Reference Maunde - Beyond Trivia

Is the Sahara on the move?

2013-11-15T22:07:00.002+05:30

The southern fringe of the Sahara, known as the Sahel, is believed by some scientists to be advancing by as much as 9 miles (15km) a year. Horrifying reports of drought, starvation and death in Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan have shocked the world. But is the Sahara really moving southwards or are the devastating crop failures being caused by politics and by bad management of land?

Global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is often blamed for the Sahel famines, but there is little proof. There is, however, plenty of evidence that the climate has fluctuated in log cycles over the past 2 million years. Stone Age paintings depict antelopes, elephants and lions at Tassili N’Ajjer in the Algerian Sahara. And roman cities all over North Africa, such as Leptis Magna in Libya, once ruled over the granaries of the Roman Empire where fields grew grain – without any need for irrigation – to be exported to Rome. Now the former farms are dusty plains of semi-desert. This is part of the natural climatic cycle – each cycle taking thousands of years – that is brought about by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. it is the same cycle that caused the Ice Ages, and could now be at work to cause the Sahara to march in the Sahel.

However, the growth of deserts can also be blamed on man’s treatment of the land. Cutting down trees and scrub to open up land for farming can expose soil to the ravages of erosion. Bad management of land on slopes, such as ploughing furrows up and down a hill instead of around it, can cause soil to be washed down or blown away. Bad farming practice in the American Midwest during the 1930s reduced an area of farm land nearly the size of England to a dust bowl. This type of soil erosion happens on the edges of the Sahara when grassland with poor oil is ploughed up to grow crops.

‘Over-grazing’ by farm animals is also alleged to cause erosion, but the evidence is inconclusive. Animals can actually encourage plant growth by fertilizing the soil with their manure. Nomadic farmers, who have roamed and flourished in the deserts for thousands of years, never stay in one place for long. They move their flocks frequently, giving grass time to grow again. Only if they are stopped from moving on will their animals over-graze the land.

In the short term, politics are probably as strong a factor as climate change in causing the Sahel famines. Wars in Ethiopia and Somalia have forced refugees to migrate into semi-arid land that cannot support them. Social and economic pressures, such as government settlement policies, have also forced people to give up traditional nomadic farming and change to static Western farming methods that are not suited to the land and climate, and so lead to ‘dust bowls’.

Climatic change is an easy scapegoat for countries suffering from famine, but the case has not yet been proved.

What does the brain have to do with temperature?

2012-03-10T19:30:00.003+05:30

Image Source: ehow.com

In order for the 100 trillion or so cells in the human body to work efficiently, they need a constant environment. For most persons, this is a temperature of 98.6 degree F (37 degree C) or so. When the body temperature deviates even a little, the person is likely to feel ill.

Apart of the brain, the hypothalamus, acts as the body's thermostat, maintaining this steady temperature no matter how hot or cold the weather. Though the extremities may be chilled, the body's core - and the brain - are protected.

Neurons in the hypothalamus constantly monitor blood flowing through it. When blood temperature rises, the hypothalamus promptly sends out messages through the autonomic nervous system, producing sweat and dilating the blood vessels in the skin.

Low body temperatures, picked up by sensors in the skin, signal the blood vessels in the skin to constrict. The muscles begin to produce heat-generating shivers. Your teeth start to chatter, and goose bumps appear as the fine hairs on the skin stand on end. In addition, the hypothalamus causes the release of the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine into into the blood. These hormones temporarily increase the body's metabolic rate and produce heat.

Does Amnesia Erase Memories?

2012-03-05T16:15:00.001+05:30

Image Source: blog.lib.umn.edu

During the 1940's and 1950's, when severe epileptic disorders were treated by surgically removing part of the brain, doctors found that electrical stimulation of the hippocampus provoked a flood of memories in their patients. Removal of or damage to the hippocampus made it impossible for patients to learn anything new, and at the same time erased memories of events within the past three years. Only older memories were left intact. This kind of amnesia (loss of memory) has proved to be permanent.

Progressive loss of memory is the dire result of Alzheimer's disease, a degeneration of the brain that generally strikes in old age. This, too, is an irreversible loss.

A head injury can also cause amnesia, but often the effect is temporary. For example, the victim of a car crash may lose memories of events just prior to the accident. Scientists call this retrograde amnesia.

Severe emotional stress is another cause of amnesia. Victims of crime and battle-scarred soldiers may protect themselves from the horrors they have experienced by blotting out the memory.. Such a mechanism may seem merciful, but can result in deeper emotional trouble, for, it seems, these memories are not lost. Unless the past is retrieved and faced, the stress may fester.

Amazing Bible Facts and Statistics

2012-03-02T19:45:00.003+05:30

The system of chapters was introduced in A.D. 1238 by Cardinal Hugo de S. Caro, while the verse notations were added in 1551 by Robertus Stephanus, after the advent of printing.

A Bible in the University of Gottingen is written on 2,470 palm leaves.

According to statistics from Wycliffe International, the Society of Gideons, and the International Bible Society, the number of new Bibles that are sold, given away, or otherwise distributed in the United States is about 168,000 per day.

The Bible can be read aloud in 70 hours.

There are 8,674 different Hebrew words in the Bible, 5,624 different Greek words, and 12,143 different English words in the King James Version.

A number of verses in the Bible (KJV) contain all but 1 letter of the alphabet: Ezra 7:21 contains all but the letter j; Joshua 7:24, 1st Kings 1:9, 1st Chronicles 12:40, 2nd Chronicles 36:10, Ezekiel 28:13, Daniel 4:37, and Haggai 1:1 contain all but q; 2 Kings 16:15 and 1st Chronicles 4:10 contain all but z; and Galatians 1:14 contains all but k.

