My Science School

A glass bottle takes one million years to decompose, according to the Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S. If that's the case, why are we more concerned about plastic, which takes only about 450 years to decompose? Because, plastic can leach harmful chemicals into the soil, unlike glass. It does not mean glass is harmless-for example, tiny shards can injure creatures. But the fact is that glass can be recycled while plastic, especially single-use ones, end up in landfills, resulting in pollutions of various kinds.

When a dropped glass shatters or a rock chips the car's windshield, it's tempting to think of glass as a fragile material. Actually, it's one of the longest-lasting man-made materials. The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services estimates that it takes 1 million years for a glass bottle to decompose in the environment, with conditions in a landfill even more protected. Glass artifacts from glassmaking's beginnings in Egypt, around 2000 B.C., still exist.

The glass-making process has been perfected over thousands of years. Glass used to be available only to pharaohs and royals but has become an everyday item. Glass can be made in several different ways, with different chemical compositions. Throughout history, however, soda-lime glass has been the most common form of glass produced, according to scientists with Texas A&M University's Nautical Archaeology program. Most glass consists primarily of silica, a component of sand, mixed at very high temperatures with sodium carbonate or potassium carbonate and a small amount of lime for stability. Glass made with sodium carbonate (soda glass) is usually more transparent than glass made with potassium carbonate (potash glass).

Glass does break, but it does not readily break down. The glass decomposition rate is essentially nil. Over time, the surface of some glass bottles will absorb moisture. This results in devitrification, a process that causes the outer layer of glass bottles to crystallize and flake off. Devitrification takes place very slowly and results in a cloudy or iridescent appearance. Modern glass is made from an incredibly stable formula, however, so the glass bottles people throw in the garbage today will most likely remain in landfills for thousands of years, experiencing only slight devitrification.

Credit : Sciencing 

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When you eat your food, depending on how it tastes, you can quickly decide whether you like it or not. You can thank the taste buds on your tongue for that important aspect of enjoying life (and discerning displeasure)! Butterflies, however, don’t have taste buds like us mammals. Their mouthparts mainly serve as a straw through which they suck up their food—no chewing necessary. Butterflies have chemoreceptors, a type of sensors, on their feet. These sensors act similar to how our taste buds do. A female butterfly will drum the leaves with her feet to release the juices in a plant. She "tastes" the chemicals released thus not to eat them, but for a different reason. She looks for the appropriate plant chemicals to check if the plant is safe (and not toxic) for the caterpillars before laying her eggs. Apparently, these sensors can detect "dissolved sugars in fermenting fruit", which butterflies love.  Without so-called “taste buds”, how do butterflies know what is nectar and what isn’t? Butterflies do taste their food, but not through their mouthparts. Instead, they do it through their feet! Having an animal’s feet serve as taste organs sounds preposterous, which is probably why researchers never even considered the possibility.

The thinking was that if humans and most other mammals had a tongue for taste, a similar organ must serve the same function in insects. Nature rarely works in such a straight and predictable manner. It was only in the late 1800s that researchers began to take a more out-of-the-box approach to the problem. This is when they discovered that it was the legs, not the mouthparts, that functioned as taste receptors in butterflies!

Insects are a varied bunch of organisms, making it difficult to generalize a feature across them all. Butterflies have mouthparts designed like straws, so they don’t really have a tongue. Such insects whose mouthparts are only designed to suck liquids are called haustellate insects. Lepidoptera, the order to which butterflies and moths belong, and Diptera, the order to which flies belong, are both “leg tasters”. The taste buds are called contact chemoreceptors, taste receptors, or basiconic sensilla in some literature. These chemoreceptors are attached to nerve endings. When chemicals present in the insect’s surrounding come in contact with the chemoreceptors, they activate the nerves, which relay the information to the insect’s brain.

Credit : Science ABC

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Considering they are our relatives, it's no surprise that chimpanzees and orangutans have fingerprints that are similar to ours. But someone completely unrelated to us also has fingerprints shockingly similar to ours - koalas! Apparently, this is what is called convergent evolution - "different species developing similar traits independently from each other. Well, as one report rightly worried, we can only hope investigators at a crime scene do not mistake a koala fingerprint for a human's and set out on a hunt that can never have an ending!

