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If birds are dinosaurs, why aren't they cold-blooded?
Margaret Osborne / Sat, June 22, 2024 at 5:00 AM EDTFor more than 100 years, researchers assumed that dinosaurs were like giant lizards: sluggish reptiles that spent most of their day basking in the sun. This image changed when we started to realize that dinosaurs were far more similar to birds than to modern-day lizards. Today, researchers agree that birds are technically dinosaurs — the only ones to have survived the mass extinction 66 million years ago. Yet, if that's true, why aren't birds cold-blooded like most modern-day reptiles?
The answer is straightforward: Most dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded, too.
Birds are descended from a diverse group of two-legged dinosaurs called theropods, which included giant, meat-eating predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, as well as the smaller 3-foot-long (1 meter) Mononykus. ...
Birds generally have a higher metabolism than similarly sized mammals and keep their body temperatures up — between 106 and 109 degrees Fahrenheit (41 to 43 degrees Celsius). Hummingbirds, which flap their wings 720 to 5,400 times per minute, need to consume about half their body weight every day, or eat every 10 to 15 minutes.
In contrast, cold-blooded animals, or ectotherms — like most modern reptiles and fish — rely on their environment to change their body temperature. Because they don't expend as much energy heating themselves, they don't need to eat as regularly; alligators, for example, can go more than a year without food. ...
But it's possible endothermy showed up even earlier. If both mammals and most reptiles were endothermic, perhaps their common ancestor, which lived about 310 million years ago, was also endothermic. However, endothermy most likely evolved independently in mammals, O'Connor said.
Future research could challenge these ideas, though. "We make so many assumptions," O'Connor said, "and then the data proves us wrong."
If birds are dinosaurs, why aren't they cold-blooded?
If dinosaurs were reptiles, then why aren't birds cold blooded?
Eating four times per hour for endothermic hummingbirds, once a year for alligators. Central heat is expensive.
In FY 2023, the U.S. Mint’s toll to make, administer and distribute the 1-cent coin increased to 3.07 cents from 2.72 cents (12.9%) and the unit cost for the 5-cent coin rose to 11.54 cents from 10.41 cents (10.9%).
www.coinnews.net
Penny Costs 3.07 Cents to Make in 2023 | CoinNews
In its 2023 Annual Report, the United States Mint disclosed that the cost of manufacturing coins increased across all denominations, and for the eighteenth straight year, the unit cost for both pennies and nickels was above their face values. The U.S. Mint struck over 10.5 billion coins for...
www.coinnews.net
Today's computers use solid state transistors to compute, to switch off or on, zero or one, binary mathematics.
Quantum computers replace the transistor with qbits.
"Unlike transistors, each additional qbit doubles the computer's power. It's exponential.
So,while 20 transistors are 20 times more powerful than one, 20 qbits are a million times more powerful than one." CBS-TV 60 Minutes / Scott Pelley 24/07/28
"The nation or company that does this [develops a workable, operationally efficient quantum computer] will rule the world's economy." Quantum Supremacy author, City University of New York phyicist Michio Kaku
Quantum computers replace the transistor with qbits.
"Unlike transistors, each additional qbit doubles the computer's power. It's exponential.
So,while 20 transistors are 20 times more powerful than one, 20 qbits are a million times more powerful than one." CBS-TV 60 Minutes / Scott Pelley 24/07/28
"The nation or company that does this [develops a workable, operationally efficient quantum computer] will rule the world's economy." Quantum Supremacy author, City University of New York phyicist Michio Kaku