BIBLE STATISTICS:

Number of books in the Bible: 66
Chapters: 1,189
Verses: 31,101
Words: 783,137
Letters: 3,566,480
Number of promises given in the Bible: 1,260
Commands: 6,468
Predictions: over 8,000
Fulfilled prophecy: 3,268 verses
Unfulfilled prophecy: 3,140
Number of questions: 3,294
Longest name: Mahershalalhashbaz (Isaiah 8:1)
Longest verse: Esther 8:9 (78 words)
Shortest verse: John 11:35 (2 words: "Jesus wept").
Middle books: Micah and Nahum
Middle verse: Psalm 118:8
Middle chapter: Psalm 117
Shortest chapter (by number of words): Psalm 117 (by number of words)
Longest book: Psalms (150 chapters)
Shortest book (by number of words): 3 John
Longest chapter: Psalm 119 (176 verses)
Number of times the word "God" appears: 3,358
Number of times the word "Lord" appears: 7,736
Number of different authors: 40
Number of languages the Bible has been translated into: over 1,200

OLD TESTAMENT STATISTICS:

Number of books: 39
Chapters: 929
Verses: 23,114
Words: 602,585
Letters: 2,278,100
Middle book: Proverbs
Middle chapter: Job 20
Middle verses: 2 Chronicles 20:17,18
Smallest book: Obadiah
Shortest verse: 1 Chronicles 1:25
Longest verse: Esther 8:9
Longest chapter: Psalms 119
Largest book: Psalms

NEW TESTAMENT STATISTICS:

Number of books: 27
Chapters: 260
Verses: 7,957
Words: 180,552
Letters: 838,380
Middle book: 2 Thessalonians
Middle chapters: Romans 8, 9
Middle verse: Acts 27:17
Smallest book: 3 John
Shortest verse: John 11:35
Longest verse: Revelation 20:4
Longest chapter: Luke 1
Largest book: Luke

Source: http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Bible/bible_facts.htm

What causes giantism and dwarfism?

2012-03-02T16:21:00.002+05:30

Image Source: everydayhealth.com

Being very tall or short does not constitute either giantism or dwarfism. Men and women can range in height from 4 feet 7 inches (140 centimeters to 6 feet 7 inches (201 cm) and still be considered normal.

Giantism and dwarfism are specific growth disorders that can usually be traced to something that has gone awry in the pituitary, but sometimes dwarfism can be caused by malnutrition or by diseases of the kidney, heart, or liver. As a rule, too much GH (growth hormone) leads to giantism and too little to dwarfism, but the timing of the secretions is also important.

If the pituitary overproduces GH before the end of adolescence, the outcome is likely to be excessive growth. But if the oversecretion comes after adolescence, the hormone acts unevenly. Because growth in stature has essentially ceased, and because GH acts only on the parts of the skeleton still not completely hardened by mineralization, the excess hormone may cause large extremities or, in rare instances, a condition called acromegaly, marked by enlargement of the face, feet, and hands.

The Secrets of Coral Castle

2012-02-28T19:23:00.003+05:30

Image Source: en.wikipedia.org

Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida, is one of the most amazing structures ever built. In terms of accomplishment, it's been compared to Stonehenge, ancient Greek temples, and even the great pyramids of Egypt. It is amazing - some even say miraculous - because it was quarried, fashioned, transported, and constructed by one man: Edward Leedskalnin, a 5-ft. tall, 100-lb. Latvian immigrant.

Many men have single-handedly built their own homes, but Leedskalnin's choice of building materials is what makes his undertaking so incredible. He used huge blocks of coral rock, some weighing as much as 30 tons, and somehow was able to move them and set them in place without assistance or the use of modern machinery. And therein lies the mystery. How did he do it?

It's estimated that 1,000 tons of coral rock were used in construction of the walls and towers, and an additional 100 tons of it were carved into furniture and art objects:

An obelisk he raised weighs 28 tons.
The wall surrounding Coral Castle stands 8 ft. tall and consists of large blocks each weighing several tons.
Large stone crescents are perched atop 20-ft.-high walls.
A 9-ton swinging gate that moves at the touch of a finger guards the eastern wall.
The largest rock on the property weighs an estimated 35 tons.
Some stones are twice the weight of the largest blocks in the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Working alone, Leedskalnin labored for 20 years - from 1920 to 1940 - to build the home he originally called "Rock Gate Park" in Florida City. The story goes that he built it after being jilted by his fiancée, who changed her mind about marrying him because he was too old and too poor. After wandering around the U.S. and Canada for several years, Leedskalnin settled in Florida City for health reasons; he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. He began building his coral home in 1920. Then in 1936, when a planned new subdivision of homes threatened his privacy, Leedskalnin moved his entire home 10 miles to Homestead, where he completed it, and where it still stands as a tourist attraction.

How Leedskalnin managed this feat of engineering has remained a mystery all these years because, incredibly, no one saw him do it. A secretive man, Leedskalnin often worked at night by lantern light. And so there are no credible witnesses to how the small, frail man was able to move the huge blocks of rock. Even when he moved the entire structure to Homestead, neighbors saw the coral blocks being transported on a borrowed truck, but no one seems to know how Leedskalnin got them on and off the vehicle.

Source: http://paranormal.about.com/od/moremadscience/a/coral-castle-secrets.htm

Turkey’s 1500-Year-Old, $28M Bible Linked to Gospel of Barnabas?

2012-02-27T22:40:00.003+05:30

Image Source: turkishnews.com

The Vatican has made an official request to gain access to a 1500-year-old Bible worth $28 million currently held by the Turkish government in Ankara, Turkey. There is speculation that the Bible may be a copy of the Gospel of Barnabas – a telling of Jesus’ ministry Muslims believe is part of the original Gospels.

Photocopies of the holy book’s pages are reportedly worth about $1.7 million, but the relic isn’t so extremely valuable just because of its age, but also because of its construction and its contents. The Bible is handwritten in gold lettering on loosely strung together animal hide and written in Syriac. Syriac is a dialect of Aramic – Jesus’ native language. Aramaic itself is rarely present in today’s society, as it is now only spoken in a small village near Damascus.

There is some speculation that this Bible is a copy of the Gospel of Barnabas – a Gospel version Muslims believe is part of the original Gospels. The Gospel of Barnabas is not included in the New Testament along side Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and in fact Barnabas opposes the New Testament and rather has clear similarities to the Muslim interpretation of Jesus. Barnabas even contains a story in which Jesus predicts the coming of Prophet Muhammad. Muslims believe this original gospel has been suppressed.

However, theology professor Ömer Faruk Harman told Today Zaman, “Muslims may be disappointed to see that this copy does not include things they would like to see and it might have no relation with the content of the Gospel of Barnabas.”

The Turkish government gained possession of the Bible back in 2000 when they caught a band of thieves and smugglers cutting through Turkey with the bible as well as other antiques, illegal excavations, and explosives.

