Gold growing in eucalyptus trees

Gold growing in eucalyptus trees

The discovery, the first of its kind in the world and the first time gold particles have been found in living material.

Geoscientists in Perth, Australia have discovered gold particles in the leaves, twigs and bark of eucalyptus trees, claiming a "eureka" moment that could revolutionise gold mining. CSIRO researchers believe the trees, sitting on top of gold deposits buried deep underground, suck up the gold in their search for moisture during times of drought.

Scientists said, "To actually see the gold particles in the leaves was quite a eureka moment for us and they were not expecting it"

The trees appear to be telling scientists what is happening under the earth's surface. The particular trees that were researched upon appear to be bringing up gold from 30 metres depth, which is about the equivalent of a 10-storey building.

The research group used the CSIRO's Maia detector for x-ray elemental imaging at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne to analyse extremely small particles at high resolution.

The portions of gold are about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair. The researchers said they have also found gold in the leaves of other trees, such as the Acacia mulga.

Gold existed not only in trees but in shrubs that are growing beneath the trees as well.

Plants Are Good At Math

Plants are good at math

According to scientific research plants do complex arithmetic calculations to make sure they have enough food to get them through the night.

According to scientists at Britain's John Innes Centre plants adjust their rate of starch consumption to prevent starvation during the night when they are unable to feed themselves with energy from the sun. They can even compensate for an unexpected early night.

During the night, mechanisms inside the leaf measure the size of the starch store and estimate the length of time until dawn. Information about time comes from an internal clock, similar to the human body clock. The capacity to perform arithmetic calculation is vital for plant growth and productivity.

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Whole trees covered with spiders’ web

Trees covered in ghostlike cocoons line the edges of a submerged farm field in the Pakistani village of Sindh, where 2010's massive floods drove millions of spiders and possibly other insects into the trees to spin their webs.

Beginning July 2010, unprecedented monsoons dropped nearly ten years' worth of rainfall on Pakistan in one week, swelling the country's rivers. The water was slow to recede, creating vast pools of stagnant water across the countryside.

Locals said that they’d never seen anything like it before. It was said to be a slow motion type of disaster. Spiders and other insects sought refuge in the trees. There were so many that entire trees became massive cocoons for them. They spun webs that covered the trees as a whole. People standing under the trees had lots of little spiders falling down on their heads.

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Tree of Life

The Tree of Life located in Bahrain is approximately 400 year-old 32 feet or 9.75 meter high. The tree is of Prosopis cineraria genus is located 1.2 miles or 2 kilometers from Jebel Dukhan or Mountain of Smoke, which is a famous hill in Bahrain that is the highest point of the country. The tree stands on top of a 25-foot or 7.6-meter high sandy hill.

The tree is a local tourist attraction, as it is the only major tree growing in the area. The tree is visited by approximately 50,000 tourists every year and the tree often is damaged by graffiti carvings. It is also believed to be the site for cults practicing ancient rites.

Trees and shrubs of Prosopis genus are extremely well adapted to arid environments with one of the deepest known root systems

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Prometheus Tree - The oldest tree in the world



The cut stump of the Prometheus tree

Prometheus tree was the oldest known non-clonal organism, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing near the tree line on Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada, United States. The tree, which was at least 4862 years old and possibly more than 5000 years, was cut down in 1964 by a graduate student and United States Forest Service personnel for research purposes. The name of the tree refers to the mythological figure Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.

Cutting down of Prometheus was an important factor in the movement to protect bristlecones and the Wheeler Peak groves in particular. There had been a movement to protect the mountain and contiguous areas in a national park before the incident, and 22 years later the area gained national park status.

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Prehistoric flower blooms again after 30000 years

Biologists have revived a 30,000-year-old plant that last flowered when ancient woolly mammoths roamed the Earth.

Cultivated from fruit tissues that were recovered from frozen sediment in Siberia, Silene stenophylla is by far the oldest to be brought back from the dead.

The previous record holder was a sacred lotus, which dated back about 1200 years.

The late researchers in Moscow, Russia, recovered the fruits of the ice age flowering plant from a fossilised squirrel burrow in frozen sediments near the Kolyma river in north-east Siberia.

Radiocarbon dating of the fruit suggested that the squirrel hoarded it around 31,800 years ago, just before the ice rolled in.

By applying growth hormones to the fruit tissue, the researchers managed to initiate cell division and ultimately produce a practical flowering plant.

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Pitcher plant eats bird

A plant has killed and "eaten" a great tit at a garden nursery in Somerset, England.

