My Science School

Like Earth, Mars has seasons. This is because the planets titled at similar angles. Different parts of the planet lean towards the Sun at different times during the year, making it warmer or cooler.

Mars is titled just 1.5  more than Earth, so it has a similar range of seasons. Seasons on Mars last longer because it takes longer for Mars to travel around the Sun.

On Mars there are huge dust storms that last for weeks. So mush dust is kicked up that they can be seen by telescopes on Earth!

Due to the extreme lows in temperature at the poles, 25-30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere freezes and becomes dry ice that is deposited on the surface. While the polar ice caps are predominantly water, the Martian North Pole has a layer of dry ice measuring one meter thick in winter, while the South Pole is covered by a permanent layer that is eight meters deep.

 

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Mars has two moons, called Phobos and Deimos, which are much smaller than Earth’s Moon. Their names mean “panic” and “fear”. They were probably asteroids pulled towards Mars by its gravity.

Like Earth’s Moon, Phobos and Deimos always present the same face to their planet. Both are lumpy, heavily-cratered and covered in dust and loose rocks. They are among the darker objects in the solar system. The moons appear to be made of carbon-rich rock mixed with ice. Given their composition, size and shape, astronomers think that both of Mars’ moons were once asteroids that were captured in the distant past.

Compared to our Moon, Phobos and Deimos are rough and asteroid-like in appearance, and also much smaller. In addition, their composition (as already noted) is similar to that of C-type asteroids that are common to the Asteroid Belt. Hence, the prevailing theory as to their origin is that they were once asteroids that were kicked out of the Main Belt by Jupiter’s gravity, and were then acquired by Mars.

 

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Mars is nicknamed the Red Planet because of its rusty soil. Like Earth, it has a rocky surface, polar ice caps, mountains, valleys, and clouds in the sky. However, the fourth planet from the Sun has a far more extreme environment than ours. It is very cold and dry with a thin unbreathable atmosphere.

Mars is approximately half the diameter of Earth, with a surface area only slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land. Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of Earth's mass, resulting in about 38% of Earth's surface gravity. The red-orange appearance of the Martian surface is caused by iron(III) oxide, or rust. It can look like butterscotch; other common surface colors include golden, brown, tan, and greenish, depending on the minerals present.

Olympus Mons

Towering high above the Martian landscape is Olympus Mons. It is the largest volcano in our Solar System and nearly three times as high as Mount Everest! Olympus Mons is part of a complex of volcanoes that lie along a volcanic plateau called the Tharsis Bulge. This entire region lies over a hotspot, a place in the planet’s crust that allows magma from deep inside to flow out to the surface. While planetary scientists have not recorded a volcanic eruption on Mars in real time, there is evidence of geologically recent flows perhaps in the past few tens of millions of years. It is possible that Mars is not yet volcanically dead.

Valles Marineris

Valles Marineris is a 4,000 km (2500 mile) crack across the surface of Mars, at parts 7 km (4 miles) deep. It is a system of canyons, including the vast Coprates Chasma. The planet has a very primitive form of plate tectonics, and the action of two plates past each other began splitting the surface some 3.5 billion years ago. That set the stage for the formation of the Valles Marineris. At the same time, volcanic activity in the Tharsis region put pressure on the crust as molten lava pushed the region up from below. The combined tectonic activity further broke the crust into fractures and fault regions. In the valleys, the ground sank, and underground water escaped. That caused the ground to drop farther, and landslides and erosion continued to cut away and widen the valley systems. Today, the Vallis Marineris canyons show the marks of ancient floods and continued erosion by the Martian winds.

 

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Jumping spiders are active hunters, like tiny lions chasing down their prey (bugs). They usually have eight eyes: two very large front eyes to get a clear, colour image and judge distance, and extra side eyes to detect when something is moving. 

Some spiders make nets to catch their prey. These net-casting spiders also need to see clearly and judge distances. Some have developed huge, scary-looking black eyes that stare straight ahead, so they are nicknamed ogre spiders! These gigantic eyes help the spider to see a wide area and accurately throw down its spider web net to catch its prey. Here’s a picture of a net-casting spider.

Some spiders live in caves that are completely dark, where eyes are no use at all. They have to rely on other senses to find their food in the dark. To save energy making eyes, these spiders lost their eyes during evolution, so now some of them have no eyes at all. 

 

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Glaucoma is a group of eye conditions that damage the optic nerve, the health of which is vital for good vision. This damage is often caused by an abnormally high pressure in your eye. Many forms of glaucoma have no warning signs. The effect is so gradual that you may not notice a change in vision until the condition is at an advanced stage.