The tome has been kept at the courthouse until recently, and is set to make its way, under heavy security, to Turkey’s Ankara Ethnography Museum. But before it settles there the Vatican is hoping to get a chance to study and investigate the extremely valuable Bible.

Source: http://www.turkishnews.com/en/content/2012/02/24/turkeys-1500-year-old-28m-bible-linked-to-gospel-of-barnabas/

Why do some people find it so difficult to relax?

2012-02-27T22:23:00.001+05:30

Image Source: naldzgraphics.net

Workaholics tend to see time off as time wasted. They typically feel that every minute has to be devoted to attaining the goals they have set for themselves. They may be corporate presidents or college students, but they share an inability to relax.

An excessive and compulsive drive for achievement may be based on a distortion of a deeply ingrained work ethic. Counselors have found that one way to persuade workaholics to relax is to convince them that time off will improve their productivity, that giving themselves time to refuel will enable them to perform twice as well.

For many, taking it easy is something they must actually learn to do. They have to consult "leisure counselors," who may advise them to try to discover the hidden benefits of leisure by seeking out activities as far removed as possible from the daily routines of the job. A counselor might also recommend that dedicated workaholics join a leisure-oriented club or make a list of things they have always secretly wanted to do.

Do people with different personalities have different brains?

2012-02-26T19:03:00.002+05:30

Image Source: quora.com

Although science is a long way from connecting every human trait to a telltale wrinkle in brain tissue, researchers have discovered fascinating links between brain structure and the ways different people behave. The British psychologist Hans Eysenck has proposed that a key to the difference between the extroverted and introverted personality - one outgoing, the other reserved - lies in the cerebral cortex, a part of the brain much involved in learning, reasoning, and planning. Activity here can be viewed in brain scans. In the extrovert, the cortex is quiet and seems to welcome noisy, exciting situations that arouse it. The introvert's level of cortical arousal, in contrast, is already high, so the introverted personality does not need much outside stimulation and seems to prefer peace and quiet.

Some support for Eysenck's theory can be found in our daily experience. Extroverts can fall asleep quickly and introverts can't, suggesting that the extrovert's cortex slips easily into a quiet state. Furthermore, the fact that extroverts tend to be less sensitive to pain seems to indicate that their cerebral cortexes are harder to arouse.

Why do smells create some of our strongest memories?

2012-02-25T16:36:00.000+05:30

One of the memory centers of the brain, the hippocampus, is closely connected with the sense of smell. Smell signals make just once stop - in the olfactory bulbs - before making their way straight to the brain.

This nearly direct connection may account for the sometimes surprisingly vivid memories that can be stirred by odors. If you were upset by your first day in school on a long-ago autumn day, the smell of fallen leaves can bring back the experience in excruciating detail. If the smell of blooming honey suckle accompanied your first kiss, the same smell, even a lifetime later, may take you back in time and place. When the painter Marc Chagall returned to Russia, his original homeland, for the first time in half a century, it was the overpowering scent of wild violets that brought back to him most vividly memories of his youth. Holding two wilted bouquets, he said; Smell, smell. No other flowers have that smell. I haven't known it in 50 years."

Smell and memory play a more direct role in what foods you like to eat,. If a certain food once made you sick, the mere whiff of it can make your stomach queasy. On the happier side, a certain kind of food can be irresistible because of your pleasant associations with it in the past.

Secret cities of the Indus

2009-06-20T15:07:00.002+05:30

A civilization that has disappeared even from legend

Even in ruins, the ancient cities of Indus Valley (now in Pakistan) look better planned than most modern cities in the Indian sub-continent. Indeed, they recall the symmetry of modern American towns, with regular grids of streets, brick buildings and sewers for sanitation.

The archaeologists who uncovered the Indus Valley ruins early in 1900s realized they had stumbled on an original culture, contemporary with ancient Sumer and Egypt (around 2400 BC). But in some ways (such as in its plumbing and town planning) it was more advanced than either. It had its own system of writing - so far undeciphered - and trade links with ancient Mesopotamia, as well as outposts near modern Bombay (now Mumbai), more than 1000 km (600 miles) distant.

Where did the creators of this civilization come from? What language did they speak? Did the same rulers govern all its remarkably similar cities - more than 100 built on the same pattern have been discovered, stretching over an area larger than Egypt or Sumer? And why did the civilization collapse around 1700 BC? These mysteries all remain unsolved.

Town planners

The major cities, which include Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, had citadels with huge walls, with towers at regular intervals, set on mounds about 12 m (40 ft) high. Archaeologists have also found remains of gigantic granaries and of huge public baths.

It had been suggested that the idea of building cities came from Mesopotamia, along the trade routes. Trade links with Sumer became so close that there were official Sumerian translators of the Indus language. But the few surviving examples of Indus writing are too fragmented to give us any real clues as to what that language was like.

Why did this culture collapse so completely? Possibly the River Indus altered its course, condemning the cities to either flodding or desert; possibly the desert was man-made, caused by excessive tree-felling to provide fuel for baking bricks; perhaps epidemics and famines played a part.

Grisly clue

The end, however, may have come more violently. At Mohenjo-Daro, archaeologists found 13 skeletons, some with axe or sword blows to the head. These may have been inflicted by the invading Aryans - ancestors of the modern Hindus - who dominated India after the Indus civilization.

Except in Hindu myths like the Rigveda, which speaks of a dark-skinned, wealthy people overcome by the Aryan invaders, and in the worship of Siva, a Hindu deity who in his aspect as Lord of the Beasts is strikingly like the god of the Indus religion, this short-lived, mysterious culture has vanished almost without trace.

Practical genius has often gone unrewarded

2009-06-20T07:21:00.007+05:30

There is a compelling fascination in the magic moment at which an original idea crystallizes in someone's head and a new invention is born. Sometimes the moment comes after months or years spent searching for a solution to a clearly-defined problem; in other cases a need is perceived and in answer provided for it almost simultaneously. But a flash of inspiration does not necessarily bring a happy or a prosperous future. For many gifted inventors, legal wrangles over patents have soured the original joy of their discoveries; others, as employees of large corporations, never saw any of the profits made from the commercial exploitation of their ideas. Still others made large fortunes from their inventions, yet have continued to live their lives much as before.

