows that despite being separated by 300 million years, dolphins and crocodiles found comparable solutions to these problems, and evolved skull shapes that are remarkably similar. “Our results suggest the remarkable similarity between some crocodilians and toothed whales is driven by what they eat rather than where they live,” said lead author Mr Matthew McCurry from the Monash School of Biological Sciences. Previously no rigorous attempt had been made to show how similar the head shapes of dolphins and crocodiles really are. It had been thought that aspects such shallow seas or rivers Read More ›