In 1975 police took fingerprints from six chimpanzees and two orangutans housed at zoos in England. They weren’t just looking for a unique souvenir; they were testing to see if any unsolved crimes could be the fault of these banana-eating miscreants. While these primates ended up being as innocent as they seemed, the police did determine that their fingerprints were indistinguishable from a human’s without careful inspection.

A few years later, in 1996, a different type of mammal came under police suspicions: a koala! While it makes sense that orangutans and chimpanzees would have fingerprints like us, being some of our closest relatives, koalas are evolutionarily distant from humans. It turns out that fingerprints are an excellent example of convergent evolution, or different species developing similar traits independently from each other.

For koalas, it’s not really so different. They are incredibly picky eaters, showing strong preferences for eucalyptus leaves of a certain age. It seems that their fingerprints allow them to thoroughly inspect their food before they chow down. Police aren’t exactly worried about koala bank robbers, but it is possible that koala fingerprints could be found incidentally at a crime scene and be mistaken for a human's, making it pretty difficult to find a match.

Credit : MC Gill

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Leech has 32 brains. Well, not exactly, but sort of Here's the thing. A leech is an annelid. which means it has a segmented body. It has 32 segments in all The creature's brain runs through the length of its body, and exists in each segment as a ganglion (a structure containing nerve cells: plural ganglia). The first few segments together form the head ganglion, the next 21 form the mid-ganglia, and the remaining, the tail ganglion. Why these are seen as separate "brains" is because each ganglion has the ability to control the segment it is located in.

Leeches are brown or black-colored worms having a segmented body (34 segments). They possess a special sucker on both ends. In majority of the species, the mouth encloses three jaws, each equipped with small teeth. Leeches move from one place to another by walking in a looping manner.

The largest leech recorded till date measures about 16 inches in length. On an average, the size of leeches is between 7-80 mm. Like earthworms, leeches are hermaphrodites, meaning that a single leech has both male and female sexual organs. Leech bite is painless, which is due to the anesthetic present in their saliva secretion. Leeches have the ability to feed in large amounts (about 5 times their body weight) and store nutrients for future use. Many species can survive for about one year after having a blood meal. They use the preserve food for survival. Some species (e.g. hirudo) lay their young ones in cocoons, while others (e.g., Amazon leech) keep their babies (as many as 300) in the stomach.

Credit : Animal sake

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With all that regular brushing, rinsing, flossing, the scary decay (not to mention wisdom teeth troubles), and the eventual visit to the dentist, you think having 32 teeth is a bother? But did you know slugs have several hundred thousand teeth? Slugs including snails, have these teeth on their tongue-together called radula that help them scrape at and eat their food. Since their teeth wear down, they are replaced by new teeth. While snails can have even up to 20,000. The Most Number of Teeth" award is won by the umbrella slug that goes through an unbelievable 750,000 of these teeth in a lifetime. A paleoanthropologist was right when he said. "Our teeth are boring.”

Slugs have an important role in the ecosystem and are key composters which help to break down decomposing vegetation. However they are notorious for being able to chomp through garden plants and vegetables in a very short period of time. They do this using their teeth. They need so many teeth  because instead of chewing their food, they have a ribbon-like flexible band of microscopic teeth called a radula. This acts like a circular saw — cutting through vegetation and eating it as they go. When their teeth wear out new rows of teeth move forward and replace them.

Slugs are hermaphrodites and they have both male and female reproductive systems. They are able to reproduce themselves without the need of a partner. In fact, one slug can lay up to 400-500 eggs in a year which can remain in the soil for years and hatch when the conditions are right. Slugs produce slime which enables them to slide along the ground. The slime also enables them to glide over broken glass or razor blades without damaging themselves. They can use the slime as a trail to find their way back to their homes, even being able to tell their own slime apart from other slugs and snails.

Credit :  Perry Ponders

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Clouds are like light fluffy, white cotton candies on the sky. How much could they weigh? Our first guess would be "Since they float in the air, perhaps, close to nothing!" Well, we are wrong. Researchers have calculated that the average cumulus cloud weighs an incredible 5,00,000 kg. That's a hundred elephants!