Wired up

The creator of the first wire coat-hanger received not a cent for his ingenious invention. In 1903, Albert J. Parkhouse (Left) was working for a company in Jackson, Michigan, manufacturing wire lampshade frames. The firm was too mean to provide enough hooks for its employees to hang up their coats, so one day, rather than throw his coat on the floor, Parkhouse twisted a piece of wire into the now familiar shape of a hanger. His employer noticed what he had done, immediately grasped its potential and patented the idea. Parkhouse just went on working on the shop floor of the factory.

Keeping time

In the early 19th century, many inventors were competing to produce a practical and reliable metronome - a device that helps musicians learn to play in a steady rhythm. Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (Left), a German organ-builder living in Amsterdam, finally solved the problem in 1814. He placed two weights on a clockwork-driven pendulum, one fixed and one sliding, on opposite sides of a pivot. Each time the pendulum swings, it produces a clicking noise. The position of the sliding weight affects the speed of the pendulum, so musicians can adjust the metronome to produce a series of clicks at the speed they wish to play. Unfortunately for Winkel, he demonstrated his invention to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German rival in the same field. Maelzel unscrupulously patented the metronome in his own name and began mass production. The gadget, which still uses the principle devised by Winkel, has been known as the Maelzel Metronome ever since.

Seeing in the dark

One dark and foggy night in 1933, Percy Shaw (Left), a road-repairer from Yorkshire, England, was struck by the sight of a cat's eyes gleaming brightly in the light of his headlamps. This everyday experience inspired him to develop a revolutionary form of road-marking for night driving - a convex lens backed by an aluminium mirror. These are embedded in a rubber pad, which is mounted in a cast-iron housing set into the road. The lens and mirror are positioned so as to direct reflected light from car headlamps back to the driver. A year after he first had the idea, Shaw was ready to patent his invention. He opened a factory to manufacture his 'catseyes' in 1935. Although the invention made him rich and famous, his style of life was completely unaltered. He continued to lead a simple existence in a small house in his native Halifax, and spent only a faction of his vast accumulated wealth.

Riding on air

The pneumatic rubber tyre was first invented by a London engineer, Robert W. Thomson (Left), in 1845, for use on the wheels of carriages. The invention failed to catch on at first - rubber was expensive at the time, so Thomson's idea was not marketable. In 1887, the pneumatic tyre was re-invented by John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish-born veterinarian, who had a flourishing practice in Ireland. Dunlop noticed how his son's tricycle jarred its rider as the solid rubber tyres bumped over the unevenly paved streets of Belfast. He substituted rubber tyres filled with air and patented his invention the following year. Dunlop's pneumatic tyres were an immediate success with bone-shaken cyclists and should have made him a millionaire. But he sold his interest in the business in 1896, and gained nothing from any of the subsequent developments of his invention, such as the automobile tyre - a multi-million-dollar business that made his name famous throughout the world.

The deadly traps laid by carnivorous plants

2009-06-17T12:08:00.007+05:30

The usual order of events in nature is that plants manufacture their own food through photosynthesis, while animals either eat plants or other animals. But more than 500 plant species are exceptions to this order: they eat animals. All grow in soil or water that contains little or no nitrogen, an element vital for plant growth, and animals provide that missing nourishment.

Pitcher plants, for example, a family of climbing vines found throughout the tropics of the Old World, grow pitcher- or urn-shaped traps, some large enough to capture a rat. Although they occasionally digest small mammals or reptiles, they are designed for eating insects, which enter the trap under the illusion that it is a flower, attracted by its scent or by a supply of false nectar. Once over the pitcher's rim, they slither helplessly down to the bottom, where downward-pointing spikes prevent escape. The plant then secretes an acid and digestive enzymes to break down the body of its victim. The pitcher plant's distinctive lid serves as a lure to flying insects and as an umbrella to prevent the pitcher from filling up with rainwater. Some species, however, do let rainwater enter their pitchers, thus drowning their prey, instead of killing it with acid.

Trigger hairs

In mechanical terms, the most sophisticated traps of all are those of the bladderworts, a successful and varied group established throughout the world. They are mainly water plants, which, depending on their size, feed on anything from single-celled protozoans to small fish. Among their branching underwater leaves grow tiny bladders, each fitted with an inward-opening trap door. Sticking out from the entrance are hairs, and any creature brushing against these make the trap fly open. As water rushes in to fill the bladder, it sucks the hapless animal in with it. The bladder then uses special glands to extrqact the water, allowing the door to close again, and leaving the animal trapped.

How Alcohol Changes the Brain ... Quickly

2009-06-16T09:26:00.000+05:30

In the name of science, eight men and seven women drank alcohol through a straw while lying in an MRI scanner, presumably not all together, to see what would happen.

It went to their heads. Quickly, the researchers say.

Only 6 minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three beers — leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, which impairs driving ability — changes had already taken place in the brain cells.

For one thing, the brain begins to run on the sugar in alcohol instead of using glucose, the normal brain food.

"Our study provides evidence for alternative energy utilization upon alcohol ingestion," said researcher Armin Biller at Heidelberg University Hospital "The brain uses an alcohol breakdown product instead of glucose for energy demands."

The concentration of substances such as creatine (energy metabolism), which protect brain cells, decreases as the concentration of alcohol increases. Choline, a component of cell membranes, was also reduced.

"That probably indicates that alcohol triggers changes in the composition of cell membranes," Biller said.

Whether there are long-term effects remains to be studied.

"Our follow-ups on the next day showed that the shifts in brain metabolites after moderate consumption of alcohol by healthy persons are completely reversible," Biller said. "However, we assume that the brain's ability to recover from the effect of alcohol decreases or is eliminated as the consumption of alcohol increases. The acute effects demonstrated in our study could possibly form the basis for the permanent brain damage that is known to occur in alcoholics. This should be clarified in future studies."

The fastest, the slowest, the highest birds

2009-06-14T08:36:00.003+05:30

In the same way that human speed and endurance records are constantly being broken, so too the animal world's fastest, slowest and highest continues to change as naturalists discover previously unknown facts. For instance, it was widely accepted among naturalists that the white-throated spinetail swift of northeast Asia and Japan was the world's fastest bird, reaching speeds of up to 150 km/h (95 mph). But researchers have fitted speedometers to the legs of the peregrine falcon and discovered that when hunting its main prey of ducks, pigeons and other birds, it makes a 'stoop' or power dive at 160 km/h (100 mph). Sometimes this falcon knocks the head clean off its victim as it strikes it in midair with its strong talons.