Glaucoma is the result of damage to the optic nerve. As this nerve gradually deteriorates, blind spots develop in your visual field. For reasons that doctors don't fully understand, this nerve damage is usually related to increased pressure in the eye.

Glaucoma tends to run in families. In some people, scientists have identified genes related to high eye pressure and optic nerve damage. Promptly go to an emergency room or an eye doctor's (ophthalmologist's) office if you experience some of the symptoms of acute angle-closure glaucoma, such as severe headache, eye pain and blurred vision.

 

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In The Blind Men and the Elephant, by American poet John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), six blind men meet an elephant for the first time and each man touches a different part of the elephant and makes predictions about what the elephant is like.

The parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, from where it has been widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.

 

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Black revolves around a deaf-blind girl, and her relationship with her teacher who himself later develops Alzheimer's disease. The film draws inspiration from the life of Helen Keller, the blind academic and activist. 

The film was screened at the Casablanca Film Festival and the International Film Festival of India. It won the Filmfare Award for best film. Time Magazine (Europe) selected the film as one of the 10 Best Movies of the Year 2005 from around the globe. The movie was positioned at number five. Indiatimes Movies ranks the movie amongst the 25 Must See Bollywood Films. The film was premiered in the Marché du Film section of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Amitabh Bachchan received his second National Film Award for Best Actor at the 53rd National Film Awards, his fourth Filmfare Award for Best Actor and his second Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor for his performance and Rani Mukerji won her second Filmfare Award for Best Actress and her second Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress.

Black was originally scheduled to be released on 10 December 2004, but Bhansali decided to postpone its release. Black was released on 4 February 2005 in 170 different towns in India, a small number compared to most large-budget Bollywood films. Black was also screened at several international film festivals like the Casablanca Film Festival. The film released in South Korea on 27 August 2009.

 

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In 1867, Alexander Melville Bell published the book Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics. This book contains information about the system of symbols he created that, when used to write words, indicated pronunciation so accurately, that it could even reflect regional accents. A person reading a piece of text handwritten in Melville Bell's system of characters could accurately reproduce a sentence the way it would be spoken by someone with a foreign or regional accent. In his demonstrations, Melville Bell employed his son, Alexander Graham Bell to read from the visible speech transcript of the volunteer's spoken words and would astound the audience by saying it back exactly as the volunteer had spoken it. Melville Bell's system was effective at helping deaf people improve their pronunciation, but his son Graham Bell decided to improve upon his father's invention by creating a system of writing that was even more accurate and employed the most advanced technology of the time.

Melville's works on Visible Speech became highly notable, and were described by Édouard Séguin as being "...a greater invention than the telephone by his son, Alexander Graham Bell". Melville saw numerous applications for his invention, including its worldwide use as a universal language. However, although heavily promoted at the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan, Italy in 1880, after a period of a dozen years or so in which it was applied to the education of the deaf, Visible Speech was found to be more cumbersome, and thus a hindrance, to the teaching of speech to the deaf, compared to other methods, and eventually faded from use.

 

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The raga Nelambari in the classical Indian Karnatic system of music is said to be able to induce sleep and also have some sleep promoting qualities. This hypothesis was scientifically tested using sleep polysomnography with eight healthy subjects who listened to either Neelambari (test) raga or Kalyani (control) raga. There was no difference in sleep architecture or in subjective feeling of quality of sleep. The anecdotal references to the quality of sleep promoting effects of Neelambari probably reflect a conditioned response since most lullabies in South India are sung in Neelambari raga.

The north Indian classical music, too, has a raga by the name Neelambari. It comes across as a particularly beautiful tune, but is remotely linked to its namesake down the peninsula. The Neelambari in Carnatic is a derivative of the popular raga Shankarabharanam, which is codified as 29th in the Melakarta matrix that the idiom got in the 17th century.

 

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Once upon a time, Afghanistan was not how we see it today, that is what studies say. It was once known as Gandhara and the fact that it still has a city known by the name of Kandahar confirms the truth. As per the experts, the Gandhara kingdom covered portions of today’s northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. It was spread over Pothohar Plateau, Peshawar Valley and Kabul River Valley.

The word Gandh?ra finds a mention in the Rig Veda, Uttara-Ramayana and Mahabharata. The word means gandha (fragrance), i.e. the land of fragrances. 

Mahabharata, the scripture authored by sage Veda Vyasa also mentions the Kingdom of Gandhara. As the story goes, King Subala ruled Gandhara some 5500 years ago. He had a daughter named Gandhari, who was married to the prince of Hastinapur kingdom, Dhritrashtra. Gandhari also had a brother, Shakuni, who later took over the kingship of Gandhara after his father’s death. Gandhari gave birth to a hundred sons, who became famous as the Kauravas.