Clouds, after all, are made up of water, and water is quite heavy. The density of cumulus clouds is around 0.5 gram of water per cubic metre. A 1 cubic km cloud contains 1 billion cubic metre. Doing the math: 1,000,000,000 x 0.5 = 500,000,000 grams of water droplets in our cloud. That is about 5,00,000 kg or 1.1 million pounds (about 551 tonnes).

So now, the next question is, how does all this massive weight stay afloat in the sky? How come they don't fall on our heads? Because the air below it is even heavier. That is, the density of the same volume of cloud material is less than the density of the same amount of dry air. Just as oil floats on water because it is less dense, clouds float on air because the moist air in clouds is less dense than dry air.

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The Bengal florican, Houbaropsis bengalensis, is a small species of the bustard. Thus, it is also called a Bengal bustard. The Bengal floricans are dimorphic. While males are black and white plumage with buff-brown upperside, the female is larger with a dark brown crown. Also, the legs and feet are yellow while the bill and irides are comparatively darker.  It has two disjunct populations: Houbaropsis bengalensis bengalensis, living in the Terai region of the Indian subcontinent, and Houbaropsis bengalensis blandini, seasonally flooding the Tonle Sap region in Cambodia.

There are less than 1,000 species of Bengal floricans documented around the world. The population of the birds is divided into different fragments – one in the Indian subcontinent and the other in Cambodia. The population is threatened and is tagged as a Critically Endangered species. There are various international conservation management authorities working for protecting and contributing to the threatened birds.

The Bengal florican's native habitat is grasslands. While the females and males species inhabit the breeding grounds, there is a movement speculated on and off the wintering grounds between the breeding and non-breeding season. The adult male birds migrate away from wet grasslands during the non-breeding season, though the migration is not long distance. The adult males and females move to warmer lowlands during the winter or when their native habitats are flooded. Their movement is also recorded by the satellite. Satellite telemetry and remote sensing help access the distribution, movements, and survival range of the Bengal florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis) to ensure its conservation and management around the world.

Credit : Kidadl

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The Tasmanian devil is the largest carnivorous marsupial, known for their high-pitched squeal and aggressive temperament. They have held this title for over 80 years. Specifically, these creatures weigh between 9 and 29 pounds. A Tasmanian Devil weighing 29 pounds is as heavy as three one-gallon cans of paint. These mammals range from 20 to 31 inches long. Picture two bowling pins lined up end to end and you have the length of a 31-inch Tasmanian Devil. This mammal’s tail is equal to half of its body length. These animals store fat in their tail to use for energy. So, if you see one of these animals with a thick tail, you know it’s healthy. Thanks to conservation efforts, they are being reintroduced to Australian mainland after a 3,000-year gap. Mother devils can give birth to 50 young ones at one go. However, very few survive.

A Tasmanian Devil is a small animal with short brown or black fur with a stripe of white hair across its chest. Some of these marsupials have patches of white hair near their dark tail. This marsupial’s front legs are longer than its back ones. They have dark eyes and small mouselike ears. These animals have excellent sight and hearing allowing them to track down prey at night.

They are known for their very strong jaws. In fact, this marsupial’s jaws have a bite force of 94 pounds. That strong bite force allows them to easily consume the meat, hair, bones, and organs of the dead animals they find. Some scientists refer to Tasmanian Devils as environmental vacuums because they clean up the carcasses they find in their habitat.

Credit : A-Z-Animals

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Lake Tuz or Tuz Golu is Turkey's second largest lake. One of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world. Lake Tuz has a surface area of over 1,600 sq km. It is said that salt extracted from the lake is exported to more than 60 countries.

Lake Tuz is a saline lake (Tuz is Turkish for “salt”) located on the Central Anatolia plateau, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) south-southeast of Ankara. It is fed by groundwater that originates in the Northern Taurus Mountains and passes through Konya Plain and Obruk Plateau bubbles up into Lake Tuz via springs. Other sources of water include two major streams, and rain that primarily falls in the springtime. The lake has no outlet.

Water here has become increasingly scarce. The Mediterranean Basin, which includes Turkey, has already seen more frequent and intense droughts, according to a report by the Mediterranean Experts on Climate and Environmental Change. In addition, the Mediterranean Basin is considered a climate change hotspot, having warmed more since the pre-industrial period compared to the global average (1.5°C/2.7°F compared to 1.1°C/2.0°F).