Peregrine Falcon (Falco Peregrinus)

By contrast, the slowest flying (rather than hovering) bird is the American woodcock. The male's display fight has been measured at only 8 km/h (5 mph). It circles high above its woodland territory at dusk, giving twittering calls before zigzagging down to Earth on whistling wings. The combination of the slow, circling flight and the sudden descent seem to impress the females waiting on the ground.

Although birds such as kestrels and buzzards can remain stationary in midair by flying into the wind, very few birds can truly hover. Only the hummingbirds have mastered the art. They have the fastest wing beats of any bird - up to 78 beats per second - and can fly backwards as well as hover. Their short 'arm' bones, stiff wing joints and flexible shoulder joints allow them to rotate their wings in a figure of eight, and thus achieve their feats.

Other birds flap their wings very slowly - some large vultures do so only once per second. Albatrosses, using wind current to their best advantage, are able to soar over the waves for days on end with scarcely a flap of their great wings, which, with a span of up to almost 4 m (12 ft), are the longest of any living bird.

Soaring to new heights

Some animals fly fast, others fly high. The great majority of birds remain below 150 m (500 ft) for much of their lives, perhaps reaching 1500 m (5000 ft) when migrating. But bar-headed geese have been seen by mountaineers flying over the Himalayas at a height of almost 9000 m (30 000 ft). The undisputed holder of the bird altitude record is the Ruppell's griffon vulture that collided with an aircraft at 11 250 m (36 900 ft) over western Africa in 1973.

Ruppell's Griffon Vulture (Gyps rueppellii)

Birds can survive in the thin atmosphere of such heights, where humans would need oxygen masks, because their circulatory system is far more efficient at extracting oxygen than our own. The high-fliers can also cope with very low temperatures: whooper swans, for instance, have been recorded at heights where the temperature was as low as -48 degree C (-54 degree F).

The human iPod: Derek Paravicini

2009-06-13T09:56:00.001+05:30

Derek Paravicini is blind and severely disabled yet can master any song after hearing it once... What is his secret?

Thirty years ago, Derek Paravicini was within a heartbeat of death. No other baby born in the Royal Berkshire Hospital 14 weeks prematurely had ever survived. His twin sister was dead at birth.

When Derek came along a few minutes later, the doctor presumed that he, too, could not possibly live. And yet, and yet... just when his mother Mary Ann had given up hope, she heard the faintest of whimpers, the tiniest of muffled squeaks. He had made it.

Three decades on, Derek no longer makes muffled squeaks. Instead, he brings a rapt audience in St George’s concert theatre, Bristol, to their feet again and again, with a dazzling range of music — an Oscar Peterson arrangement of Greensleeves, his own version of Bach’s Air in the key of G, a jaunty ragtime taste of Debussy.

You’ll have heard of perfect pitch. Well, Derek has absolute pitch — a rare gift, meaning that, when he hears a chord with ten notes in it, he can identify every one. Most professional musicians can get about five.

He can master any melody on earth, has a databank of thousands of songs in his head and can play any one of them at will, improvising as he goes.

One member of the audience asks him to play Ain’t No Sunshine. Another suggests that he play it in B major. And another, that it’s done in ragtime. No problem — without a pause, his fingers flutter across the keyboard in a hummingbird blur of staggering virtuosity.

‘Goodnight Sweetheart,’ shouts out someone from the back row. In C sharp, in the style of theatre composer Jerome Kern. And so it goes on, for two hours of riotous shared joy, the latest chapter in an uplifting tale of rare talent locked in a damaged brain.

Because he was born so early, Derek is blind. The oxygen used to revive him at birth caused certain vessels in his eyes to grow abnormally, damaging his retinas, in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity.

As he is blind, he cannot read music — he can’t even read Braille. The whole of tonight’s performance — his and the orchestra’s — is encapsulated entirely within his head.

Despite his music gift, Derek’s verbal skills are limited. His English is well-spoken, clear and loud, but his capacity for thought does not stretch far.

He is an echolaliac, meaning that he echoes what you say to him, turning your question into a statement.

‘Do you know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Derek?’ I ask.

‘Yes, I know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Harry.’

‘Are you looking forward to playing in London?’

‘Yes, I am looking forward to playing in London, Harry.’

There are flashes of humour. At a recent recital in 11 Downing Street, hosted by Alistair Darling, Derek launched, unbidden, into a version of Big Spender. At an earlier concert at No10, he coaxed Cherie Blair into singing along to The Beatles’ When I’m 64.

Usually, though, Derek’s thoughts dwell on the immediate future and no further. ‘Where will we go after the concert, Adam?’ he asks Adam Ockelford, the Professor of Music at Roehampton University, who has taught Derek for 26 years. ‘Can we have fish and chips?’

This short-term view of life means he barely suffers from nerves. Half an hour before tonight’s concert started, he asked Roger Huckle, the artistic director of the Emerald Ensemble, what they were going to do that evening. On being told that he was going to play a concert, he said calmly: ‘Yes, let’s do a concert.’

For someone so handicapped, it is a godsend that his hidden talent was unleashed at all. Much of the credit goes to his nanny, Winifred Daly, who died 12 years ago.

She had looked after several generations of Derek’s mother’s side of the family — the Parker Bowleses, as in Camilla. Derek’s mother, born Mary Ann Parker Bowles, is sister to Andrew Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall’s ex-husband. It was Winifred Daly who first spotted something unusual in Derek.

Looking for a diversion to occupy the blind 20-month-old, she dragged down a small electric organ from the attic of the Paravicini home in Berkshire; the organ had belonged to Derek’s grandfather, Derek Parker Bowles, after whom he was named.

To begin with, Derek used a jumble of fists, palms and knuckles to knock the living daylights out of the keyboard. Gradually, though, with no tuition, he started moving his hands in synch, up and down the keys. Soon he was forming chords, until one day, his older sister, Libbet, came rushing into her parents’ sitting room and announced: ‘Quick, quick, come and see, Derek’s playing that hymn we sang in church.’

What had happened? How had he magically summoned up the capacity to produce music from within his damaged brain? ‘His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first 20 months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form,’ says Professor Ockelford. ‘And it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.’

If it was Winifred Daly whose love — and repeated singing and talking in the nursery — sparked off Derek’s talents, it was Professor Ockelford who harnessed them and moulded them into concert-worthy form.

