My Science School

The horned viper belongs to the reptile family. Dispersed throughout Yugoslavia and some regions of Austria these vipers can also be found in Italy on the eastern Alps. They are easily distinguishable from the usual vipera aspis and vipera berus by a horn, sometimes growing to a length of 5 centimetres, which sprouts out from the tip of the head. The horned viper prefers limestone or very stoney ground, and loves hot climates. It moves rather slowly, particularly during the day, when it sits lazily in the sun, digesting its captured prey which it swallows whole. But, if disturbed, the viper rears up emitting a hissing noise and sinking into the flesh of its enemy two poisonous fangs which are normally kept folded and hidden in a sac in its palate. In this respect, its behaviour is quite similar to that of the other European vipers.

 

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Boars, the ancient forefathers of the domestic pig, have long been extinct in Britain but they still live in fairly large numbers in marshy, wooland areas in Spain, Austria, Russia and Germany. Some species can also be found in northern Africa and central and northern Asia.

Because of their great strength, speed and ferocity when at bay boars have always been hunted by man. In some parts of Europe and India they are still hunted, usually with the aid of dogs. They have not died out, however, mainly because they are prolific animals, the female producing between five and eight off spring at a time. Boars have sociable natures and live in flocks in dense, wooded areas. They feed on acorns, beechnuts, and chestnuts and occasionally small hard-shelled animals, worms, small birds or mice. They even eat serpents as they are immune to their poison.

In order to get rid of parasites, they wrap themselves in the mud.

 

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Cork, a material used mainly for bottle-stoppers, insulation and floor coverings, is produced from a special type of evergreen oak tree which grows, sometimes wild, in the coastal regions of the Mediterranean.

The cork-oak has a thick, dark foliage, formed from noded branches, covered with tough, oval leaves which are small and slightly jagged.

Its thick tall trunk is completely wrapped in an outer bark of cork which is covered with find brown grooves. The tree is first tripped of its cork, which will be rather hard and knobby, when it is about sixteen years old. It is then stripped again every nine to ten years, depending on its location, and each time it will produce a good, light cork just over three centimeters thick.

After about 150 years, these trees cease to produce good quality cork and they are then felled.

 

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Sunflower with their round golden heads are grown in gardens where their beauty can be admired, and in field where they are planted for their seeds.

In Europe the largest habitat of the sunflower is in the Ukraine, where the black soil is rich in nutritive substances which are ideal for this type of cultivation.

Immense expanses of golden head, whose diameters sometimes reach 30 centimetres, and of stalks growing to a height of 4 metres, cover kilometre after kilometre of fertile plain, providing a spectacle which is at once vivid and imposing.

A native of North America, the sunflower leaves can be used as fodder for animals, the flowers provide a yellow dye and oil suitable for industrial use and for foodstuffs is extracted from its seeds. It is no coincidence and other oil producing plants are scarce.

 

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In the countries where bamboo grows this wood is used in an incredible number of ways as it is cheap and plentiful. Bamboo stems are used to build bridges, houses, boats, irrigation pipes and receptacies of all kinds. One of the best known uses of bamboo in its flexible state is in fishing rods.  This wood is also used to make garden furniture because it is light and strong and stands up to the weather. The shoots of the bamboo are also delicious to eat.

Bamboo belongs to the graminaceous family of plants, which means it is a sort of glass. It has a rhizome, or root part, which grows from year to year and produces new stalks. Sometimes these stalks are enormous, growing to more than 30 metres high.

The stalks are hollow and jointed, with knots from which branches grow. These branches become covered in leaves and the bamboo resembles a tree. Most bamboos flower very rarely and are thornless, but a few kinds have sharp spines.

 

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The most striking feature of the giraffe is its very long neck which gives this animal a lofty view of the world around it. Such a long neck has both its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that the giraffe can feed on the tasty, tender leaves which grow high up on the trees where no other animal can reach them. The long neck is also useful because the giraffe can look out over the savanna and see any danger from afar. One disadvantage is the difficulty the giraffe has in touching the ground with its head; every time it drinks it has to spread out its front legs in a rather awkward manner to bend down.

