THE TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2015 17TIMES TRENDSXIIXI

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Saltwater crocodiles can rest with one eyeopen to watch for threats, Australian scien-

tists said on Friday, with further research likelyto show half of the mammal’s brain could beconscious even while asleep. The scientistsfound that crocodiles — like birds, their closestliving relatives — engaged in “unilateral eyeclosure” during hostile situations. “Birds like tosleep like humans, with both eyes closed, butwhen they feel threatened they’ll have one eyeopen and they’ll orientate that eye towards thethreat,” lead author Michael Kelly of La TrobeUniversity said.

SHORT CUTS

SHOWCASING DEATH: Illegally trafficked leopard and tiger heads are stored by the US Fishand Wildlife Service’s office of law enforcement ina warehouse inside the National Wildlife PropertyRepository in Commerce City, Colorado. More than1.5 million items fill the shelves of the warehouse.A one-of-its-kind repository, it’s the only place inthe US that stores such a large collection of wildlife items seized by law enforcement agencies.It offers a macabre look at the cost of the globaltrafficking of endangered and threatened animals

Crocs rest with one eyeopen to look out for threats

AP

Washington: Scientistsusing Nasa’s Kepler space tele-scope have uncovered strongevidence of a tiny, rocky ‘pla-net’ being torn apart as it spi-rals around a white dwarf star.This discovery validates along-held theory that whitedwarfs are capable of canniba-lising remnant planets that ha-ve survived within its solar sy-stem, researchers said.

“We are for the first timewitnessing a miniature planetripped apart by intense gravi-

ty, being vaporised by starlightand raining rocky material on-to its star,” said Andrew Van-derburg, graduate student atthe Harvard-SmithsonianCentre for Astrophysics.

As stars like our Sun age,they puff up into red giantsand then gradually lose abouthalf their mass, shrinkingdown to 1/100th of their origi-nal size to roughly the size ofEarth. This dead, dense starremnant is called a whitedwarf. The devastated planete-

simal, or cosmic object formedfrom dust, rock, and other ma-terials, is estimated to be the si-

dwarf. It orbits its white dwarf,WD 1145+017, once every 4.5 ho-urs. This orbital period placesit extremely close to the whitedwarf and its searing heat andshearing gravity. During itsfirst observing campaign lastyear, K2 trained its gaze on apatch of sky in the constella-tion Virgo, measuring the mi-nuscule change in brightnessof the distant white dwarf.

When an object transits, orpasses in front of a star fromthe vantage point of the spacetelescope, a dip in starlight isrecorded. The periodic dim-ming of starlight indicates thepresence of an object in orbitabout the star.

A research team led byVanderburg found an unusu-al, but vaguely familiar pat-tern in the data. While therewas a prominent dip in bright-ness occurring every 4.5 ho-urs, blocking up to 40% of thewhite dwarf's light, the transitsignal of the tiny planet did notexhibit the typical symmetricU-shaped pattern.

It showed an asymmetricelongated slope pattern thatwould indicate the presence ofa comet-like tail. Together the-se features indicated a ring ofdusty debris circling the whitedwarf, and what could be thesignature of a small planet be-ing vaporised. PTI

ze of a large asteroid, and is thefirst planetary object to be con-firmed transiting a white

Celestial Body Vaporised ByGravity Of White Dwarf

Nasa probe spots dead star ‘eating up’ planet

RIPPED APART: The discovery validates a long-held theory thatwhite dwarfs are capable of cannibalising remnant planets that havesurvived within its solar system

Reuters

London: The widow of a manwho suffered with Parkinson’shas triggered new research thisweek into the condition aftershe discovered she could“smell” the disease. Joy Milne,65, told researchers that shehad noticed a change in the odo-ur of her late husband, Les, ye-ars before he developed symp-toms of Parkinson’s.

He passed away from the di-sease, a nervous system disor-der whose symptoms includeshaking and slowness of move-ment, earlier this year at theage of 65. “I’ve always had a ke-en sense of smell and I detectedvery early on that there was avery subtle change in how Lessmelled,” Milne, from Perth,Scotland, said. “It’s hard todescribe but it was a heavy,slightly musky aroma. I had noidea that this was unusual andhadn’t been recognised before.”