After the year 2000, there was a distinct shift. Between 2001 and 2016, water spanned less than 20 percent of the lake in every August (except 2015) as droughts became more frequent and intense. In 2008 and 2016, the lake completely dried up. Aydin-Kandemir’s current research shows that more recently, extraordinary meteorological drought has devastated Lake Tuz since 2019. The patterns led the scientists to wonder why the lake had become more sensitive to drought after the year 2000. Before that time, Lake Tuz usually contained water even during periods of drought. But something changed.

Credit : Sci Tech Daily

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Deserts are arid ecosystems, receiving fewer than 25 cm of precipitation a year. They are hot dry and deserted. But the sand dunes aren't just inert masses. They, in fact. "breathe" water vapor and are very much alive. Scientists have developed a super-sensitive probe that has recorded how water vapor from the surrounding air percolate between sand grains.

Researchers at Cornell University, New York, and University of Nantes, France, developed over a decade a new form of instrumentation called capacitance probes. to study the moisture content in sand dunes to better understand the process by which agricultural lands turn to desert. The probe uses multiple sensors to record everything from solid concentration to velocity to water content, all with unprecedented spatial resolution. It is so sensitive to moisture that it can pick up tiny films of water on a single grain of sand!

Conducting the research at Qatar, they combined data on wind speed and direction as well as ambient temperature and humidity. The study revealed just how porous sand is, with a tiny amount of air seeping through it.

When wind flows over the dune, it creates imbalances in the local pressure. This forces air to go into and out of the sand. "So, the sand is breathing, like an organism breathes," the researchers note. This breathing could be the reason behind how microbes live deep in sand dunes, even when no liquid water is available. The researchers also found that at the surface of the dune, the probe measured less evaporation than scientists were predicting. This shows that the leaching of moisture from the sand dune to the atmosphere is a slow chemical process.

The team's paper has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface. Probes that can sensitively measure moisture within sand could help experts find invisible signs of water, say, on Mars.

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NEWCASTLE University scientists claim that an enzyme isolated from marine bacterium Bacillus licheniformis cuts through plaque on teeth and cleans hard-to-reach areas. Dr Nicholas Jakubovics of the university's School of Dental Sciences said: "Plaque is made up of bacteria which join together to colonize an area in a bid to push out any potential competitors. Traditional toothpastes work by scrubbing off the plaque containing the bacteria. But that's not always effective which is why people who religiously clean their teeth can still develop cavities." When bacterial cells die, the DNA inside leaks out and creates a biofilm that sticks to teeth, protecting the bacteria from brushing, chemicals or even antibiotics. Bacillus licheniformis, found on the surface of seaweed, releases an enzyme which breaks up the biofilm and strips away harmful bacteria.

Researcher Prof. Burgess said: "The zyme breaks up and removes the bacteria esent in plaque and importantly, prevents build-up of plaque too. If we can contain it with'n toothpaste we would be creating a product which could prevent tooth decay. The enzyme also has huge potential in he ping keep clean medical implants such as artificial hips and speech valves which also suffer from biofilm infection."

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A  Lyrebird is a ground-dwelling bird, native to Australia. It has strong legs and feet and short rounded wings.  Its plumage is a mix of brown, white and black. It is a poor flier and rarely take to the air except for periods of downhill gliding. The males have a strikingly beautiful tail, which they fan out as part of courtship display.

A  Lyrebird is best known for its ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from the environment. Its songs may last as long as 20 minutes and It make different sounds for different requirements.

Its diet consists of cockroaches, spiders and beetles. It is a solitary, shy bird.

Female Lyrebirds build dome-shaped nests made of sticks. They build these cosy structures on the ground, in tree stumps, in tree ferns or even in caves, and fill them with fern fronds, feathers, moss and roots – a particularly talented lyrebird could even put Grand Designs homeowners to shame.

Once they’ve built and decorated their home, they’ll generally lay one egg, which hatches in six weeks. The young lyrebird will then live in the nest for the first 6-10 weeks of its life.

There’s also a smaller, darker lyrebird that lacks the elegant lyre-shaped tail feathers of the superb lyrebird. This is the Albert’s lyrebird – less superb, but equally amazing – the Albert’s lyrebird is found in only a small region of south-east Queensland and far northeast New South Wales. With brown upper body plumage and a rich chestnut colour below, they are roughly the size of a pheasant.