‘The man is a saint,’ says Derek’s father, Nic Paravicini, a banker who now lives in Wales. ‘I tried to pay him and he refused. I had to force petrol money on him.’

They first met at Linden Lodge — the school for the blind attended by the celebrated jazz pianist George Shearing in the 1920s. Professor Ockelford taught Derek conventional musical techniques and untaught his unconventional ones — in particular his desire to play music as loudly as possible.

Still today, in Bristol, the professor is at Derek’s side, gently cueing his intros and tapping him on the back, encouraging him to take a bow when the audience erupts once more.

In time, news of Derek’s exceptional talent spread. At seven, he gave his first concert in Tooting Leisure Centre in South London. At nine, he was on the Wogan show.

At ten, he was presented with a Barnardo’s Children’s Champion Award by Diana, Princess of Wales. She was unruffled by the fact that he was Camilla Parker Bowles’s nephew, even though her marriage was on the rocks at the time. When Derek suggested playing Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, she laughed uproariously.

In recent years, he has played at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Las Vegas and has accompanied Jools Holland. He has appeared in two documentaries about genius savants, and the show I attended was being filmed by the popular American show 60 Minutes, on CBS. Now he is embarking on his first tour with a 20-piece orchestra.

After 26 years of tuition, Derek’s playing style is much more traditional. But still Professor Ockelford is trying to work out exactly how his genius works. ‘Recent research has revealed that only one in 10,000 babies who are born at term have absolute pitch, but 40 per cent born prematurely have it,’ says the professor. ‘So there is a link. And it seems that all the brain capacity that would have gone elsewhere, into verbal reasoning or social skills, is transferred to music.’

Certainly, Derek’s emotional capacity is limited. When his beloved nanny Winifred Daly was on her death bed, she said to Professor Ockelford: ‘He won’t miss me, you know.’

She appears to have been largely right. He remembers Winifred, but has not cried over her. He very rarely cries — and then it will be over physical pain — and he has no self-indulgence. ‘He never says he’s ill,’ says his stepmother, Suki Paravicini (Derek’s parents divorced when he was five, and have each since remarried.) ‘All he’ll say, very politely, is: “Can I have a Lemsip?”’

His playing, though, has grown more emotional. Professor Ockelford has determined that Derek is not just a human iPod who can replay exactly what he has heard after listening to it once. Instead, he initially recreates pieces by recalling crucial fragments and reassembling them as he plays.

If a piece is too long or complicated for him to absorb at one sitting, he is inventive when he plays it back, reordering the snatches that he can remember, borrowing snippets from pieces with a similar stylistic pedigree or making up new material.

Whatever magic is going on in his head, certainly it is when he is at the piano that he is most at ease. As he comes on stage, led by Professor Ockelford, his steps are hesitant. His hands clutch at his trousers, fingers twisting the cloth.

And then, as he sits down, his hands reach out for the keys. As soon as his fingers hit the ivories, the hands relax. His head sometimes sways with the music, much like those other blind pianists Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.

At other times, his head is still, his sightless gaze fixed in the direction of the hammers of the Steinway, furiously striking away to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. He is doing what he was born to do.

The vanished race

2009-06-12T08:54:00.003+05:30

About 15000 Indians from all over the USA live in New York City. But where now are the people whose ancestors were the city's first inhabitants?

Two surviving groups of Indians do have a connection with Manhattan. They are the Delaware, who now live, after enforced migration, over 2000 km (1250 miles) away in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario; and the Ramapough, a community living on the order of New York and New Jersey, direct descendants of Manhattan's original inhabitants. When the Dutch first settled the island, two groups of Indians, the Canarsee and Wickquaasgeek, came seasonally to settlements in the south and north respectively, to hunt, fish and grow crops.

By the 1740s, disease, the spread of European settlers and warfare had emptied the island of its first Indians. Yet Indians and New York's most famous modern feature are indelibly associated. As the skycrapers began to rise over Manhattan, descendants of New York State's Iroquois Indians became renowned as supremely skilled steel-workers in the construction industry.

Lifeguards of the deep

2009-06-11T09:11:00.002+05:30

When Adam Maguire and his two friends Jason Maloney and Bradley Thompson went surfing at Halftide Beach, in New South Wales, early in January 1989, they found themselves in exhilarating company. For an hour or more, a school of dolphins played with them in the surf, riding in on the waves towards the beach.

But then the dolphins became agitated, splashing and turning in the water, and making loud clicking and whistling noises. It was then that Adam saw the fin of a shark speeding towards him through the waves.

Before he knew it , the shark had attacked, biting a large chunk out of his surfboard and knocking him into the water. He hit out at the shark with his fists, but it bit him in the stomach and side. Adam thought the end had come. Then the dolphins came to his rescue. They surrounded the shark and drove it out sea by ramming it with their beaks.

A friendly push

The dolphin has a reputation for being friendly to humans, and there have been many other reports of dolphins rescuing people in distress - chasing off attacking sharks, pulling drowning sailors to the surface, even guiding them to dry land. In 1945, a woman swimming off a beach in Florida was pulled under by a strong current. As she struggled to get her head above water, something pushed her violently from behind and she landed on the beach, face down. When she looked around, no one was near - but a dolphin was leaping through the waves, 6 m (20 ft) from the shore. In 1983, a Dutch helicopter pilot was helped by a dolphin after he had crashed into the Java Sea; for nine days the dolphin swam beside his rubber life raft, nudging it along until it at last reached the coast.

It is tempting to believe that we do have a special affinity with these gentle, intelligent creatures. But would an animal really take the trouble to save a human being, in some cases risking its own life in the process?

Blind instinct

Dolphin expert Dr Margaret Klinowska, of Cambridge University, believes not. She says that when attacking sharks, dolphins are only following a natural instinct to defend themselves; indeed, the presence of humans is probably coincidental. As for pulling people to the surface or pushing stranded boats along in the water, these too are probably instinctive reactions useful for the survival of the species: a dolphin is born underwater, but its mother immediately nudges it to the surface so that it can start to breathe. Perhaps the Dutch helicopter pilot's dinghy seemed to be no more than a struggling baby to the dolphin that guided it to safety.

The serious side of speaking backwards

2009-06-10T20:33:00.000+05:30

Anybody can painstakingly read words backwards, but how many can do it by ear? Professor Andrew Levine discovered his talent for speaking backwards in 1959 when, as a teenager watching the news on television, he admired the skill of the interpreters accompanying Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on his visit to the United States. Levine was keen to try his own hand at interpreting, so, as he turned every English word he heard back to front.

