According to a study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, only 32 per cent of men washed their hands with soap while 64 per cent of women did. A quarter of a million people were counted using the toilets and their use of soap was monitored by on-line sensors. Messages, ranging from ‘Water doesn’t kill germs, soap does’ to ‘Don’t be a dirty soap dodger’, were flashed onto LED screens at the entrance of the toilets and the effects of the messages on behaviour were measured. ‘Is the person next to you washing with soap?’ was best overall. While women responded better to reminders, men tended to react best to messages that invoked disgust, for example ‘Soap it off or eat it later’.
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24 October 2009
Shiva’s Fury
A meteorite 40 km in diameter that struck off the west coast of India may have doomed the dinosaurs.
Another devastating blow: The object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula in North America, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs, was between 8 km and 10 km wide in diameter.
Impact
A buried crater centred at Bombay High off the west coast of India could well be the result of the biggest meteorite collision the earth has ever seen. The source of much of India’s gas and petroleum reserves in the Arabian Sea today, the crater created by the impact would have signalled the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years earlier.
In a paper to be presented at the forthcoming meet of the Geological Society of America (GSA), Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and Naresh M Mehrotra of the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany, Lucknow, have suggested that, ‘the buried and multi-ringed Shiva crater (500 km diameter) on the western shelf of India is the remnant of a giant meteorite impact’.
Their calculations show the impact would have released the energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs. According to a GSA press release, the geological evidence is dramatic—Shiva’s outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500 km in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as Bombay High, which would be 4.8 km tall from the ocean floor. Most of the crater lies submerged on India’s continental shelf, but where it does come ashore it is marked by tall cliffs, active faults and hot springs.
In the abstract of their paper, the geologists state, ‘The impact was so powerful that it led to several geodynamic anomalies: it fragmented, sheared, and deformed the lithosphere mantle across the western Indian margin and contributed to major plate reorganisation in the Indian Ocean. It initiated rifting between India and Seychelles in the west and created the Laxmi Ridge; it shattered the Indian plate easterly along the Narmada-Son Rift extending 1,500 km across, dividing the Indian shield into a southern peninsular block and a northern foreland block.’
Science Buzz
24 Oct 2009 - 30 Oct 2009
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When Professor Joel Levine’s team genetically tweaked fruit flies so that they didn’t produce certain pheromones, they triggered a sexual tsunami in their University of Toronto Mississauga laboratory. Levine’s team genetically eliminated a certain class of pheromones—cuticular hydrocarbon pheromones—to determine their effect. They found that female fruit flies bred without the hydrocarbons were so sexy that even males of other fruit fly species courted them. Males lacking the hydrocarbons were also sexually irresistible. The study, published in Nature, points to a link between sex, species recognition and a specific chemical mechanism. Levine stresses that while pheromones are part of the human mating dance, the cues for attraction are far more complex in our species.
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According to EPSRC funded researcher, Dr Kerry Kirwan at the University of Warwick, who led the research team which designed and built the world’s first fully sustainable Formula 3 racing car, the idea of ‘green motorsport’ actually works. The car is made from woven flax, recycled carbon fibre, recycled resin and carrot pulp for the steering wheel. It runs on biofuel made from chocolate and animal fats and is lubricated with plant oils. But it’s not just an environmentally friendly car, it is also fast. The car has a top speed of 216 kmph, can achieve 0-100 in 2.5 seconds and is turbo charged to give it more torque. With the approval from drivers such as Lewis Hamilton and Adam Carroll, the car makes its debut in the F3 Championship final at Brands Hatch on 17 October.
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