My Science School

Dragonfly may be only several centimetres long, but with their oversized jaws and rows of fang-like teeth, they can trap and swallow sizable prey. How these small terrors manage to open their mouths so wide has puzzled scientists, until now. In most fish, the skull is fused to the backbone, limiting their gape. But a barbelled dragonfish can open its jaw up to 120 degrees thanks to a soft tissue joint that connects the fish’s head and spine.

Studies of specimens of barbelled dragonfish, show a flexible rod called a notochord, covered by special connective tissue that bridged their vertebrae and skulls. When the mouths are opened, the connective tissues stretched out. The joint provide just enough room for dragonfish to swallow whole crustaceans and lanternfish almost as long as they are.

 

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Tiny zircon crystals coughed up by volcanic eruptions on the island of Mauritius are around 2.5-3 billion years old. That’s a billions of years older than the island itself; Mauritius that nestled between Madagascar and India before the two landmasses split apart around 84 million years ago.

Comparing the crystals’ ages with those of nearby landmasses, researchers retraced Mauritia’s fate. Volcanic eruptions and shifting tectonic plates fragmented Mauritia and the land, including the zircon crystals, was recycled into the rising plume of magma that fuelled the eruptions that eventually built Mauritius.

 

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The amount of manmade goods around today is 30 trillion metric tonnes. That’s about 50 kilogrammes for every square metre of Earth’s surface. Researchers refer to this tsunami of stuff as the ‘technosphere’. The term is a way of helping people recognizes the magnitude and pervasive influence of humans on the planet. In Earth’s biological ecosystems, animal and plant waste are generally reused by other organisms in an efficient cycle of life. Much of the material in the technosphere, by contrast, ends up in landfills where it often doesn’t decay or get reused.

 

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The Botanical Survey of India (BSI) says that India is home to 11.5% of all flora in the world. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, since 1750, more than double the numbers of plants have disappeared from the wild than birds, mammals and amphibians combined.

Eighteen species of plants (4 non-flowering and 14 flowering) are extinct. Notable among them – Lastreopsis wattii, a fern in Manipur discovered in 1882, three species from the genus Ophiorrhiza discovered from peninsular India, and Corypha taliera Roxb, a palm species discovered in the Bengal region.

The cheetah (Acionyx jubatus) and the Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensisi) are considered extinct in India. The pink-headed duck (Rhodonessa caryophyllaceai) is feared extinct since 1950 and the Himalayan quail (Ophrysia supercililios) was last reported in 1876. The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) says that the four animals can be found in other parts of the world. India has about 6.49% of all the fauna species in the world.

“Competition, predation, natural selection, and human induced factors like hunting, habitat degradation” are some of the reasons that have led to these extinctions.

 

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Researchers have discovered Dracaena cambodiana, a dragon tree species, in the Dongka Sarpo area of West Karbi Anglong, Assam, adding to India’s botanical wealth a plant whose sap turns bright red after coming in contact with air. This is the first time that a dragon tree species has been reported from India.

Dracaena cambodiana is an important medicinal and ornamental tree. Several antifungal and antibacterial compounds, antioxidants, flavonoids, etc. have been extracted from various parts of the plant. The bright red resin has also been used since ancient times as varnish, incense and dye.

The population size of the dragon tree species in Assam was estimated to be fewer than 50 mature individuals. Dracaena seeds are usually dispersed by birds. But due to the large fruit size, only a few species of birds are able to swallow the fruits, thus limiting the scope of its natural conservation. Forest officers are working hard to propagate it; Dracaena saplings are currently growing in nurseries in Sonitpur, Guwahati, Dhemaji and Jorhat.

 

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Scientists from the University of California, San Diego, have created a robotic soft contact lens that lets you zoom in by blinking twice.

The lens mimics the natural electric signals in the human eyeball that are active even when the eye itself is closed. Researchers measured the electrical potential of the eye – called the “electro-oculographic signal” – made lenses that would respond to that activity.

The lens is made from polymers that expand when electric current is applied. It’s controlled using five electrodes surrounding the eye that act like human muscles. A person blinking twice in succession causes the lens to change its focal length, allowing it to zoom in and out just like users do on their phones. Because the lenses depend on electrical signals, they should function even if a person is blind. This will prove useful in creating visual prostheses.

A lead researcher said: “Even if your eye cannot see anything, many people still can move their eyeball and generate this electro-oculographic signal.”

In the future, this lens can also be used for adjustable glasses and remotely-operated robotics.