The caretaker was inspecting his tropical garden when he discovered one of his pitcher plants had trapped the bird. He was "absolutely staggered" to find it had caught the creature.

The larger pitcher plants frequently take frogs, lizards and mice, and the biggest ones have been found with rats in them, but to find a bird in one is pretty unusual.

It is believed to be only the second time such a carnivorous plant has been documented eating a bird anywhere in the world.

(Source)

Oldest living thing on earth' discovered

Photo: Getty Images

Ancient patches of a giant seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea are now considered the oldest living organism on Earth after scientists dated them as up to 200,000 years old.

Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus.

The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old.

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Different colours of carrot

Have you ever seen a purple carrot? How about white, yellow, red or black? Most people haven't, even though such carrots have existed for hundreds of years. They are available in good health food stores, often called "Rainbow Packs".

Carrots were originally purple or red, with a thin root. Orange carrots arrived from natural mutations of yellow forms, and then by human selection and development, probably in the Netherlands. It is thought that humans made selections from a genepool involving yellow rooted eastern carrots, cultivated white-rooted derivatives of wild carrot and wild unselected populations of adjacent Daucus Carota subspecies in Europe and the Mediterranean. It is thought that Dutch breeders used a mutant seed from North Africa to develop the orange variety into a stable and reliable plant for domestication.

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Exploding trees

A tree trunk that exploded after being hit by lightning

Exploding trees occur when stresses in a tree trunk increase leading to an explosion. These explosions can be caused by three different factors: cold, lightning, and fire.

Cold causes maple trees to explode by freezing the sap, because it contains water, which expands as it freezes, creating a sound like a gunshot. The sound is produced as the tree bark splits, with the wood contracting as the sap expands.

Trees can explode when struck by lightning. The strong electric current is carried mostly by the water-conducting sapwood below the bark, heating it up and boiling the water. The pressure of the steam can make the trunk burst. This happens especially with trees whose trunks are already dying or rotting.

Exploding trees also occur during forest fires and are a risk to smokejumpers. In Australia, the native eucalyptus trees are also known to explode during bush fires due to the high flammability of vaporized eucalyptus oil produced by the tree naturally.

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Poland's Mysterious Crooked Forest

In a tiny corner of western Poland a forest of about 400 pine trees grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks - all bent northward. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees, or "Crooked Forest," is a mystery.

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The heaviest pumpkin in the world weighs more than the heaviest man in the world

The heaviest pumpkin weighs 821.23 kg (1,810 lb 8 oz). The Guinness World Records recognised the pumpkin presented by Chris Stevens (USA) at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Minnesota, USA, in October 2010 as the heaviest pumpkin.

The pumpkin is heavier as compared to Manuel Uribe who, until recent years, held the record as world’s heaviest man, weighing 597 kg (1320 lb.). The heaviest man in recorded history, Jon Brower Minnoch, was weighed 635kg (1400 lb.), still quite a bit lighter than Chris Stevens’ pumpkin. This is true for everyone else on the list of the heaviest people on Wikipedia.

Flower that smells like chocolate

Cosmos atrosanguineus, aka chocolate cosmos, is a plant from Mexico that can grow up to about 24 inches high and has a maroon-colour flower. It’s famous for its chocolate-y scent. No part of this plant is edible. This plant is not actually fertile, so it produces no viable seeds. It is extinct in the wild. They currently only propagate by the division of tubers.

 (Source)

The creepiest trees on earth

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Walking mango tree

An old mango tree has become the pride of this Gujarat village, not merely because of its age - which, according to the villagers, is over a thousand years - but also because of its ability to 'walk'.

Ask any villager in Sanjan Bandar in Bulsar district of south Gujarat, and he will insist that the mango tree in late Vali Ahmed Achchu's farmland has moved about 200 metres from its original place in more than two centuries and is continuing its 'walk'.

The mango tree (Mangifera Indica), which finds mention in the list of 50 heritage trees of Gujarat, has several unique features not seen elsewhere.

Its branches grow parallel to the ground from the main stem. Roots develop from a part of the branch that touches the ground, which develops in the form of a stem and the original stem dries off, he points out.

The branch keeps on growing parallel to the ground from the new stem and new roots appear in the same pattern. 'This process has continued for several hundred years, perhaps over a thousand years.

Data collected by forest officials and information handed down through generations of villagers indicate that the mango tree may have been planted by early Parsi settlers about 1,300 years ago.

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Ants defend their host tree

Ants fend off competing plant species by marking their host tree with chemical signals in the depths of tropical rainforests.

