Category Science & Technology

A little asteroid has been tagging along in Earth’s orbit for at least a century – and it’ll probably follow along for at least a few hundred years more.

Scientists at the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii spotted the little asteroid known as 2016 HO3, in April. They estimate that the asteroid is only about 130-330 feet wide, making it a tiny speck in the vastness of space. Even at its closet point, 2016 HO3 is at least about 9 million miles away.

“The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift and hold onto the asteroid so that it never wanders farther away than about 100 times the distance of the moon,” says NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies. “The same effect also prevents the asteroid from approaching much closer than about 38 times the distance of the moon. In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth.

Picture Credit : Google

Researchers from Carnegie of Science have been monitoring the seismic activity of more than 50 volcanic explosions in active volcanoes since 2009. Leading up to an eruption, volcanoes threw out plenty of smoke, fire, and sputtering ground movement, as expected. But, in the moments right before an eruption, the volcanoes went suddenly and completely quiet and still.

Most eruptions had quiet periods of less than 30 minutes, and some had lulls lasting only a few minutes. The longest one measured 10 hours, but then it was also followed by the largest eruption that researchers noticed that the longest lull was also linked to the biggest explosion, they compared all explosion sizes to the length of the quiet periods and found a clear correlation – the shorter the lull, the smaller the explosion; the longer the lull, the bigger the explosion.

Researchers can use these long, ominous silences to predict how big of an explosion will occur, right before it happens.

Picture Credit : Google

The giant fluorescent pink slug (Triboniophorus aff. graeffei) that only lives on an extinct volcano in Australia is under severe threat of global warming. The slug grows up to 8 inches long and lives in a small forest at Mount Kaputar’s peak where it has no predators. Millions of years ago, when Australia was part of a larger landmass known as Gondwana, the terrain was characterized by lush rainforests. A volcanic eruption 17 million years ago on Mount Kaputar kept a small, 10 sq.km. area lush and wet even as much of Australia turned to desert. The slugs spend most of their time buried beneath the leaf mould on which they feed, but come out in the hundreds by night or after a rain shower to snack on tree moss.

Picture Credit : Google

Whether you prefer drinking tea or coffee may come down to your genes.

University of Queensland researchers studied the relationship between taste receptor genes and tea and coffee consumption in over 430,000 men and women. People taste bitter flavours like caffeine, quinine and an artificial substance called propylthiouracil differently according to the types of taste receptor genes they have.

Participants with gene variants that made them taste caffeine more strongly were 20 percent more likely than the average person to be heavy coffee drinkers. These caffeine super-tasters were less likely to drink tea as people who are better at detecting caffeine are more prone to becoming addicted to its stimulant effects, and coffee contains more caffeine than tea.

Participants with gene variants that made them more sensitive to the tastes of quinine and propylthiouracil were 4 and 9 per cent more likely than the average person to be heavy tea drinkers respectively. They were also less likely to drink coffee. This may be because super-tasters of quinine and propylthiouracil – both more bitter than caffeine – are more sensitive to bitter tastes overall. They may find the intense bitterness of coffee overwhelming and prefer the gentler bitterness of tea.

Picture Credit : Google

Arunachal Pradesh has gifted India with a fifth brown pit viper with a reddish tinge. Herpetologists discovered the new species of pit viper – a venomous snake with a unique heat-sensing system – from a forest in West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. India has four other brown pit vipers – Malabar, Horseshoe, Hump-nosed and Himalayan – discovered 70 years ago. The new species, Trimeresurus arunachalensis, makes Arunachal Pradesh the only Indian state to have a pit viper named after it. As only one male has been found so far, this single known specimen of the species currently makes it the rarest pit viper in the world.

Comparative analyses of DNA sequences by Mr. Deepak and examination of morphological features by Mr. Captain suggested that the snake belonged to a species not described before.

Mr. Bhatt, a scientist of the Arunachal Pradesh forest department, said that the single known specimen of this species makes it currently the rarest pit viper in the world. The specimen was donated to the museum of the State Forest Research Institute in Itanagar.

Picture Credit : Google

Scientists have for the first time successfully raised laboratory-bred colonies of a critically endangered Caribbean coral species to their reproductive age, a step towards sustainable restoration of degraded reefs.

An estimated 80 per cent of all Caribbean corals have disappeared over the last four decades. The elkhorn coral (Acropora palmate) was one species whose decline was so severe that it was one of the first coral species to be listed as critically endangered under The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened species.

Due to its large size and branching shape, elkhorn corals created vast forests in shallow reef waters that protect shores from incoming storms and provide a critical habitat for a myriad of reef organisms, including ecologically and economically important fish species.

Elkhorn corals reproduce only once or twice a year, synchronously releasing their gametes (reproductive cells) into the water column. SECORE International researchers collected a small proportion of these gametes and produced coral embryos by in-vitro fertilization. Coral embryos develop into swimming larvae within days and eventually settle onto specifically designed substrates. After a short nursery period, researches outplanted the substrates with the newly-settles corals onto the reef.

Picture Credit : Google