Kiran Kuppa's List: Natural World

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck.

But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

"The Ennedi plateau or the Ennedi desert as it is sometimes called is located in the north-eastern area of Chad in one of the most inaccessible region in the middle of the Sahara. The region is full of interesting sandstone formations - graceful fingers of rock and many hundreds of natural arches, including the great Aloba arch, which has a height of nearly 120 meters and is one of the most spectacular arches in the world. Apart from the geological attractions, examples of petroglyphs or rock paintings are abundant in the area. Many of the rock art represent all kinds of animals that the first inhabitants of the desert had."

These unusual reptiles, which are found in rainforests in Southeast Asia, are able to fling themselves from trees and elegantly glide through the air.Scientists say that the serpents radically alter their body shape to generate the aerodynamic forces needed to perform this feat.

Scientists have long hypothesized that elephants use salt licks to supplement an insufficient dietary intake of sodium, but conclusive verification has been lacking. The Journal of Mammalogy paper uses several lines of evidence to test the hypothesis, from examining mineral content of available plants and the soils consumed by elephants to observing patterns of salt lick use.

The scientists found that, unlike other minerals, sodium in woody plants and natural water supplies may be inadequate to meet the minimum
requirements of elephants. The soils consumed by elephants had higher levels of sodium than other soils in the area, but did not differ in terms
of other minerals

The monarch is famous for its southward late summer/autumn migration from the United States and southern Canada to Mexico and coastal California, and northward return in spring, which occurs over the lifespans of three to four generations of the butterfly. The migration route was fully determined by Canadian entomologists Fred and Norah Urquhart after a 38-year search, aided by naturalists Kenneth C. Brugger and Catalina Trail who solved the
final piece of the puzzle by identifying the butterflies' overwintering sites in Mexico. The discovery has been called the "entomological discovery of the 20th century". An IMAX film, Flight of the Butterflies, tells the story of the long search by the Urquharts, Brugger and Trail to unlock the secret of the butterflies' migration.

Over the last 3.6 billion years,[3] nature has gone through a process of trial and error to refine the living organisms, processes, and materials on Earth. The emerging field of biomimetics has given rise to new technologies created from biologically inspired engineering at both the macro scale and nanoscale levels. Biomimetics is not a new idea. Humans have been looking at nature for answers to both complex and simple problems throughout our existence. Nature has solved many of today's engineering problems such as self-healing abilities, environmental exposure tolerance and resistance, hydrophobicity, self-assembly, and harnessing solar energy through the evolutionary mechanics of selective advantages

Structural coloration is the production of colour by microscopically structured surfaces, sometimes also called schemochromes, fine enough to interfere with visible light, sometimes in combination with pigments: for example, peacock tail feathers are pigmented brown, but their structure makes them appear blue, turquoise, and green, and often they appear iridescent

"Whenever a public figure cheats on his wife, pundits can be counted on to trot out the tired old claim that males are simply wired by evolution to be promiscuous.

Two studies released on Monday beg to differ. By sticking to one female, they conclude, males of many species, especially primates, can increase their chances of siring many offspring who survive long enough to reproduce - the key factor in determining whether a particular behavior survives the brutal process of natural selection.

In fact, the evolutionary advantages to males of being monogamous are so clear that the two studies reached competing conclusions about which benefit is greater for males. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, protecting the lives of his offspring was the paramount benefit of monogamy"

"It's exactly this selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success after teaching capuchins to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. The economist wanted to study the incentives that motivated specimens to behave in a way, while the psychologist analyzed the behavior itself."

"The director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is responsible for the world's largest collection of living plants. The organisation employs more than 650 scientists and other staff. The living collections include more than 30,000 different kinds of plants, while the herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over seven million preserved plant specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants."

Five essential things to know about evolution:If the public doesn't get evolution, part of the reason may be because many don't fully appreciate some of the ideas behind the theory. Here's a rundown of five things about evolution that many people don't fu

"Scientists have unearthed extraordinarily preserved fossils of a 520-million-year-old sea creature, one of the earliest animal fossils ever found, according to a new study.The fossilized animal, an arthropod called a fuxhianhuiid, has primitive limbs under its head, as well as the earliest example of a nervous system that extended past the head"

flying or crawling insects such as flies are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments, and nectar bribes. The sides of the pitcher are slippery and may be grooved in such a way so as to ensure that the insects cannot climb out. The small bodies of liquid contained within the pitcher traps are called phytotelmata. They drown the insect, and the body of it is gradually dissolved.

Drosera, commonly known as the sundews, comprise one of the largest genera of carnivorous plants, with at least 194 species.[1] These members of the family Droseraceae lure, capture, and digest insects using stalked mucilaginous glands covering their leaf surface. The insects are used to supplement the poor mineral nutrition of the soil in which they grow. Various species, which vary greatly in size and form, can be found growing natively on every continent except Antarctica.[

Venus flytraps are the speed demons of the plant world. In spite of belonging to a particularly sedate kingdom of organisms, these carnivorous plants snap shut their two-lobed traps in a tenth of a second to capture an insect meal, which they then digest.

"When we say those 700 species are all types of leech, we're saying that we think they share a common ancestor. When we say that leeches are a type of worm, what we're really saying is that leeches and worms share a common ancestor - and that that ancestor is not as recent as the one shared by all the different leeches.

Those are hypotheses, and they could be wrong. Because evolution is an ongoing process, the relationships those hypotheses describe could also change"

Cyanobacteria also known as blue-green bacteria, blue-green algae, and Cyanophyta, is a phylum of bacteria that obtain their energy through photosynthesis.
The ability of cyanobacteria to perform oxygenic photosynthesis is thought to have converted the early reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, which dramatically changed the composition of life forms on Earth by stimulating biodiversity and leading to the near-extinction of oxygen-intolerant organisms.