The ants inhabit hollow channels inside the tree and aggressively fight off any invaders, including other plants. Yet how these ants recognise their host tree compared to other plants has not been studied.

It has been found that the ants distinguish between their host trees and encroaching species through recognition of the plant's surface waxes.

More about the study.

Fields of watermelon burst in China

Watermelons have been bursting by the score in eastern China after farmers gave them overdoses of growth chemicals during wet weather, creating fields of "land mines."

About 20 farmers around Danyang city in Jiangsu province were affected, losing up to 115 acres (45 hectares) of melon. Prices over the past year prompted many farmers to jump into the watermelon market. All of those with exploding melons apparently were first-time users of the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, though it has been widely available for some time.

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The Great Barrier Reef

One of Australia's most remarkable natural gifts, the Great Barrier Reef is blessed with the breathtaking beauty of the world's largest coral reef. The reef contains an abundance of marine life and comprises of over 3000 individual reef systems and coral cays and literally hundreds of picturesque tropical islands with some of the world’s most beautiful sun-soaked, golden beaches.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the seven wonders of the natural world, and pulling away from it, and viewing it from a greater distance, you can understand why. It is larger than the Great Wall of China and the only living thing on earth visible from space.

The marine park stretches over 3000km (1800 miles) almost parallel to the Queensland coast, from near the coastal town of Bundaberg, up past the tip of Cape York. The reef, between 15 kilometres and 150 kilometres off shore and around 65 Km wide in some parts, is a gathering of brilliant, vivid coral providing divers with the most spectacular underwater experience imaginable.

A closer encounter with the Great Barrier Reef's impressive coral gardens reveals many astounding underwater attractions including the world's largest collection of corals (in fact, more than 400 different kinds of coral), coral sponges, molluscs, rays, dolphins, over 1500 species of tropical fish, more than 200 types of birds, around 20 types of reptiles including sea turtles and giant clams over 120 years old.

 

The Great Barrier Reef is a breeding area for humpback whales, migrating from the Antarctic and is also the habitat of a few endangered species including the Dugong (Sea Cow) and large Green Sea Turtle. In recognition of its significance, UNESCO listed the Great Barrier Reef as a World Heritage Site in 1981.

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The Tallest Tree in the World

The tallest tree in the world is a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), named Hyperion after a person in Greek mythology. He is no less than 115.55 m (379.1 feet) tall! This enormous tree was discovered only in August 2006 in a remote part of the Redwood National Park, California by naturalists Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor. In July 2006 some other record tall trees were discovered: "Helios" (named after the Greek God of the sun), the world's tallest known tree as of June 2006 (114.09 m), "Icarus" (113.14 m), and "Daedalus" (110.76 m).

Until July 2006 the tallest known Sequoia sempervirens was "The Stratosphere Giant" (image on the left). He is 112.83 m tall (measured in 2004, Steve Sillett) and was only discovered in August 2000 (by Chris Atkins) in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, California, where a lot of these giants grow.

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Symbolism of Roses

The rose is a flower that is steeped in tradition. Roses are the ultimate flower for expression of emotion or feeling. Roses can convey different meanings, if the person receiving them knows the symbolism attached to the various colours of roses. There are many elements, such as the type of rose and number of stems, which can carry as much significance as the colour...

 
Red - Love, Romance

Dark Red - Unconscious beauty

Pink - Grace, Elegance, Happiness, Appreciation

Light pink - Sympathy, Friendship

Dark Pink - Appreciation, Thankfulness

Yellow - Joy, Friendship, Platonic Love

Yellow with red tips - Friendship, falling in love

White - Innocence, Purity, Youth

Orange - Fascination, Desire, Pride, Celebration

Peach - Sincerity, Gratitude

Lavender, Lilac - Love at first sight, Enchantment

Burgundy - Beauty

Green - Calm

Coral - Desire

Purple - Majestic Glory, Protection

Black - Death, Farewell (There are no true black or blue roses,they are artifically created)

Blue - Impossible, Unattainable, Mystery

Red and White - Two colours; Passionate Purity, Unity

Red Rosebud - Symbol of Purity and Loveliness

White Rosebud - Girlhood, Youth

Thornless Rose - Love at First Sight

Single Rose - Simplicity, Utmost Devotion

Two Roses - An engagement or coming marriage

Six Roses - A need to be Loved or Cherished

Eleven Roses - True and Deep Love

Twelve Roses - Love and Appreciation

Thirteen Roses - Secret Admirer