Science News

Headlines

. Toucans use their bill to cool down
. An object has recently hit Jupiter
. NASA celebrates Chandra X-Ray Observatory's 10th Anniversary
. Life is rusty under a glacier
. Standard 10 exams could become optional

Some of these are described in more detail below.

Toucan's bill gives big chill
A toucan releases heat through its bill to keep cool, as
seen here in an infrared thermography image. Warmer and colder areas are
shown in different colour contrasts.

While overheated people crank up their air conditioning, toucans
increase the blood flow to their supersized, uninsulated bills.
Extra heat radiating from the bill keeps the bird
comfortable.

When the bird no longer needs a big chill, blood flow slows.
This new study adds an "entirely plausible" twist to a long-standing
subject of debate: why does a toucan have such a big beak?

But the cooling powers for the toucan bill doesn't mean other
ideas for its function are wrong.
The beaks of
toucans work well for picking tropical fruits, for example. The bill
has many functions.

Aside from addressing a curiosity, the work also stirs up new questions
about bird beaks as evolutionary adaptations to the environment.
Birds and other animals that generate their own warmth
sometimes face a critical need to lose heat. Yet birds pick apart their
food with their beaks. Developing the perfect heat-radiating bill might
lead to structures awkward for food handling. 

To test the cooling properties of bills, the researchers focused on the
toucans with the largest bill, the toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). The
bill of an adult bird can account for up to half of its body surface
area. Under the hard, hornlike outer covering of the bill lies a network
of blood vessels.

Researchers put birds one at a time into a temperature-controlled
chamber. Over the course of six hours, the chamber warmed 10 degrees
Celsius.

As the temperature increased, the birds' bills warmed too,
a sign that the bird was flooding its beak
vessels with extra blood. Yet the unfeathered skin around the birds'
eyes, an indicator of core body temperature, stayed about the same.

Toucans also spent a night in the chamber as researchers monitored bill
temperature during sleep. When the birds settled down, their bills
warmed up, suggesting they were dumping heat. Animals typically cool
down as they fall asleep.

The question now is how widespread this is among birds.
Earlier research on ducks did show a small percentage of heat loss
through the bill when the bird was at rest, but more research is needed.

An object has recently struck the giant planet Jupiter

An infrared image taken by the Keck II telescope
shows a scar on Jupiter that has
grown to an area about the size of the Pacific Ocean.

The new scar in Jupiter's upper atmosphere reveals that an object has
recently bashed the giant planet's south polar region. The strike is
only the second time in recorded history that a large projectile has
been known to strike a giant planet.

The discovery comes 15 years after fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
hit Jupiter and created a memorable display of dark spots, waves and
plumes.

It's unclear whether the projectile was a comet or an asteroid,
but the size of the scar in Jupiter's atmosphere suggests the body
had a diameter of a few hundred meters, similar to of Shoemaker-Levy 9's
smaller fragments.

NASA Celebrates Chandra X-Ray Observatory's 10th Anniversary

Ten years ago, on July 23, 1999, NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia
and deployed into orbit. Chandra has doubled its original five-year
mission, ushering in an unprecedented decade of discovery for the
high-energy universe.

With its ability to create high-resolution X-ray images,
Chandra has enabled astronomers to investigate phenomena as diverse as
comets, black holes, dark matter and dark energy.

Chandra's discoveries are truly astonishing. 
The science that has been generated by Chandra has had
a widespread impact on 21st century astrophysics.

Chandra has provided the strongest evidence yet that dark matter must
exist. It has independently confirmed the existence of dark energy and
made spectacular images of titanic explosions produced by matter
swirling toward supermassive black holes.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Chandra,
classic Chandra images will be released during the next three months.
One such image is of E0102-72,
the spectacular remains of an exploded star.

Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra is
in a highly elliptical orbit that takes it almost one third of the way
to the moon, and was not designed to be serviced after it was deployed.

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science
and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center.

Life is rusty under a glacier

Blood Falls is at the tip of a giant glacier in Antarctica. As its name
suggests, the icy face of Blood Falls is red -- but not from blood.
Instead the water gets its hue because it's rich in iron. When the water
trickles out from its underground beginnings, the iron is exposed to
oxygen in the air and quickly forms the red rust.

It may not be a tourist hot spot, but Blood Falls is very interesting to
scientists who study living creatures. A geomicrobiologist -- someone
who studies how tiny organisms affect or use minerals -- recently
studied the rusty water and came up with some surprising results.

The water that feeds Blood Falls probably comes from a salty underground
lake. It's home to microbes that surprisingly don't need oxygen to
survive. Microbes are tiny organisms, usually invisible to the naked
eye. The microbes found in Blood Falls are similar to other microbes
that live in the ocean.

It is believed that the underwater reservoir formed
when a giant glacier, now 400 meters thick, moved over the salty lake at
least 1.5 million years ago. This trapped the water and everything in it
in an oxygen-free, or anoxic, environment.

Unlike human beings and most other forms of life, the microbes from
Blood Falls don't need oxygen to live. Instead, they are able to exist
using the iron and sulfates, chemical salts also found in the water. The
microbes transfer particles called electrons from the sulfates to the
iron.

The microbes at Blood Falls show that life can exist in even the
harshest environments. In addition to giving us more information about
our own planet, the study of these "extremophiles" may be useful in
other scientific areas -- like the search for life on other planets! If
scientists find organisms on Earth that live on sulfur and iron, instead
of oxygen, researchers might gain a better idea of where to look for
life elsewhere in the universe.


Standard 10 exam could be optional

Aiming to 'de-traumatise education', the Indian government is
planning to make the Class 10 exams 'optional', HRD Minister Kapil Sibal
said on Thursday. Outlining his ministry's plans for the education
sector, he said, "Schools will evolve a [alternate] system of
assessment."

"Because of the marking system there is lot of pressure on children,
parents, especially mothers."

"I have seen children committing suicide due to poor marks. Children in
our country shouldn't study in pressure."

Also, the minister plans to set up an independent accreditation
authority to rate schools.

The government will try to set up a national commission in higher
education and research, as recommended by the Yash Pal committee. "The
report seeks to show a roadmap for the future of education in India. The
recommendations are pivotal for reforms. I believe it will be accepted
by the nation," Sibal said.

The Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday said it would replace the marks
system in the Class 10 board exams with a grading system.

Chief Minister Mayawati also announced that from now on, students who
clear five of the six subjects would be declared as passed in the exams.

Compiled from several sources