The life lost (A frictional fantasy on Avni saga)

Date :- 18.03.2022

The blowing sound of chill wind... The moon looks unnaturally crescent looks like a pale bashful widow...the love lost..hapless . Shameless shadows are passing by... Scarlett,the renowned hunter distressed by his fellas on a dark Night...  The dense disdained jungle,deeper ever than before,denser perhaps the wild attire of nature mourning down here   He feels lonely..lonelier than before... Oh! My beloved one...for the last laugh I want ur warmth    The shadowy faces of dangers are passing by..   Here raises the sound..the roar..larger louder than before  Like a voice of lost emptiness  ...here scarlett once an ominous hunter now he is quite senile..  Faces a Tiger..    Flabbergasted...dumbfounded for a while.. No the tiger is not attacking him neither showing aggression.   Suddenly it came near Scarlett...whispers on ear  ' let's see'..we have no family.. Then we were there..and then... ' The tiger was stopped stumbled Little. 

            Mr. Arthobalanus - Darwin's favourite animal;  At a glance 

                                     Koustav Bhattacharjee

                                        DATE:- 11.03.22

In January 1835, three years into the voyage, the Beagle anchored off the coast of Chile, and Darwin—who’d been seasick much of the trip—scrambled ashore to walk the beach. He found a lush green canopy covering silky sand, with snow-peaked mountains visible in the distance. Wild potatoes grew near the shore, and otters splashed in the water, hunting crabs.

On the beach Darwin found a strange shell. It was coconut-sized and had a baffling feature: hundreds of millimetre-sized holes, as if somebody had blasted it with tiny buckshot. He’d never seen anything like it.

That night, back on the Beagle, Darwin studied the holes under his microscope. Using a needle, he pried something unexpected from inside them—minute barnacles, roughly a tenth of an inch long. They were cream-coloured and doubled over on themselves like hairpins.

Unlike other barnacles, these lacked shells. And while most barnacles secrete a cement like glue and lock themselves on to anything convenient—ships, docks, the bellies of whales—these barnacles were living as parasites inside another creature’s shell. No scientist had ever recorded anything like it, and despite all the other wonders Darwin saw on the rest of the voyage, his mind kept circling back to that odd species of barnacle. He nicknamed it Mr. Arthrobalanus, which means “jointed barnacle.” On his return to England in 1836, he was eager to study Mr. Arthrobalanus more thoroughly.

To describe Mr. Arthrobalanus, Darwin needed to know what differentiated its species from other species of barnacles. So he began writing letters to museums, requesting barnacle specimens. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that all existing work on barnacles was sloppy and third rate. There were gaps, obvious mistakes, redundancies. With a sigh, Darwin realised he would have to reclassify everything himself. He started writing more letters, requesting more specimens.

All known barnacles then were actually hermaphrodites, with both male and female sex organs. In calling the specimen “mister,” Darwin had been joking around. But in truth, the joke was on him. It turned out that Mr. Arthrobalanus’s species was not hermaphroditic. In fact, Mr. Arthrobalanus wasn’t even a mister—she was Ms. Arthrobalanus, a female.

Illustration by Clay Cansler; Thomas Johnson/Science History Institute, George Sowerby/Biodiversity Heritage Library

 Zospium thollusum - The tale of Unique Snail from the deepest cave of the World 

 DATE :- 08.03.2022                              Koustav Bhattacharjee

Zospeum tholussum or the Domed Land Snail, is a cave-dwelling species of air-breathing land snails in the family Ellobiidae. It is a very small species, with a shell height of less than 2 mm (0.08 in) and a shell width of around 1 mm (0.04 in). Z. tholussum individuals are completely blind and possess translucent shells with five to six whorls. The second whorl of their shells has a characteristic dome-like shape. They are also extremely slow-moving and may depend on passive transportation through running water or larger animals for dispersal.

Zospeum tholussum was discovered at depths of 743 to 1,392 m (2,438 to 4,567 ft) in the Lukina jama–Trojama cave system in Croatia in 2012, during a caving expedition. It was formally described as a new species in 2013 by the taxonomist Dr. Alexander M. Weigand.

On 22 May 2014 International Institute for Species Exploration declared the snail as one of the "Top 10 New Species of 2014" among species discovered in 2013. The reason for its selection is its habitat in complete darkness of a cave some 900 meters below the surface. It lacks eyes and its shell is transparent giving it a ghost-like appearance. 

Like all members of the genus Zospeum, Zospeum tholussum are completely blind. Because of this and their lack of pigmentation, they are considered to be true cave-dwelling organisms (eutroglobionts). Very little is known about their biology, but members of the genus Zospeum are known to prefer muddy to permanently wet subterranean microhabitats. They are generally found along the drainage systems of caves.

 Zospeum tholussum are currently only known from the Lukina jama–Trojama cave system of Croatia. Its distribution range is within the larger distribution range of the morphologically similar Zospeum amoenum (which is found in caves in the Western Balkans in northern Slovenia, western Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro). Since Zospeum species with large inferred distribution ranges are known to actually also contain morphologically similar and unrecognised cryptic species, Weigand postulated that some early records of Zospeum amoenum may have actually been specimens of Zospeum tholussum.

                      

A TALE OF GLASS TADPOLES

 PRINCE RUPERT'S DROPS - IN A NUTSHELL 

                                                         KOUSTAV BHATTACHARJEE                                                                           

 DATE :- 03.03.2022

Prince Rupert's drops first gained widespread fame in 1660, when Prince Rupert of the Rhine (of Germany) brought a few of the curiosities to King Charles II of England. (The teardrops, which are made by pouring molten glass into cold water, had likely been known to glassblowers centuries earlier.) Charles then handed them over to the Royal Society, which published its first scholarly investigation of their properties in 1661.

        Strong head

In the new study, Chandrasekar relied on a slightly different technique called integrated photoelectricity , to reveal the mysteries of the glass tadpoles' heads. The technique calls for placing the object in a pool of water and then passing polarized light waves, or light that is oriented in a single plane, through the material. Internal stresses inside the material change the polarization of the light. Looking at the polarization of the outgoing light waves through special filters reveals the internal stresses inside the object — in this case, the head of the drop and the tail. 

These stresses formed because the type of glass used in these teardrops — which expands dramatically with heat — also shrinks dramatically when exposed to cold water. During the process to make these drops, the molten glass is dipped in cold water. When the glass hits the water, the outside cools faster than the inside. The outside layer of the glass then forms a kind of "jacket" that squishes the inside. Because the inside is still cooling, and because the total forces acting in the object have to equal zero, the head forms tensile stresses on its interior, the researchers reported in their paper, which was published online in Applied Physics Letters. 

The reason the compressive stress on the outside of the drops prevents fracturing is somewhat intuitive; the compression is squishing the atoms of the glass closer together – so they have no place to go. Fractures also don't move as easily through materials under compression. By contrast, most materials tend to break more easily when they are being pulled apart in tension.

However, even these shatter-resistant confections will eventually crack under pressure; for instance, if the heads of the drops are put inside a vise with enough pressure, they too will eventually turn to powder, though not quite as spectacularly as in the tail-snapping process, Chandrasekar said.

( SOURCE:- live science)