It is believed that after failing miserably at the hands of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata war, several Kaurava descendants settled in the Gandhara kingdom. Later, they slowly migrated to today’s Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

 

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A waterfall is a river or other body of water's steep fall over a rocky ledge into a plunge pool below. Waterfalls are also called cascades.

Often, waterfalls form as streams flow from soft rock to hard rock. This happens both laterally (as a stream flows across the earth) and vertically (as the stream drops in a waterfall). Many waterfalls in an area help geologists and hydrologists determine a region's fall line and underlying rock structure.

Waterfalls are also classified by height. Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall, plummets 979 meters (3,212 feet) into a remote canyon in a rain forest in Venezuela. The water, from the Gauja River, often does not reach the bottom. The fall is so long, and so steep, that air pressure is stronger often than the water pressure of the falls. The water is turned to mist before it reaches the small tributary below.

 

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The Shivanasamudra Falls is on the Kaveri River after the river has found its way through the rocks and ravines of the Deccan Plateau and drops off to form waterfalls. The island town of Shivanasamudra divides the river into twin waterfalls. 

Shivanasamudra Falls is a waterfall in Chamarajanagar District of the state of Karnataka, India. It is situated along the river Kaveri, which forms here the boundary to the Mandya, and is the location of one of the first hydro-electric power stations in Asia, which was set up in 1902.The project was designed by Diwan Sheshadri Iyer.

The Gaganachukki waterfalls are best viewed from the Shivanasamudra watch tower. Most of the pictures showing the twin waterfalls are taken from that location. There is another approach to the Gaganachukki falls from the Darga Hazrath Mardane Gaib (Imam Ali). Despite warnings being posted, people climb down the rocks and attempt to view the waterfalls from behind/top, resulting in many fatal accidents. It is 139 km (86 mi) from the city of Bangalore.

 

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Courtallam falls is not just one but a set of nine falls settled close to each other in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. They are named as Peraruvi (Main Falls), Aintharuvi (Five Falls), Thenaruvi (Honey Falls), Chithirai Aruvi, Puli Aruvi (Tiger Falls), Shenbagadevi Falls, Pazhaya Aruvi (Old Falls), Puthu Aruvi (New Falls) and Pazhathotta Aruvi (Fruit Garden Falls). Besides, what adds more charm to the panoramic surroundings are the Western Ghats and the Chittar river where these famous waterfalls find their home.

Coutrallam Falls is located in Western Ghats to the South of Coutrallam town and to the north of Coutrallam Lower, the first lake in the descent of Chittar. It is located 5 km (3.1 mi) from the nearest town Tenkasi and 59 km (37 mi) from the nearest city Tirunelveli. The place is frequented by animals like Tiger and Panther, which are frequently spotted in the route from Coutrallam Falls to Papansam as both are located close to Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve.

The falls receives its waters during the South-west monsoon from May to September, but the maximum amount of rainfall is received during the North-east monsoon during October to December. The Kutralanathar Temple is located close to the main falls. The falls is usually frequented by devotees of the Papanasanathar Temple, who take a holy dip in the falls before visiting the temple. The falls is also frequented by tourists to Sabarimala during the November - December season in a religious circuit in the region and Agasthiyar Falls.

 

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The Cascata delle Marmore is an ancient artificial waterfall with a total height of 165 meters makes it the tallest man-made waterfall in the world.

It appears to have been created by the Romans as a means of mitigating perceived health risks from wetlands formed by the source of the waterfall, the river Velino.

The waterfall consists of three discrete sections with the topmost the tallest part at around 83 meters. It is located in the Italian region of Umbria, just under 8km from Terni. 

Most of the time, the water in the canals above the falls is diverted to a hydroelectric power plant, so the flow in the falls themselves is heavily reduced. Piediluco Lake, above the falls, is used as a reservoir for the power plant. The Galleto power plant, built in 1929, is architecturally interesting. Its capacity is about 530 MW. To control the operation of the power plant, and to satisfy tourists, the falls are turned on according to a set schedule, achieving a spectacular effect at full flow.

 

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Six elephants died while trying to save each other after a baby elephant fell from a waterfall in a Thai national park, officials said.

Staff at Khao Yai National Park, about 85 miles northeast of Bangkok, found the roughly 3-year-old baby elephant drowned on Saturday. Five more dead elephants also were discovered at the bottom of Haew Narok Waterfall, according to the Thailand Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.

Elephants are sympathetic animals that have been known to help each other when they are distressed. They also show something resembling grief when one of their own dies.

Khao Yai is Thailand's third-largest national park. Haew Narok, the park's tallest waterfall, has three tiers that total about 492 feet. Elephants are common nearby.

 

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