Threats to the species include danger from vehicle collisions, domestic animal, and foxes. Having survived the devastation of the 2019-20 bushfires by living in one of the Unburnt Six forest areas on our east coast, lyrebirds are still vulnerable to threats such as land-clearing and logging and need our help to thrive and stay as superb as we know they are.

Credit : WWF Australia 

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Alpine swift is a species of swift found in the mountains from southern Europe to the Himalayas. It is a large bird, with broad wings and a short. forked tail. Upper parts, head, tail and wings are olive brown, while its underbelly is white. It has a tiny beak but an extremely large mouth which helps in catching flying insects.  Its diet consists of bees, wasps, lacewings, cicadas, aphids and butterflies. While in flight, It look like a boomerang.

Alpine swift known for graceful glides, swoops and soars. It can stay aloft without touching the ground for an extraordinarily long period of time. The Alpine swift has legs that are too short when compared to the body and won’t allow him to be able to take off from the ground, but it’s an excellent climber, capable of getting up a wall to the ideal height for gliding and flying. Six months of uninterrupted flight, never landing: this is how the Alpine swifts spend the entire wintering period in West Africa, it even manages to enjoy some form of sleep while continuing to soar in the air. Its flight can be fast and straight but also with rapid direction changes, usually carried out to look for the food it catches in flight. 

Alpine swift build their nests in colonies in cliff hole or cave, laying two or three eggs and return to the same site year after year, and pair for life. Young swifts in the nest can drop their body temperature and become torpid if bad weather prevents their parents from bringing back food.

Credit : Avi Birds 

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One of the coolest caracal facts is that they are known to have a vertical leap of over 10 feet!

The caracal is a medium sized wild cat found in arid regions of Africa, India and the Middle East. They average about 20 inches at the shoulder and range from 20 to 40 pounds, with males being quite a bit larger than females. The caracal is also known as the Persian lynx and the gazelle cat. The most distinctive caracal characteristics are the long tufts of black hair on the tips of the ears. The actual function of these tufts is not known, although some speculate they may keep insects or sunshine out of the eyes, or even be used to communicate with other caracals. Caracals are typically solid colored reddish tan with a lighter underbelly and white "eyeliner" that sets off their beautiful features. Black eyebrow markings complete the picture.

Just as there are solid black leopards and jaguars, caracals can also be found in solid black. Black caracals are very rare, and may occur side by side in the same litter as normally colored caracals. They are powerfully built, with long, sturdy legs that act like springs, allowing them to leap straight up and snatch Birds right out of the air. The hind legs are longer than the fronts, and the topline slopes slightly from the hips to the shoulders.. The tail is bobbed at about a 3/4 length, but is well-muscled and used as a rudder in the air. Along with birds, caracals eat an assortment of small animals, rodents, rabbits, reptiles and occasionally large insects. They have also been known to take down prey much larger than themselves, including small antelope and goats.

Credit : Animal Facts Encyclopedia

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Brookesia micra is the smallest of four new chameleon species found on the African island of Madagascar. With an average adult length of 2.9 cms from snout to tail, it is among the tiniest reptiles in the world. Scientists think the diminutive new chameleon species might represent extreme cases of island dwarfism, whereby organisms shrink in size due to limited resources on islands.

 Brookesia Micra’s scientific name is the same as its common name. Brookesia comes from Joshua Brookes, the British naturalist. Micra is a Latinized form of the Greek word  mikros, which means “tiny.” The pronunciation of Micra is MIKra and not MYkra, by the way.

The Brookesia Micra is also different from other chameleons in that the structures of it     inner ear resemble that of a turtle more than it does a chameleon. This is probably to help with the reptile’s stability and sense of balance. But like other chameleons, the Brookesia Micra feeds by projecting its tongue to catch its prey. As a small chameleon, it can project its tongue twice the length of its body and snap up prey in a fraction of a second.

Brookesia Micra is not poisonous to other animals nor is it venomous, and its tiny size makes it vulnerable to predators such as larger chameleons like the cat-sized Parson’s chameleon, frogs, birds such as the Malagasy coucal, and whatever small mammals share its island home.

Credit : A-Z-Animals

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