 

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The real master of venom is snakes. Man has come to know them even since he first appeared on the earth and has learned to hate and fear them; it is a hatred and fear that takes in all slithering crawling creatures, even if they are quite harmless.

The instinct that makes us shun these animals is a wise one for in many parts of the world there are a large number of dangerous and venomous snakes. Their venom varies from species to species and acts in many different ways; some can act on the blood, making it thicken or go thinner. Usually the effect of snake venom is rapid and leads to partial or total paralysis of the body. Death is usually caused by asphyxia.

In snakes the venom is a kind of salvia which often runs through special fangs that have a hollow passage in them. There are some snakes which do not have venom fangs but their bite is still poisonous. The only poisonous snake in Europe is the viper, also known as the adder, of which there are many varieties.

Snakes are very considerably in size, from the small Syrian thread snake to the tropical pythons which can grow to a length of 10 meters.

 

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The body of the ant-eater is covered in long hair that prevents ants from reaching its skin. For this reason it has no cause to fear insect bites when it tears the homes of ants apart with its strong claws.

The ant-eater makes its meal by shooting out its long, sticky, worm-like tongue and scooping up the ants that swarm all over the ground after their home has been destroyed. It has highly developed salivary glands which secrete the sticky substance that coats its tongue and traps the insects.

 

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Although it is difficult to believe, there are fish living in the desert. Several important expeditions have gone to the Sahara to uncover the mystery of these fish which are sometimes found scores of metres down.

The most famous is the lungfish which in the larger African rivers. When these rivers overflow their waters can spread out to desert regions to form small lakes or ponds. When the lake dries up the lungfish buries itself in wet mud where it can live for months on end, especially if it goes deep enough to find an underground layer of water.

Lungfish are among the most ancient bony fishes and are very like those which lived 200 million years ago, at the beginning of the Mesozoic Era.

 

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There is a Bedouin saying which states that a date palm must have ‘its feet in water and its head in the sun’. for this reason the date palm is a typical tree of the desert oases.

Its roots dig very deeply into the soil until they find an underground store of water which gives rise to an oasis, that island of water and vegetation in the vast wastes of the desert. The palm needs a great deal of sunshine to grow vigorously and this explains the second part of the Bedouin saying.

A fully grown date palm tree stands more than 20 metres high. It has a slender trunk with a tuft of leaves at the top. Under these leaves there grow clusters of flowers which produce the berries that we know as dates. They have a sweet flesh and contain only one seed. A single larger branch of the tree may carry more than 1,000 dates weighing about 10 kilogrammes.

The date palm is very important in the life of desert people. This is not just because of its fruit but for every part of the tree. The wood from the trunk is used in building; the leaves are dried and make thatch roofs for huts as well as mats and ropes; the sap of the tree can be made into an alcoholic drink; and the seeds or stones of the date can be ground to make a beverage like coffee.

Date sugar, which is produced in India, is obtained from the sap of the Phoenix Sylvester’s, which is closely related to the date palm.

 

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To establish how effective a drug is it must be tested carefully and accurately and its effect on a living organism meticulously studied and noted. This is the task 0- pharmacology, a science -which has made tremendous advances in less than a century.

The work of pharmacologists is often related to biochemistry, since they study the effects of foreign substances on cells or chemical systems of the body; and to psychiatry, for they also study the effects of drugs on the brain and behaviour.

The most significant stage in the discovery of a new drug is when the active substance that has curative properties is isolated. These substances are then checked for the effect they have on living tissues. This could be dangerous on a human being and even the curative properties of an) drug can prove fatal if they are administered in wrong doses.

To overcome these difficulties scientists carry out their experiments on animals such as dogs, cats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits and monkeys. Many such animals an sacrificed daily in the laboratories of the world, although most countries have strict laws which forbid the infliction of unnecessary pain on them.

One of the most common experiments is to infect these operations that can be carried out only by skilled craftsmen who pass on their art from one generation to the next.

Not all diamonds can be cut and transformed into elegant stones, The more impure ones and fragments obtained from cutting gems are used in industry, Diamonds are extremely hard and are valuable in cutting or polishing the hardest of metallic alloys.

