science wave

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Thu, 4 Nov 2010 22:57:00 -0700

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Lion

FACT FILE:
Swahili Name:	Simba
Scientific Name:	Panthera leo
Size:	48 inches high
Weight:	330 to 500 pounds
Lifespan:	13 years in captivity
Habitat:	Grassy plans and open woodlands
Diet:	Carnivorous
Gestation:	About 105 days
Predators:	Humans

The lion is a magnificent animal that appears as a symbol of power, courage and nobility on family crests, coats of arms and national flags in many civilizations. Lions at one time were found from Greece through the Middle East to northern India, but today only a very small population remains in India. In the past lions lived in most parts of Africa, but are now confined to the sub-Saharan region.

Most cat species live a fundamentally solitary existence, but the lion is an exception. It has developed a social system based on teamwork and a division of labor within the pride, and an extended but closed family unit centered around a group of related females. The average pride consists of about 15 individuals, including five to 10 females with their young and two or three territorial males that are usually brothers or pride mates.

Physical Characteristics
Generally a tawny yellow, lions, like other species, tend to be lighter in color in hot, arid areas and darker in areas of dense vegetation. Mature male lions are unique among the cat species for the thick mane of brown or black hair that encircles the head and neck. The tails of lions end in a horny spine covered with a tuft of hair.

Habitat
Lions are found in savannas, grasslands, dense bush and woodlands.

Behavior
Females do 85 to 90 percent of the pride's hunting, while the males patrol the territory and protect the pride, for which they take the "lion's share" of the females' prey. When resting, lions seem to enjoy good fellowship with lots of touching, head rubbing, licking and purring. But when it comes to food, each lion looks out for itself. Squabbling and fighting are common, with adult males usually eating first, followed by the females and then the cubs.

Lions are the laziest of the big cats. They usually spend 16 to 20 hours a day sleeping and resting, devoting the remaining hours to hunting, courting or protecting their territory. They keep in contact with one another by roaring loud enough to be heard up to five miles away. The pride usually remains intact until the males are challenged and successfully driven away or killed by other males, who then take over. Not all lions live in prides. At maturity, young males leave the units of their birth and spend several years as nomads before they become strong enough to take over a pride of their own. Some never stop wandering and continue to follow migrating herds; but the nomadic life is much more difficult, with little time for resting or reproducing.

Within the pride, the territorial males are the fathers of all the cubs. When a lioness is in heat, a male will join her, staying with her constantly. The pair usually mates for less than a minute, but it does so about every 15 to 30 minutes over a period of four to five days.

Lions may hunt at any hour, but they typically go after large prey at night. They hunt together to increase their success rate, since prey can be difficult to catch and can outrun a single lion. The lions fan out along a broad front or semicircle to creep up on prey. Once with within striking distance, they bound in among the startled animals, knock one down and kill it with a bite to the neck or throat. Hunts are successful about half the time.

Diet
Cooperative hunting enables lions to take prey as large as wildebeests, zebras, buffaloes, young elephants, rhinos, hippos and giraffes, any of which can provide several meals for the pride. Mice, lizards, tortoises, warthogs, antelopes and even crocodiles also form part of a lion's diet. Because they often take over kills made by hyenas, cheetahs and leopards, scavenged food provides more than 50 percent of their diets in areas like the Serengeti plains.

Caring for the Young
Litters consist of two or three cubs that weigh about 3 pounds each. Some mothers carefully nurture the young; others may neglect or abandon them, especially when food is scarce. Usually two or more females in a pride give birth about the same time, and the cubs are raised together. A lioness will permit cubs other than her own to suckle, sometimes enabling a neglected infant to survive. Capable hunters by 2 years of age, lions become fully grown between 5 and 6 years and normally live about 13 years.

Predators
Lions have long been killed in rituals of bravery, as hunting trophies and for their medicinal and magical powers. Although lions are now protected in many parts of Africa, they were once considered to be stock-raiding vermin and were killed on sight. In some areas, livestock predation remains a severe problem.

Did you know?

Most lions drink water daily if available, but can go four or five days without it. Lions in arid areas seem to obtain needed moisture from the stomach contents of their prey.
When males take over a pride, they usually kill the cubs. The females come into estrus and the new males sire other cubs.

What’s The Fastest Possible Speed ?

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 18:56:00 -0700

Well imagine going 500,000 times faster than a concorde and you have a speed nearing 299,792,458 meters per second. This is the speed of light as it travels through a vaccum which is so fast that if you were able to move at this speed you could go around the earth 7 times in just 1 second, now that’s fast!

Obviously the speed of light passing through liquids and solids is slower but even then the speed of light is phenomenal. Many of you may also have heard of the concept of a light year, which represents the distance light would travel in a complete year.

This extraordinary number comes out to around 9,460,000 million kilometres. The term is used extensively in astronomy to measure distances between planets, stars and other celestial bodies. The simple fact of the matter is that distances involved when it comes to discussing the universe are so huge that you need a better unit of measure to make it more understandable.

Lastly those of you who watch too many space movies e.g. star wars, star trek etc and are familiar with concepts like warp speed or hyperspace then you’re probably wondering when we’ll be able to travel at speeds like those shown in the movies. Well the simple answer is it’s highly unlikely that we’ll see anything like that in our lifetime however tolearn more about the research going on in this area you can check out NASA’s section on breakthrough propulsion physics.

What’s The Fastest Possible Speed ?

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 18:56:00 -0700

Where Did The Word Robot Come From ?

