Saturday 27 September 2014

Water is The Vital Source to Increase the Life on Earth & Other Planets



Everyone knows the importance of water on planet earth; no one can survive without water. So water was a vital source to increase the life on Earth and also imperative to evaluating the possibility of life on other planets. However to identifying the original source of Earth’s water is important to understanding how life-fostering environments come into being and how unlikely they’re to be found elsewhere. New work from a team, including Carnegie’s Conel Alexander, observed that plenty of our solar system’s water perhaps originated as ices that formed in interstellar space. However; water is found throughout our solar system, not just on Earth, but on icy comets and moons and in the shadowed basins of Mercury. Thus water has been found included in mineral samples from meteorites, the Moon, and Mars.

Comets and asteroids in specific, being basic objects, deliver a natural “time capsule” of the conditions during the early days of our solar system. Their ices can tell experts regarding the ice that encircled the Sun after its birth, the origin of which was an unanswered question until now. In its youth, the Sun was surrounded by a proto-planetary disk, the so-called solar nebula, from which the planets were born. But it was unclear to scientists whether the ice in this disk created from the Sun’s own parental interstellar molecular cloud, from which it was created, or whether this interstellar water had been damaged and was recreated by the chemical reactions taking place in the solar nebula.

A Graduate Student Created First Man Made Bilological Leaf Which Can Produce Oxygen Just Like a Plant

A graduate student Julian Melchiorri has created a biological leaf. That has the ability to absorb water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen just like a plant. Julian did this by suspending chloroplasts in a mixture made out of silk protein. He believed it can be used for several things but the most incredible one is the thought that it could be used for long distance space travel. Plants do not grow in space, but this synthetic material can be used to produce oxygen in a hostile environment. The silk Leaf is composed of chloroplasts suspended in silk proteins, for the express purpose of long-distance space travel.  

 He says; plants don't grow in zero gravity. Therefore; "NASA is researching diverse ways to create oxygen for long-distance space journeys to let us live in space. This material could allow us to explore space much further than we can now. This incredible finished product functions like a plant in the sense that it is biological and produces oxygen, but its synthetic packaging makes it more likely to be able to survive in extraterrestrial environments.

Interestingly just like a real plant, it only requires light and water to survive and photosynthesize:  Because Silk Leaf is the first man-made biological leaf and it is very light, low energy-consuming, entirely biological. Therefore; it is really very convenient and can extend even further, as making lamps out of Silk Leaf kills two birds with one stone. My idea was to increase the efficiency of nature in a man-made environment. I created some lighting out of this material, using the light to illuminate the house but at the same time to create oxygen for us.


Red-and-Yellow Barbet

The red-and-yellow barbet is also named “Trachyphonus erythrocephalus” belongs to the African barbet family. This bird can be found in eastern Africa, in woodlands, scrubland and savannah, where it regularly forages on the ground near trees or bushes. The Red-and-Yellow barbet is approximately eight or nine inches long. Red and Yellow barbet has a long, strong, pointed red bill, and has red, yellow black and white upper parts and yellow under parts. The male bird has a black crown and a black chin stripe. The female bird has a red crown with black spots.

Moreover; the bird habitually build nests inside termite mounds (termite nests), using their strong, heavy beaks to break into the mounds. They like to eat fruits, and are mostly fond of figs. They also eat seeds, insects, lizards, small birds and eggs. These birds are generally comfortable around humans, but they eat food, such as bread, that people waste. Some people keep red-and-yellow barbets as pets. The Masai use the feathers of red-and-yellow barbets as clothing decorations.

Therefore; the breeding pair will often belong to a group that comprises of the pair and from 1 to 5 "helpers" who support the breeding pair to raise their young. These helpers are habitually younger birds, but there may be 1 or 2 additional adults in the group. The breeding pair in a group will often sing a long & loud duet, which sounds like the words "red and yellow" being repeated over and over. The helpers sometimes join with them in singing with breeding pair for a short while. Moreover; termite mounds are often used as nesting sites. 

However; the barbets dig a tunnel, which is about 16 inches long, inside a termite mound. They build a nesting chamber, lined with grass and feathers, at the end of this tunnel. The female lays between two to six eggs. Both the parents help chicks feed as a diet of mostly insects, which are responsible for the newly hatched birds with the big amounts of protein that they need. When the chicks grown up, and able to leave the nest, they’ll normally stay close to their parents and become helpers themselves, assisting their parents in raising the next brood.























Friday 26 September 2014

Grass Green Tanager: A Distinctive Small Passerine Bird



The striking Grass Green Tanager is a small passerine bird, belongs to tanager family. This is beautifully distinctive and well-named bird and the only member of the genus Chloronis. The bird is 20 cm in length and weighs 53g and it lives in and around subtropical and found temperate forests in the Andes of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru at elevations of 1500–3350 m.  This bird is often seen in mixed species flocks, and usually travels in pairs or in groups of 3-6 individuals. It forages mostly on upper half of short trees and eats fruits and insects. It is recognized as perch almost horizontally, and its nest is made of mosses and ferns, and its eggs are gray with light purple-grey dots. Almost the full bird is clad in bright green, relieved only by the chestnut face mask and ventral region, while both the chunky bill, and the legs and feet are deep red. It is one of the most impressive tanagers in the cloud forest.          Source: Charismatic Planet