My Science School

Octopuses have been documented changing colour 177 times an hour. An octopus’ camouflage reaction time is faster than any other animal’s occurring in one-fifth of a second. Despite their miraculous colour-changing abilities, octopuses are colour-blind. Scientists aren’t sure if the octopus is even aware of what its skin is doing when it transforms from one colour and texture to the next.

They can change not only their coloring, but also the texture of their skin to match rocks, corals and other items nearby. They do this by controlling the size of projections on their skin (called papillae), creating textures ranging from small bumps to tall spikes. Color changing is just one tool in an octopus’s arsenal of defenses, however; it can also spray ink, and make a quick escape through any hole it can get its hidden bony beak through.

 

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Our oceans hold an estimated 20 million tonnes of gold, suspended is seawater, according to the National Ocean Service (Maryland, USA). But this gold is spread throughout the normal mineral content of seawater to the tune of “parts per trillion.” Each litre of seawater contains, on average, about 13 billionths of a gram of gold. There are also gold deposits within the seafloor, but profitably mining them is far beyond our current abilities.

Nonetheless, gold is gold, and it has a way of making people believe all sorts of speculative things. Ever since British chemist Edward Sonstadt discovered that there was gold in seawater in 1872, there have been those who have tried to capitalize on it, honestly or not.

The earliest, and largest, attempt to mine the oceans for gold took place in the 1890s. And it was all a hoax. The scam began when New England pastor Prescott Ford Jernegan claimed to have invented a “Gold Accumulator” that could suck gold from seawater via a process involving specially treated mercury and electricity.

 

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The Miracle Fruit berry, when eaten, causes sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste deliciously sweet. Native to West Africa, it utilizes a molecule called miraculin to change the shape of the sweetness receptors on our tongues, activating them to respond to acids, too. Suddenly, sour tastes register as sweet ones.

When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. At neutral pH, miraculin binds and blocks the receptors, but at low pH (resulting from ingestion of sour foods) miraculin binds proteins and becomes able to activate the sweet receptors, resulting in the perception of sweet taste. This effect lasts until the protein is washed away by saliva (up to about 30 minutes).

 

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The average person blinks around 15-20 times per minute – so frequently that our eyes are closed for roughly 10% of our walking hours overall. Although blinking has a clear purpose – mostly to lubricate the eyeballs, and occasionally protect them from dust or other debris, scientists say that we subconsciously use blinks as a sort of mental resting point, to briefly shut off visual stimuli and allow us to focus our attention.

 Scientists have found that the human brain has a talent for ignoring the momentary blackout. The very act of blinking suppresses activity in several areas of the brain responsible for detecting environmental changes, so that you experience the world as continuous.

The researchers came to the hypothesis after noting an interesting fact revealed by previous research on blinking: that the exact moments when we blink aren’t actually random. Although seemingly spontaneous, studies have revealed that people tend to blink at predictable moments. For someone reading, blinking often occurs after each sentence is finished, while for a person listening to a speech, it frequently comes when the speaker pauses between statements. A group of people all watching the same video tend to blink around the same time, too, when action briefly lags.

 

 

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The Bhimbetka Rock Shelter has the oldest known rock art in India, and is one of the largest prehistoric complexes in Asia. Located in Raisen, Madhya Pradesh, the UNESCO world heritage site consists of seven hills and over 500 rock shelters disturbed over 10 kilometres. They contain evidence that people inhabited these shelters and caves as far back the Lower Paleolithic period, more than 200,000 years ago. The shelters are painted with scenes depicting local birds and animals, mythological figures, and everyday scenes of people hunting, playing, and carrying weapons. The earliest paintings date from the Upper Paleolithic Period about 30,000 years ago, though to the medieval era in India. One of the Pandava brothers, Bhim, was said to have stayed in these caves after he and his four brothers were banished from their kingdom. “Bhim betka” means “the place where Bhim sat”.

 

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Between October 2011 and November 2017, at least 259 people around the world died taking selfies, according to the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care in India, compared to just 50 people killed by sharks in the same period.