Word game

Amusements of this kind are not uncommon in children, especially between the ages of eight and ten, when they like to construct secret play languages. To do this, they do not have to be literate: in Panama, young Cuna Indians have a traditional game called sorik sunmakke, in which they reverse the order of the syllables in each word.

In Levine's case, the speed at which he spoke backwards was quite exceptional. He thought of his talent as nothing more than a party trick, until colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught political philosophy, decided to subject him to rigorous tests.

When asked to provide a simultaneous 'translation' of simple sentences, Levine started and finished less than two seconds behind the spoken model he was translating. Individual words he could reverse almost instantaneously, as if speaking normally. Turning words backwards often produces combination of sounds that do not occur in English, yet his failure rate over long passages was only 7 per cent.

The reason for Levine's proficiency is that he does not allow the spelling to interfere with his backwards versions of words. Like many children who take up talking backwards, he reverse the phonemes, the units of sound considered to be the building blocks of speech: 'dollars' becomes 'srallod', and 'peace' becomes 'seep'. As Levine reverses only the sounds he hears, silent letters are ignored. This means he is almost as fluent in repeating foreign languages backwards, even ones he does not understand.

Subconscious ability

Linguists were particularly interested in the fact that Levine, albeit subconsciously, was aware of the existence of phonemes. If the brain does cut spoken language up into segments of sound, further research may have practical applications in helping both the deaf and children who, through some mental disorder, have difficulty in acquiring normal forwards speech.

How did 100,000,000 women disappear?

2009-06-08T09:41:00.000+05:30

Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm

In India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, millions upon millions of women are missing. They are not lost, but dead: victims of violence, discrimination and neglect.

A University of British Columbia economist is amongst those trying to find them – not the women themselves, who are long gone, but their numbers and ages, which paint a sad and startling picture of gender discrimination in the developing world.

The term "missing women" was coined in 1990, when Indian economist Amartya Sen calculated a shocking figure. In parts of Asia and Africa, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, 100 million women who should be alive are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services. These are excess deaths: women "missing" above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.

Women who are dead because their lives were undervalued.

Around the world boys outnumber girls at birth, but in countries where women and men receive equal care, women have proved hardier and more resistant to disease, and thus live longer. In most of Asia and North Africa, however, Sen found that women die with startlingly higher frequency.

His research began a flutter of activity in academic circles and by 2005, the United Nations produced a much higher estimate for how many women could be "missing": 200 million.

From her office at the University of British Columbia, economics professor Siwan Anderson has been crunching numbers to try and understand why so many women are dying. "If you're interested in gender discrimination, it's really one of the starkest measures of discrimination, because it's women who should be alive, but aren't," she says.

The 40-year-old researcher recently co-authored a paper with New York University's Debraj Ray, focusing on figures from China, India and sub-Saharan Africa for the year 2000. What they discovered flew in the face of existing literature and commonly held beliefs about the missing women phenomenon.

"Previously, people had thought that they (the missing women) were all at the very early stages of life, prenatal or just after, so before four years old," Anderson says. "But what we found is that the majority are actually later." Female infanticide has been endemic in India and China for some time, which she says led researchers to assume that it was the source of all the missing women. But the truth is much more complicated.

Once she and Ray broke down the numbers by age group, they found that the majority of excess female deaths came later in life: 66 per cent in India, 55 per cent in China and 83 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

One of their colleagues in the economics department at the University of British Columbia says this finding is striking, and points the way for future research and advocacy.

"Why would there be excess mortality of, let's say, 45-year-old women versus 45-year-old men?" asks economics professor Kevin Milligan. "And what they find is ... they have the same set of diseases, they just seem to die more frequently. The explanation that seems most consistent with that is differential access to health care. And so that's a really striking finding."

Anderson says that lack of health care is likely a big part of the problem, but that there are numerous cultural and social factors at play that can be difficult to pinpoint.

In their "elementary accounting exercise" published this February, Anderson and Ray began to plot the causes of excess death in 2000 by age group, and produced some interesting figures.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the dominant source of missing women was HIV and AIDS, the cause of more than 600,000 excess female deaths each year.

In China, Anderson says, most of the 141,000 excess female deaths by injury were suicides, making China the only place in the world where women are more likely than men to kill themselves, often by eating pesticides used for crops.

And in India, a category called "injuries" yielded ominously high figures: 86,000 excess deaths in the age group 15-29 in 2000 alone. Anderson has done extensive research in India, and says the numbers beg the question of exactly how many deaths were so-called "kitchen fires" – often used to mask dowry-related killings, the result of a new bride being tortured by her new family until her parents pay their debts.

Contrary to what you might expect, Anderson says, dowry prices have not dropped off with improvements in education in India. Instead, they have gotten worse, with educated brides and their families willing to pay even more for high-quality grooms.

Anderson says dowry payments can be six times a family's annual wealth – an excruciating price, especially for poor villagers. The implications of this hefty sum trickle down to the first moments of a child's life. While conducting recent field work in India, Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.

"They see no other options," she says. "They really cannot afford to have a daughter."

Future research will delve deeper, seeking answers to questions such as: How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?

Anderson is using data gathered primarily from the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, but admits that getting the figures can be a huge challenge. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, many deaths go undocumented, and in India, it is virtually impossible to know how many "unintentional" deaths are actually dowry killings, because they are not accurately reported to the authorities.

It is also difficult to separate direct gender discrimination from biological, social, environmental, behavioural and economic factors. That will be part of the task as Anderson works on calculating missing women by region in India, and isolating gender discrimination from other factors that might contribute to uneven male-to-female ratios.

When asked what can be done to combat such deep-seated inequality, Anderson pauses. Even when governments outlaw root causes, such as the Indian dowry system, violence persists, she says. "It's too embedded in the system in their world."

The duck that astounded Paris

2009-06-06T16:07:00.004+05:30

In 1738, Jacques de Vaucanson presented duck to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Like any duck, this one rose upon its legs, threw its neck to the right and left, plumed its wings, made gurgling noises, played in the water with its bill, took food from people's hands and occasionally excreted. But this duck was completely mechanical.

Unfortunately, Vaucanson's duck no longer exists, only the description and drawings of it he published. The gilded-copper duck 'digested' food, but only after a fashion - it dissolved food in its stomach, but absorbed no energy in the process, and needed to be wound up.