About one in 500 people suf-fers from Parkinson’s, a dege-nerative illness that is difficultto diagnose and for which thereis no cure. Milne made the con-nection between the smell andthe disease after picking up thesame scent from other suffe-rers. That prompted researchcharity Parkinson’s UK to thisweek launch a project to findwhether the disease and odourare linked. AFP

Briton whocan ‘smell’Parkinson’s

sparks study

WHEN LIFE IMITATES ARTReuters

A father holds his son to match a bronze sculpture by Thai artist Naidee Changmohentitled ‘Fun’ at the 19th annual ‘Sculptures by the Sea’ exhibition in Sydney on Friday.Sydney’s coastal walk between Bondi and Tamarama has been transformed into atemporary sculpture park featuring over 100 artworks from Australian and international artists. It has been billed as the world’s largest free sculpture exhibition

London:The plague was spre-ading nearly 3,000 years before previously thought,scientists say after findingtraces of the disease in the te-eth of ancient people — a dis-covery that could provide clues to how dangerous disea-ses evolve.

To find evidence of the pre-historic infection, resear-chers drilled into the teeth of101 individuals who lived inCentral Asia and Europe so-me 2,800 to 5,000 years ago.

The drilling produced apowder that the researchersexamined for DNA from pla-gue bacteria. They found it insamples from seven people.

Before the study, the earli-est evidence of the plague wasfrom AD 540, said Simon Ras-mussen of the Technical Uni-versity of Denmark.

Simon Rasmussen and hiscolleagues found it as early as2,800 BC. “We were very sur-prised to find it 3,000 years be-fore it was supposed to exist,”said Rasmussen, one of thestudy authors.

Rasmussen said the pla-gue they found was a differentstrain from the one that cau-sed the three known pande-mics, including the Black De-ath that swept across medie-val Europe. AP

‘Plague spread3,000 yearsearlier than

thought’

Washington: A substancefound in bananas and careful-ly edited by scientists could le-ad to drugs that may fight off awide range of deadly viruses,including AIDS, hepatitis Cand influenza.

The new research focu-ses on a protein called bana-na lectin, or BanLec, that“reads” the sugars on theoutside of both viruses and

cells. Five years ago, scien-tists showed it could keepthe virus that causes AIDSfrom getting into cells — butit also caused side effects.

Researchers from theUniversity of Michigan cre-ated a new form of BanLecthat fights viruses in mice,but does not have a propertythat causes irritation andunwanted inflammation. PTI

Drug from bananascould fight AIDS

Andrew Griffin

Researchers claim tohave found the perfectway of creating a me-

morable and secure pass-word. As a rule, the easier apassword is to remember,the easier it is to guess.

New research claims tohave created a method of ge-nerating passwords that ma-kes them incredibly difficultto guess but at the same timeeasy to remember — poetry.In a new paper, MarjanGhazvininejad and KevinKnight argue that genera-ting passwords that have ametrical rhythm and rhy-ming words will allow peo-ple to commit them to memo-ry — even if they are ran-domly generated and non-sensical.

The researchers referen-ced an image created as partof XKCD, the popular onlinecomic series. In that, authorRandall Monroe points outthat while people tend tochoose strange words forpasswords, it would actuallybe much more secure to picklonger random words.

Those random words arechosen through a randomnumber generator. Each ofthose words then corre-sponds with a word in thedictionary, which leads tothe words themselves. Thatmakes them very hard to gu-

ess, since a computer wouldhave to try billions of combi-nations. But putting thewords together also makesthem easier to remember.

The researchers used a si-milar method, but chose po-etry instead of a randomlygenerated story. They usedthe same random numbermethod for picking words inthe dictionary — but told thecomputer to ensure that thewords rhyme and are in iam-bic tetrameter. That genera-ted small — sometimes unu-sual and meaningless — po-ems, such as: Sophisticatedpotentates misrepresentingEmirates. Because of hu-mans’ capacity for remem-bering poems, the nonsensi-cal and hard to guess wordsare all the same easy to re-member. THE INDEPENDENT

Want a passwordthat you won’t

forget? Try poetry

Researchers say that generating passwords that havea metrical rhythm and rhymingwords will allow people tocommit them to memory

Corbis

Madrid: In an effort to boost theirpupils’ low maths and readingmarks, more and more Spanishschools are holding chess clubs —and some could even make it acompulsory class. “It really incre-ases your mental ca-pacity. I have impro-ved a lot,” said Alva-ro, at a chess group in his schoolnorth of Madrid.

Spain’s parliament this yearunanimously adopted a law allo-wing regional governments to in-troduce chess as a compulsory oroptional subject in schools.

The law won the rare unanimo-us backing of lawmakers from ri-val parties.

The opposition Socialist Partydeputy who drafted it, Pablo Mar-tin Pere, cited studies showing

that an hour ofchess a week couldboost pupils’ per-

formance in maths by 30% .Studies by the Organisation for

Economic Co-operation and Deve-lopment have regularly shownthat Spanish pupils lag behind the-ir peers in other developed count-ries in maths and reading. AFP

Spanish schools bank onchess to boost math skills

MIND GAME

Times of India, Pune, October 24, 2015 Pp.17