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 18:53:00 -0700

This is a question we get asked a lot so we thought we’d put people out of their misery. Firstly the word robot comes from the Czech word ‘robotnik‘ which means forced labour or even slave. Watching movies like I Robot, Wall-E and reading various sci-fi novels of the past you’ll quickly see that robots have mostly always been portrayed as helpers and servents of humanity.

It’s only in recent years that the image of robots has been upgraded to sentient beings with minds of their own e.g. transformers and even IRobot.

Anyway the word was first introduced by playwright Karel Capek in his play ‘RUR - Rossum’s Universal Robots‘ and it’s from there that the word and idea became popular. The first robot to be developed was by Joseph Engelberger and George Devol back in 1961 and if you’re imagining a metallic being with 2 arms, 2 legs and a head you can forget it. The first robot was basically a clawed arm that dropped hot steel car parts into water for cooling.

90% of robots today are used in factories, working on production lines and often handling dangerous materials that humans would find difficult or even impossible to handle. Other uses include exploration such as deep sea exploration and mining.

Deepest Lake In The World ?

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 18:48:00 -0700

Lake Baikal (Baikal) in Siberia, Russia is the deepest lake in the world measuring 1620m deep at its deepest point. This makes it not only deep but also the oldest lake in the world estimated to be around 25 million years old. At over 636 kilometers long and 80 kilometers wide this fresh water lake holds over 20 percent of all the fresh water in the world and is second in size only to the Caspian Sea (the caspian is called a sea but is technically a lake).

To put things into perspective the lake is so big that if all the rivers in the world flowed into its basin it would take almost 1 year to fill. We all know Siberia isn’t the warmest of places so you can imagine what a phenomenal site it is when in the winter months the lake freezes over holding ice up to 115 meters thick. Now that’s a lot of ice!

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Thu, 3 Dec 2009 04:54:00 -0800

Space Quick Facts

1. Saturn’s rings are made up of particles of ice, dust and rock. Some particles are as small as grains of sand while others are much larger than skyscrapers.

2. Jupiter is larger than 1,000 Earths.

3. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hurricane-like storm system that was first detected in the early 1600’s.

4. Comet Hale-Bopp is putting out approximately 250 tons of gas and dust per second. This is about 50 times more than most comets produce.

5. The Sun looks 1600 times fainter from Pluto than it does from the Earth.

6. There is a supermassive black hole right in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy that is 4 million times the mass of the Sun.

7. Halley’s Comet appears about every 76 years.

8. The orbits of most asteroids lie partially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

9. Asteroids and comets are believed to be ancient remnants of the formation of our Solar System (More than 4 billion years ago!).

10. Comets are bodies of ice, rock and organic compounds that can be several miles in diameter.

11. The most dangerous asteroids, those capable of causing major regional or global disasters, usually impact the Earth only once every 100,000 years on average.

12. Some large asteroids even have their own moon.

13. Near-Earth asteriods have orbits that cross the Earth’s orbit. These could potentially impact the Earth.

14. There are over 20 million observable meteors per day.

15. Only one or two meteorites per day reach the surface of Earth.

16. The largest found meteorite was found in Hoba, Namibia. It weighed 60 tons.

17. The typical size of a meteor is about one cubic centimeter, which is equivalent to the size of a sugar cube.

18. Each day, Earth accumulate 10 to 100 tons of material.

19. There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

20. The largest galaxies contain nearly 400 billion stars.

21. The risk of a falling meteorite striking a human occurs once every 9,300 years.

22. A piece of a neutron star the size of a pin point would way 1 million tons.

23. Europa, Jupiter’s moon, is completely covered in ice.

24. Light reflecting off the moon takes 1.2822 seconds to reach Earth.

25. There has only been one satellite destroyed by a meteor, it was the European Space Agency’s Olympus in 1993.

26. The International Space Station orbits at 248 miles above the Earth.

27. The Earth orbits the Sun at 66,700mph.

28. Venus spins in the opposite direction compared to the Earth and most other planets. This means that the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East.

29. The Moon is moving away from the Earth at about 34cm per year.

30. The Sun, composed mostly of helium and hydrogen, has a surface temperature of 6000 degrees Celsius.

31. A manned rocket reaches the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.

32. The nearest known black hole is 1,600 light years (10 quadrillion miles/16 quadrillion kilometers) away.

babasiddharthan@ymail.com (babasiddharthan) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:06:00 -0800

Cobra Facts

King Cobras are just one type of cobra. Overall, there are hundreds of different types.
King Cobras are the only snake in the world that build a nest for their young, just like a bird, but on the ground!
King Cobras lay 20-40 eggs in a nest, which is faithfully guarded by female her mate. The incubation time is 60-90 days.
King Cobra young are called hatchlings since they come from eggs. Hatchlings are about 50cm long.
King Cobras (Ohiophagus hannah) eats other snakes! The Latin word for "snake-eater" is ophiophagus.
Cobras are the only snake in the world that can spit their venom, and they are accurate up to about half their own length!
King Cobras are the longest venomous snake in the world! The average male grows 18 feet long, and some have been known to grow more than 20 feet long.
Cobras are not blind, in fact they see very well even at night.
Cobras have a "Jacobsen's Organ" (like most snakes) that gives it super smelling ability. They can sense tiny changes in temperature, which helps them track their prey at night.
Cobras typically live to 20 years old or more in the wild.
Cobras are at the top of the food chain. Their only natural predators are the mongoose, and man.
Cobras venom is not the strongest there is, but cobras can inject so much venom in a single bite that they can kill an elephant. Sea snakes have deadlier venom, and rattlesnakes have weaker venom.