And the death toll is increasing incrementally each year as smartphones become more sophisticated and Selfie-sticks increase the range at which people can snap themselves, prompting them to take bigger risks for the perfect shot.

In October 2018, an Indian couple fell to their deaths trying to take a Selfie a Taft Overlook at Yosemite National Park (U.S). The couple’s Instagram account often showed them in dangerous situations.

While woman take the most selfies, young men, who are more prone to taking risks, make up three quarters of “selfecides”. Most deaths are caused by drowning, being hit by vehicles, falling, posing with loaded weapons or wild animals or while driving.

India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion and 800 million cell phones, had the highest number of deaths (159 so far) partly because the country has a high number of people younger than 30, and because selfies in India are especially trendy.

The study concluded that ‘no Selfie zones’ should be declared across tourist areas, especially water bodies, mountain peaks and tall buildings to decrease the incidence of Selfie-related deaths.

 

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The Indian Institute of technology (IIT) Indore has developed a prototype robot resembling a jellyfish to document marine life at close range. Conventional motor-based bio-inspired robots are noisy, limiting their applicability for marine life monitoring as they disturb marine species.

IIT Indore’s Mechatronics and Instrumentation Laboratory has developed a shape memory alloy (SMA) polymer-based soft robotic jellyfish for noiseless marine life monitoring. The continuous heating and cooling of the SMA wire-based polymer structure is responsible for expansion and contraction of its body with tentacles which generate thrust to make the 250 gm robot move in the water. A combination of soft and smart materials allows it to mimic complex motions like real underwater living creatures.

These robots can be used to study the functioning of certain underwater species that are highly conscious of artificial cameras or understanding the behaviour of coral reefs.

 

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 Around 70 hatchlings of the rare Black Softshell and Indian Softshell turtles bred in the ponds of two temples in Assam were recently released in the Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary. The hatchlings from the temple ponds were nurtured at a conservation facility at the Assam State Zoo in Guwahati.

The “wild restocking” of the two turtle species was done under a joint programme of the management committees of Ugra Tara Temple in Guwahati and Hayagriva Madhava Temple in Hajo, the Assam Forest Department and the NGOs, Turtle Survival Alliance and Help Earth.

“This wild restocking programme is important for sustaining turtles in the Brahmaputra river system, especially the Black Softshell (Nilssonia nigricans) that is considered extinct in the wild,” said Help Earth.

Assam is the most species-rich state in India in terms of turtle diversity. It is home to 20 species of freshwater turtles and tortoises out of 29 species found in India. But 80% of these species are threatened with extinction.

 

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The world’s largest waterfall is underwater! Beneath the Denmark Strait (which separates Iceland and Greenland), frigid water from the Greenland Sea meets warmer water from the Irminger Sea. The cold, dense water quickly sinks below the warmer water and plunges 11,500 feet straight down, flowing at 123 million cubic feet per second. The Denmark Strait Cataract dwarfs any giant waterfall you could find on land. Angel Falls in Venezuela, the tallest waterfall above sea level (3212 feet high), is three times shorter than the Denmark Strait cataract, and Niagara Falls carries 2,000 times less water, even during peak flows.

 

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A flock of ravens is called an ‘unkindness’ or ‘conspiracy’. A constable of ravens refers historically to the group of ravens that congregated around the Tower of London; they were thought to be 'keeping watch' over the monarchy. Therefore, any time a grouping of these birds seems to be watching or guarding something, the group can be referred as a 'constable.' They can also be called an unkindness or a conspiracy - likely for similar reasons. If a flock is driving off other predatory or carrion birds, or 'picking on' another species either because it is competition or prey (although they feed largely on already dead animals, they are known to work together to hunt if need be since they are extremely adaptive birds), then these are apt terms.

 

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Wimbledon tennis balls are kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of tennis balls affects how the ball bounces. At warmer temperatures, the gas molecules inside the ball expand making the ball bounce higher. A tennis ball at lower temperatures causes the molecules to shrink and the ball bounces lower. Every year over 54,000 Slazenger tennis balls are prepared for Wimbledon.

