How can you tell age of a tree

Do you know age of a tree planted around you?

As a tree grows, its trunk thickens as new wood is added in the middle of the trunk.

The age of a tree can be judged not only  by the thickness and height of a tree but also by the number of circles on the trunk. Each circle indicates roughly a year.

In fact if find any severed tree you will see number of concentric circles in a cross section of trunk growing from the middle outwards. The space between two concentric circles represent annual layer of wood and by counting number of circles themselves the age of a tree can be known.

If you count number of circles in some giant fir trees, it will be many hundreds of years old.

These circles are also known as tree’s rings.

 

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Amazon rainforest-more than 350 species found

Amazon rainforest is one of the most famous and dense rainforest in the world. It is also dangerous if anyone goes deep into it.

This world’s largest tropical rainforest lies in much of north western Brazil and extending into Colombia, Peru and other South American countries. It measures about 5.5 Million sq km.

Discoveries by scientists have been mostly in endangered areas threatened by human activities as confirmed by World Wildlife fund (WWF). It took nearly 2 years for scientists to do this task.

Nearly 381 species were found including 216 plants, 93 fish, 32 amphibians, 19 reptiles, 1 bird and 20 mammals.

Some of the interesting new finds include fire-tailed titi monkey, or Milton’s titi, a white ball acari, a nocturnal river fish, and a ‘honeycomb’ stingray, a freshwater ray.

A Brazilian judge has held an order on proposed mining in the area nearly size of Switzerland which is really applaudable otherwise these discoveries will cease in future and we will lose all natural resources.

Why diseases should be named carefully

Disease names can have consequences. Yes this is true.

Government agencies generally do not pay attention whenever disease is named. This is not only in India but is prevalent in other countries also.

Swine flu has nothing to do with pigs but pigs were slaughtered in some countries at the time of spread of Swine Flu. In 2009 Egypt ordered killing of 300,000 pigs to stop its spread.

Spanish flu did not originate from Spain. Many organizations working on Spanish flu brought Spain to limelight claiming it to be the source of this disease and hence Spain could not censor reports and figures on this disease though some of the countries censored this.

HIV was first called “gay related immune deficiency” or GRID leading heterosexuals to underestimate the risk of unprotected sex.

Sudden change in colour of Bosphorus strait connnecting Europe & Asia

Have you heard of Bosphorus Strait?

This strait connects continents of Asia and Europe in Istanbul, capital of Turkey.

People noticed this change as the colour of strait was bluish earlier and changed to milky turquoise this week.

This sudden change has been attributed by scientists to increasing level of pollution in the sea and surge in a species of plankton across the Black Sea.

Other reasons cited are earthquake in the region on 12^th Jun 2017 afternoon and surge in micro organism Emiliania huxleyi popularly known as Ehux.

If this continues, it may endanger species of fish and other animals living in the sea in this area and may result in decline in tourism and protests by environmentalists.