 

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The number of trees planted in 12 hours in Madhya Pradesh is 66 million. More than 1.5 million people helped plant the 66,750,000 tree saplings which featured over 20 different species. In total, 24 districts of the Narmada river basin were chosen for the planting, to increase the likelihood of survival for the trees. The goal was to raise awareness and help India achieve its environmental objectives. As part of the Paris Agreement, India pledged to increase forest cover to 95 million hectares by 2030. Kerala has planted more than 10 million trees in a single day, and Maharashtra will plant 40 million trees this year in a reforestation campaign.

 

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The long term impact of smoking, from heart disease to a range of cancers, is well known. But according to research funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the damage begins just moments after the first cigarette is smoked; chemicals which cause cancer from rapidly after smoking.

Researchers looked at the level of chemicals linked with cancer, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), in 12 patients after smoking. A PAH in cigarettes are modified by the body and turned into another chemical which damages DNA and has been linked with cancer. This process only took between 15 and 30 minutes.

Scientists involved in the study described the results as a stark warning to people considering smoking. Anti-smoking charity Ash (Action on Smoking and Health) said: “The chilling thing about this research is that it shows just how early a single cigarette. The process starts early but it is never too late to quit and the sooner you quit the sooner you start to reduce the harm.”

 

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NASA is to set to launch the world’s first mission to the sun next year that will answer questions about solar physics that have puzzled scientists for decades, including finding out why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface.

The Parker Solar Probe is named after pioneering astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind nearly 60 years ago; the first time NASA has named a spacecraft for a living individual.

The spacecraft will travel through the sun’s atmosphere, seven times closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it, facing intense heat and radiation conditions to provide humanity with the closet-ever observations of a star.

It will fly close enough to the sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly through the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles. The spacecraft and instruments will be protected from the sun’s heat by a 4.5 inch thick carbon-composite shield, which will withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 1,377 degree Celsius.

The spacecraft will be launched in July 2018 from NASA’s Kennedy Centre in Florida.

 

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Scientists have found the first bio fluorescent or “glowing” reptile: the hawks bill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricate). David Gruber, associate professor of biology at Baruch College in New York City, was filming fluorescent corals near the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific when “out of the blue, it almost looks like a bright red-and-green spaceship came underneath my camera.” This is the first time researchers have identified bio fluorescence in a reptile in the wild. Bio fluorescence occurs when an organism absorbs light from an outside source, such as the sun, transforms it and then remits it as a different colour. “It could be a way for them to communicate, for them to see each other better, or to blend into the reefs, which are also bio fluorescent,” Gruber said. “It adds visual texture into the world that’s primarily blue.”

 

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Fingerprints are still dusted for at crime scenes, but sometimes fingerprinting powder doesn’t adhere to them well. A new technique developed at Australia’s CSIRO not only reveals fingerprints in cases where dusting won’t, but makes them glow under UV light. Materials scientist Kang Liang developed a liquid containing metal-organic framework (MOF) crystals that when applied to surfaces, rapidly binds to fingerprint residue, including proteins, peptides, fatty acids and salts. In around 30 seconds, this results in an ultrathin coating that forms an exact copy of the fingerprint and glows under UV light, enabling high resolution images to be easily captured for analysis. “Because it’s done on the spot, a digital device could be used at the scene to capture images of the glowing prints to run through the database in real time,” says Liang.

 

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Can’t stop yourself from having just one more bite of cheese? That’s because it’s actually addictive! Researchers from the University of Michigan investigating which items serve as the “drugs” of the food world, discovered pizza headed the “addictive” list because of its cheesy, fatty topping. They discovered that the chemical casein found in dairy products was to blame for these addictive properties. Casein breaks apart during digestion to release a opiates called casomorphins Studies have shown that casomorphins interact with opioid receptors, which are involved in controlling pain, reward and addiction in the brain. The same parts of the brain are stimulated while under the influence of addictive drugs like crack cocaine and heroin. Casomorphins play with the dopamine receptors and trigger that addictive element.

 

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NASA’s orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory has mapped an enormous coronal hole – a gap in the sun’s outer layer and magnetic field – which is the size of 50 Earths and is releasing an extra-fast solar wind in Earth’s direction.

Coronal holes, normally formed over the sun’s poles and lower latitudes, are areas within the sun’s outermost layer (corona), which are lower-density and cooler. This, plus the weakened magnetic field, lets the plasma and charged particles that make up the corona stream out more easily in a solar wind at up to 800 km/sec, kindling a days-long geomagnetic storm upon hitting Earth. The phenomenon can affect power and navigation for satellites orbiting the Earth as well as radio communication. Another side effect of a geomagnetic storm is enhanced northern lights: the glowing auroras that form in the night sky over the northernmost reaches of the planet grow much brighter and can even extend much farther south than usual.

 

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