The tennis balls used at Wimbledon have travelled 50,570 miles around the world before they land on Andy Murray’s racket on Centre Court.

Slazenger is a quintessentially British sports equipment manufacturer and has been the official ball supplier for Wimbledon since 1902, with its headquarters based at Shirebrook in Derbyshire.

But their official Wimbledon ball flies between 11 countries and across four continents before being manufactured in Bataan in the Philippines and then travelling the final 6,660 miles to SW19 as illustrated in the graphic below

Mark Johnson, Associate Professor of Operations Management, has looked into the supply chain of the Wimbledon tennis ball and unearthed the surprisingly long and complex journey to one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

 

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Two parts of the human body never stop growing. Human noses and ears keep increasing in size, even when the rest of the body’s growth has stopped. Our noses and ears are unique compared to the rest of our bodies because they’re composed of soft tissue enveloped in cartilage. And it’s this soft tissue that keeps growing throughout our entire lives.

Gravity guarantees that ears will look longer as people grow older. As collagen and elastin in ears' cartilage break down, they sag and lengthen.

Ear tissue does have the ability to regenerate, however. According to Wojciech Pawlina, all "flesh" tissue has this ability, which "you can see in cases of injury such as cuts or piercings, where the ear can heal over time."

 

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Canadian Space Company Thoth Technology Inc. has been granted a patent to build the world’s first-ever space elevator – 20 times the height of the world’s tallest building Burj Khalifa – that will also have a tower assisting spacecraft to land and take off. It will help save enormous amounts of fuel and money that go into launching rockets into orbit and will also be used for wind-energy generation and communications.

The company will build a freestanding tower reaching 20 km above the planet’s surface. “Astronauts would ascend 20 km by an electric elevator. From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refueling and reflight”, says its inventor Dr Brendan Quine.

The design uses inflatable sections and flywheels to provide dynamic stability and seeks to get around the complication of geostationary orbit by limiting its height to just 20 km instead of the full 100 km, considered the end of our atmosphere and the beginning of space.

The space elevator tower may also be used to deliver equipment personnel to at least one platform or pod above the surface of the Earth for scientific research, communications and tourism.

 

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Ants self-medicate when sick, say Finnish researchers. Researchers from University of Helsinki, Finland, did a series of experiments on the black ant Formica fusca and found that when the ants get infected by a local fungus, they seek out and eat a certain type of food.

The sick ants eat hydrogen peroxide to fight the fungus. Hydrogen peroxide is an antiseptic and is also used for bleaching. It releases free oxygen that kills off fungus. Ants find it in damaged plants, other insects and cadavers. The scientists found that taking the medicine increased the changes of infected ants surviving by 20 per cent. The fungal disease is lethal to these ants.

Hydrogen peroxide containing food was avoided by healthy ants and eaten only by infected ones, the researchers found. If healthy ants are given hydrogen peroxide it damages their health. So it was definitely a choice being made by the ants. Also, when the scientists increased the quantity of hydrogen peroxide available for consumption, the ants consumed less of it. This implied that the ants were consuming, a certain dosage of the ‘medicine’.

 

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Scientists searching through the treetops in Panama and Peru have discovered a previously unknown species of spider that glides its way to safety after a fall. And it can change direction in mid-air. The daredevil arachnids steer themselves through the air with movements of their outstretched forelegs. The species, belonging to the genus Selenops, is the only one ever found that has this ability. They’re nocturnal hunters that hide in crevices or under bark. The largest species are about three inches wide, but less than a sixteenth of an inch thick. Selenops have evolved to live in the treetops where there are fewer predators. Gliding helps them move from tree to tree without venturing down to the dangerous forest floor. When the spiders began to fall, they take just a tiny fraction of a second to flip themselves right side up and point their heads towards a tree trunk. The study of this kind of behaviour may help engineers design robots in the future that can remain upright during a fall.

 

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