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It's a Beetle's World
Have you ever had winged visitors to your room on a rainy day, that are black, shiny and button-like, and which fall to the ground with a distinct tapping sound? You might also be familiar with those cute-looking insects with bright orange bodies dotted with black, called Ladybirds, hovering over flowers and tender leaves. There also might have been times when an unlucky one splats on your windshield or gets crunched underfoot. Well, these are all different kinds of BEETLES — creatures that can be called evolution’s biggest success story....
Pollution – an old ancestral legacy
If you thought today’s pollution and environmental damage was just as old as the coming of industrial factories, smoke and chemical waste, you were wrong. A recent report in the journal ‘Science’ says that environmental pollution is as old as human existence itself, though industrialisation certainly hastened the process. The report is based on a study consisting of the combined research of 19 scientists across four continents, who found that the diversity of marine life was among the first to be affected....
High-tech Turtle
A few months ago, a turtle in Thailand was grievously injured when it was run over by a truck. The animal hardly seemed to have any chance of survival. However, with the immediate help of the Thai Animal Guardians Association, it did survive. The Association admitted the turtle to Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University for medical treatment. High-tech Turtle [Illustration by Anup Singh] The plucky little survivor was named Jikko and the Bangkok Post (a local newspaper) kept readers updated on the animal’s progress....
Footprints on Earth
Have you ever been to a national park? If so, you must have tried to trace or locate a wild animal by trying to see its footprints on the soil. For example, people who go to Jim Corbett National Park, in Uttar Pradesh, India, spend most of their time looking for tigers. They do so by trying to look for its pug marks on the soil. If they find even one, they return happy and spin tall tales of adventure to their friends, about “How I saw a tiger”....
Can You Speak Dolphin Language?
Mastering a language is not an easy task. Different countries have different languages, and each language in turn has different dialects. For instance, the Hindi usage, in Uttar Pradesh, is drastically different from the Hindi spoken by the Koli fisherfolk of Maharashtra. In fact, in smaller towns, there is a subtle shift in the spoken language, every few kilometers! Can You Speak Dolphin Language? [Illustration by Shiju George] Recent studies show that dolphins are no different from us....
An Earth Day Fable
Indians are masters of junk. And out of junk they produce masterpieces. One such junk master is the sculptor Nek Chand who fashioned his sculptures from waste. The story goes that Nek chand was once invited to America to fashion sculptures, works of art out of waste. Nek Chand came back disillusioned and glum complaining that their junk was not so good, that its feel and smell was so alien. If Nek Chand turned masterpieces out of junk (see picture below), the slum is a craft built around junk....
An Octopus as Jar-opener
Try opening a bottle of jam. See how skilfully your fingers wrap around the lid and unscrew it? Now researchers at the Brighton University, United Kingdom, are carrying out an interesting study to see if the octopus, too, has the same skill. Makes sense considering it has so many ‘hands’ or tentacles! The scientists have even made a gigantic glass aquarium, specially designed for the resident pet octopus, in the university laboratory. They have named it Roger, after the British actor Roger Moore who acted as James Bond in the Hollywood film...
Rhinoceros: On the Comeback Trail
Next to the tusk-bearing elephants, rhinos are the other large animals heavily targeted by poachers. Rhinos are poached for their horns and these are sold in the black market at astonishing prices. Since 1977, trade in rhino horn has been banned but poachers and smugglers still hunt and kill these gentle creatures to meet the demands of the rhino horn in markets in Central Asia and the Far East. For some years now, rhinos have been high on the endangered list....
The Earth takes a Battering
During its life span, our planet has suffered the impact of close to 30 small planets, up to 10 miles in diameter and travelling 60 times the speed of sound. Each such impact releases about a thousand times as much energy as would be released if all the nuclear powers exploded all their present weapon stocks. About 5,000 giant meteorities with diameters of more than a kilometre have hit the Earth over the past 600 million years, with an average strike rate of one per 120,000 years....
Excerpts from 'Everything has a History'
Haldane’s books are the best for communicating science to a layperson. He wrote almost 300 brilliant articles on popular science for ordinary workers, many of which were later collated into books such as ‘Everything has a History’, ‘Science in Everyday Life’ and ‘On Being the Right Size’. Here are two chapters from ‘Everything has a History’. How Bees Communicate: Eight years ago, I gave an account in ‘The Daily Worker’ of the early work of Von Frisch and others on the language of bees....