Another precious stone that is extremely rare and very valuable is the emerald which is a beautiful green colour. Emeralds are usually small. When one is larger than ten carats and free from impurities and faults it is much more valuable than a diamond of the same size. Much of the value of these gems depends on the way they have been cut. The usual way is to cut surfaces or facets on them so that they will refract or break up the light that passes through the stone, The effect is La produce a number of small prisms which breakup me light into the rainbow, Great skill is necessary at every stage of diamond cutting, but especially during faceting, as the angles of the facets must be exact to give the maximum amount of brilliance and to preserve symmetry of the stone.

There are the various ways in which gem stones can be cut: (1) marquise; (2) drop or pendeloque; (3) briolette; (4a) resecut, seen from above; (4b) resecut seen from the side; (5a) flat cabochon, seen from the side; (5b) double cabochon, seen from the side; (6a) brilliant cut, seen from above; (6b) brilliant seen from bottom; (6c) brilliant, side view; (7a) step cut, seen from above; (7b) step cut, seen from bottom; (7c) step cut, side view.

The upper part of the faceted gem is called the crown and the lower is called the base or pavilion.

 

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During the mating season penguins gather together by the tens of thousands along the coasts of Antarctica. The female penguins lay one or two eggs which they place in a hollow in the ground. They take turns with the male penguin to sit on the eggs, clutching them tightly between their legs and their downy stomachs.

With the eggs covered like this, the penguins can still move from place to place although they look extremely odd when they do so. When the female is sitting on the eggs, the male bird feeds her. He continues to do so for a time after the young birds are hatched.

There are seventeen species of penguins. They vary in height from 40 centimeters to more than a metre. They all live in the southern hemisphere and go on long migratory swims to escape severely cold weather.

 

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A large beehive can contain up to 80,000 bees but there is never any danger that such a vast number of insects will lead to confusion or chaos.

There is only one queen in a hive and her sole task is to keep on lying eggs. There are several hundred male bees, known as drones, who do not work except fertilize the eggs. But as soon as a new queen is born these drones though incapable of lying eggs.

The worker bees form the overwhelming majorityof the population of a beehive and collect all the nectar and pollen.

Bees suck the nectar from the flower through a special nosetube and then carry it in a sack which contains up to 50 milligrams. The pollen is carried contains up to 50 milligrams. The pollen is carried in two little baskets on the bee’s hind legs. The worker bee delivers these ingredients and other worker bees in the hive mix them together into a sort paste which is fed to the larvae so that they will develop into adult insects.

 

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Earthworms cannot stand dry conditions in the soil: their bodies must always be in contact with damp earth and even a few minutes’ exposure to the sunlight makes them dry up and die.

Earthworms spend most of their lives digging tunnels in the soil. It is quite surprising how they can burrow their way into even hard ground simply by using the strength of their muscles, for earthworms do not have any special physical equipment for digging.

They contract and expand in a rhythmic manner to force an aperture in the ground and then they push on with their head.

The earthworm then expels the ‘digested’ soil and leaves it as a worm-cast. It has been estimated that the yearly deposition above ground of soil by earthworms is between 7 and 16 tons per acre in England. Earthworms can grow up to 15 centimetres or more in length. In tropical countries some earthworms are as long as 2 metres.

 

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It seems impossible that tortoises that move in such a slow, cumbersome manner should have relatives that swim fast through the ocean. Turtles, which very closely resemble tortoises, are sometimes as quick as fish in moving through the ocean. Turtles, which very closely resemble tortoises, are sometimes as quick as fish in moving through the water, despite their heavy shell.

These turtles can weight up to 250 kilogrammes but they have adapted wonderfully to aquatic life. Through living in the sea for millions of years, their bodies have become streamlined and their paws have turned into flippers. Turtles come ashore only to lay their eggs. They drag themselves on to deserted beaches where they dig holes for their eggs.

Their home is the sea and that is where they find their food. Turtleseat meat or plants according to their species. The meat of the turtle itself is regarded as a delicacy, especially the green turtle of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.

The scientific name of turtles is Chelonia and they belong to the reptile class.

 

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