Nature inFocus #Photography Contest 2021—a competition that honours shutterbugs that document unique natural history & critical conservation issues—has announced its winners!
(📸: Kallol Mukherjee-Special Mention in Creative Nature category)
Thread! 👇
Animal Portraits category winner: City Lights
The photographer spent months documenting the behaviour of Arabian Red Fox families in Kuwait. Although scared at first, the foxes became more comfortable around his presence after frequent visits.
📸: Mohammad Murad
Wildscape & Animals in Habitat category winner: The Resting Monarch
A gigantic kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies sits huddled together on Oyamel Fir trees in the overwintering grounds of central Mexico. The tree canopy provides a blanket effect.
The spores of a bracket fungus (Polypores) create a vast spectrum of colours when lit from an angle. The photographer came across the fungi as they grew on a dead tree log.
📸: Prathamesh Ghadekar
Young Photographer category winner: Hop Into The Limelight
A staunch believer that one doesn't have to travel far to photograph wildlife, Anagha captured this surreal image of a grasshopper resting on a flowering plant at the outskirts of #Bangalore.
📸: Anagha Mohan
Conservation Issues category winner: Evicted
A lone Gharial is portrayed against the backdrop of construction work, highlighting their changing habitats. Captured in Bihar, India.
📸: Mahisin Khan
Animal Behaviour category winner: Tag, You Are It!
When awakened from deep sleep by the alarm calls of a Malabar Giant Squirrel, this leopardess launched an attack, chased the squirrel around the tree trunk, and eventually captured it.
📸: Priyanka Rahut Mitra
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Indian astronomers are on a winning streak! In two separate discoveries, researchers have found an exoplanet 1.4x the size of Jupiter and a rare class of radio stars hotter than the Sun!
The first discovery of new exoplanet TOI 1789b was made by Prof A Chakraborty and team using the PARAS optical fibre-fed spectrograph—the first of its kind in India—on the 1.2-metre Telescope of PRL at its Mt Abu Observatory.
The exoplanet was found to have 70% of the mass and 1.4 times the size of Jupiter.
TOI 1789b orbits its Sun in just 3.2 days. Due to its closeness to its host star, the planet is intensely hot, with a surface temperature of up to 2000 K.
Peanuts comic’s iconic character Snoopy has been nominated to be the NASA mascot for mission Artemis I, which is up for launch in early 2022.
Like Apollo 10, Artemis I would serve as a test mission—the first one in a series of increasingly complex Artemis missions.
📸: NASA
During this flight, the uncrewed Orion spacecraft will launch on the most powerful rocket in the world, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and travel thousands of kilometres beyond the Moon—farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.
#StubbleBurning is the process whereby farmers get rid of crop residues by torching them up, so as to create space for a fresh batch of crops. This annual activity leads to the exacerbation of recurring seasonal pollution.
📸: Piyal Bhattacharjee/TOI, BCCL, Delhi
The images captured by @NASA underline the magnitude of the #StubbleBurning problem by depicting a massive ‘river of smoke’ originating from fires in Punjab, Haryana and even north Pakistan, stretching towards Delhi.
The researchers focused on two major tributaries of Ganga: Bhagirathi & Alaknanda.
The study observed an increase in flooding events in these river basins after 1995, particularly in the water flow in the Alaknanda river, which increased between 1971 & 2010.
📸: Swarnkar et al.
"We observed that Alaknanda basin has a high, statistically increasing rainfall trend, unlike Bhagirathi basin. Most trends were observed in Alaknanda’s downstream region. We also saw an increase in the magnitude of extreme flow in the regions", said the study's first author.
As if small scorpions weren’t scary enough, scientists have discovered an ancient fossil of a sea scorpion that was 16 times larger than the present-day scorpion—almost as big as a dog!
📸: Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology/Y Dinghua
Named Terropterus xiushanensis, this arachnid was a relative of the present-day horseshoe crab and whip spider.
It had similar spiny attacking forelimbs & belonged to mixopterids—a group of eurypterids (sea scorpions)—also recognised for their specialised arms for catching prey.
The fearsome beast is suspected of having lived during the Silurian period—somewhere between 443.8 million and 419.2 million years ago—where it would have been an apex underwater predator.
Despite being highly vulnerable to #ClimateChange and featuring among the top five emitters of greenhouse gases, India is unlikely to commit to net-zero emissions at the upcoming #COP26.
Being a developing country, India is highly dependent on fossil fuels to run a substantial portion of its economy. The havoc created by the recent shortages in coal stands testimony to this.
Achieving net-zero would mean significant cuts in the use of fossil fuels.
India is unlikely to follow the much-advocated net-zero plan, but would rather dwell on improvising goals for the transition towards green energy.
Simply put, India is not against the idea of net-zero, but rebuts the timeline of 2050 to achieve this ambitious goal.