Vaucanson must have been an inventor of considerable genius; the same year, at the age of 29, he demonstrated an automation that could faultlessly play 12 'airs' on the flute. He also built a shepherd that could play 20 tunes on his pipe with one hand and beat a drum with the other.

However, he did not restrict his talent to such whimsical projects. Applying himself to the challenge of building a machine to weave silk, he eventually designed an important forerunner of the modern automated loom. It was guided by perforated cards and powered by animals or falling water.

Can a Nuclear Blast Alter Earth's Rotation?

2009-06-05T16:29:00.002+05:30

Nuclear bombs are humankind's most powerful weapon, but their destructive impact would unlikely alter the spinning of the Earth on its axis.

One way to see this is to compare the energy of a nuclear blast to that of the rotational motion of the Earth. The largest nuclear bombs have an explosive energy of several tens of megatons, or about 10^17 Joules, whereas the Earth's rotational energy is around 10^29 Joules.

So even if all the force of a nuclear explosion was used to push the Earth in a particular direction, the energy in this push would be less than a trillionth that of the rotational energy.

It would be like trying to divert a speeding car with the energy of a flying mosquito.

Even the largest earthquakes have only a miniscule effect on our planet's spinning. Scientists calculated that the colossal tsunami-causing 2004 Sumatra earthquake caused a slimming of the Earth that shortened the day by a few millionths of a second and shifted the North Pole by an inch.

The amount of fault-moving ("Earth-slimming") energy in this magnitude 9.3 earthquake was estimated at more than 10&^22 Joules, or roughly 100,000 times that of the biggest nuclear bombs. So any effect of a nuclear blast on Earth's rotation would be far below what is measureable.

One final note: Nuclear explosions would have even less influence on the Earth's orbit around the sun, as the planet's orbital energy is 10,000 times greater than its rotational energy. This fact did not prevent the making of the 1961 film "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," in which nuclear testing knocks the Earth out of its orbit and towards the sun.

Get out of town!

2009-06-05T15:33:00.003+05:30

The citizens - that is the free men of ancient Athens - were proud of their equality, so what happened when some citizens threatened to become more equal than others?

Democracy was frequently jeopardized by the development of factions and vendettas in the Assembly. Professional politicians (called 'orators' or 'demagogues') were charismatic men who often inspired great personal loyalty. It followed that there were sometimes bitter arguments between rival supporters. If feuds were allowed to become too bitter or an unpopular politician became too strong, the business of government would be disrupted - and that would endanger Athenian democracy. So a system called 'ostracism' was invented.

Banishing acts

Any prominent citizen who had become unpopular could be 'ostracized' by his fellow citizens - banished from the city for a period of ten years. The system worked like this: without specifying anyone's name, any citizen could propose that an ostracism be held. If the Assembly agreed to the proposal, the Agora - the market place that also acted as a civic center - was fenced off. Each of the ten tribes of Athens had its own gate through which the members would pass to vote. Each citizen voted by writing the name of the person he wished to see exiled on a fragment of pottery called an ostracon.

At least 6000 'votes' had to be cast before a citizen - the one with the highest score - could be banished. But when his ten-year exile was over, he could return and resume his life as if nothing had happened - without any dishonour or loss of rights or property.

How a mummy was prepared

2009-02-13T17:11:00.001+05:30

Investigation of mummies over the years has shown that techniques and the level of skill changed during the period mummification was practiced - from about 2800 BC until the Arab invasion of about AD 640. The technique was at its most successful around 1000 BC, when the High Priests of Amon (king of the gods) were all-powerful - at the time Solomon and David were on the throne of Israel.

The process took 70 days, as described by Herodotus, the Greek historian, writing about 450 BC. There were, he says, three qualities and three prices. In the most expensive, the brain was extracted through the nostrils, and the contents of the trunk, usually with the exception of the heart, were removed through an incision made in the side with a flint knife. Then the body was dried out. In the less expensive method, the internal organs were not removed, instead cedar oil was injected into the body before drying. In the cheapest method the body was just dried.

Herodotus was writing at a time when the skill was on the decline. In earlier periods, in general, the internal organs and brain were removed and the body was packed with material that included sawdust, linen and mud. At the peak of the technique, packing was also inserted under the skin through small incisions.

Drying out took about 40 days, the body being covered with dry natron - a naturally occurring salt compound similar to washing soda. The remaining time was used for anointing with oil, adornment, bandaging and religious rites. The outer bandages were impregnated with beeswax and glued with gelatin.

The internal organs were also dried out in natron before being stored in four sealed vases, the canopic jars, near the body. But at one period, the organs were parceled up and used as part of the body packing.

The wrapped mummy was given a face and chest mask made of cartonage which consisted of linen and plaster. This might be gilded and have inlaid eyes and eyebrows. It was sometimes placed in a wooden case shaped to the body, then in a rectangular wooden coffin, and finally in an outer coffin, or sarcophagus, frequently made of stone. Decoration on the coffins included ritual verses to guard the spirit on its journey.

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Bugs Find Meals With Heat Sensors

2009-02-12T19:39:00.001+05:30

The western conifer-seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, has a peculiar world view. Objects stand out against the background as a result not of their color, but of their temperature — and the infrared radiation that comes with it.

Trees, warmed by their active metabolism, appear as if on fire, and their even warmer reproductive organs — in conifers, the cones — seem to glow like embers. The bugs navigate this thermoscape using infrared receptors to locate the precious seed-bearing cones they feed on.

Stephen Takács of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and several colleagues discovered the novel system after noticing that conifer-seed bugs are often attracted to warm objects in people’s homes.

To find out more, the team first measured the temperature and radiation of different pine-tree parts. Cones were as many as 27 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than needles and emitted proportionally stronger infrared radiation. Then, they tested the ability of conifer-seed bugs to perceive the radiation. Placed in cooled experimental boxes, the insects were offered the choice of a strong or weak infrared source. Insects overwhelmingly chose the strong radiation. Electron micrographs of the insects’ abdomens revealed eight bristly organs that, when irradiated, responded with frantic electrical activity. Moreover, when the presumed receptors were covered, the bugs lost their infrared “vision.”

Takács and his team suspect that many other insect species can sense infrared, and that some plants use the radiation to advertise to pollinators.
The findings were detailed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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