热出的长腿？
@João Jesus
生活在寒冷气候中的动物往往有短粗的四肢——较短的胳膊和腿——甚至较小的耳朵和尾巴。想象一只企鹅，你就明白了。长期以来，生物学家一直认为这些短小的附肢是一种进化适应，较短的四肢能让动物最大限度地减少热量损失，因此更“紧凑”的动物更适合于寒冷的天气。
然而，来自美国俄亥俄州的科学家表示，温度可能对动物四肢的长度有更直接的影响。他们发现，较高的温度有助于软骨生长，这一成果发表在《美国科学院院刊》（Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences）上。
研究人员在几种不同的温度环境下饲养小鼠，结果表明，在……[查看全文]
Warm Climates Support Longer Limbs
Animals that live in cold climates tend to have stubby limbs—shorter arms and legs—even smaller ears and tails. Picture a penguin and you'll see what I mean. Biologists have long assumed that these stumpy appendages are an evolutionary adaptation. Shorter extremities minimize heat loss, so animals that are more compact are better suited to the cold.But scientists from Ohio say that temperature may have a more direct effect on the length of an animal's limbs. Because they find that turning up the heat helps cartilage grow—results that were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers raised mice at several different temperatures, and they confirmed that...[full transcript]
Serrat, M.A., King, D. and Lovejoy, C.O. (2008) ‘Temperature regulates limb length in homeotherms by directly modulating cartilage growth’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(49), pp. 19348–19353.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0803319105
扫码关注“领研网”微信公众号
订阅最新“科学60秒”英语新闻
不再漏掉任何一次新知 plus 练耳的机会~
