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Feb 20, 2022 7 tweets 4 min read Read on X
On #WorldWhaleDay, here are some fun facts about #WHALES that are sure to blow your mind away!

Fun facts: weather.com/en-IN/india/bi…

📸: NOAA

Thread👇
The earliest whales were land-dwelling!

Whales first marked their presence on Earth around 50 million years ago. In fact, last year, palaeontologists unearthed a 43-million-year-old fossil of a four-legged whale that walked on land and swam in oceans.

📸: Robert B
Dolphin is a type of whale!

Yes, you read it right. They belong to the class of toothed whales—those whales that have teeth and use them for hunting and feeding on their prey.
Whales are helping us fight the #ClimateCrisis!

Their iron-rich faeces create conditions for phytoplankton growth—the tiny plants that pull carbon from the atmosphere and produce oxygen.

Also, when whales die, the carbon becomes fuel for deep-sea ecosystems.
Humpback whales fast for several months.

While travelling long distances, these animals live off their fat reserve for 5-7.5 months of the year.

After returning to Antarctica from their tropical breeding grounds, they actively feed on krills for around 22 hours of the day!
Humpback whales and Bryde Whales trap their prey using a behaviour called bubble-net feeding.

They blow bubbles through their blowhole and encircle their prey. The prey is unable to overcome the bubble barrier and eventually fall prey to the trick.
A whale's tail is the key to identifying individuals.

Like human fingerprints or tiger stripes, each whale's tail is unique. The underside of a whale's fluke (its tail) may have scarring, notches, patterns and shapes that help to tell individuals apart.

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More from @weatherindia

Aug 17, 2022
While searching for life in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers pulled out a new bizarre-looking species of isopod, whose head resembles the Darth Vader from Star Wars!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/bi…

By: @anujav_97

📸: Dr Ming-Chih H/Journal of Natural History

🧵👇
This new-found crustacean, named Bathonymus yucatanensis, has 14 legs and is around 26 cm long — approximately 25 times larger than its closest relative, the common woodlouse.
While these blonde creatures seem pretty scary, the "Vanilla Vaders" are, in fact, harmless to humans.

Their huge size is only due to deep-sea gigantism — a phenomenon wherein ocean dwellers grow bigger than their terrestrial relatives due to lack of sunlight.

📸: SJADES 2018
Read 7 tweets
Aug 16, 2022
The Sun spewed out two consecutive coronal mass ejections on August 14-15, giving rise to a 'Cannibal CME'.

The scarier part? It's heading towards the Earth this week & could spark strong geomagnetic storms on Aug 18!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sp…

By: @ashmitagupta_21

🧵👇
A cloud of dark plasma erupted on the solar surface on Aug 14, launching a #CME that could side sweep the Earth's magnetic field.

Then, on Aug 15, an exploding magnetic filament launched another CME right at its tail.
This could be a Cannibal CME event where the second CME might overtake and gobble up the first, creating a mish-mash of the two.

Cannibal CMEs contain tangled magnetic fields and compressed plasmas that can spark strong geomagnetic storms.

📽️: Animation by Walt Feimer/NASA
Read 7 tweets
Aug 6, 2022
Japan's #Subaru Strategic Program has discovered a super-Earth four times the mass of our planet orbiting a red dwarf just 37 lightyears away.

The good news? This #exoplanet, named Ross 508b, might be habitable!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sp…

By: @ashmitagupta_21

🧵👇 Image
This super-Earth is a rocky world, on which a year is equal to just 11 Earth days.

The short orbit is down to the red dwarfs being a lot smaller than the Sun that centres our solar system. But the smaller sizes also make their gravitational fields less expansive than the Sun's. Image
Therefore, Ross 508b revolves around its red dwarf at a distance of just 5 million km. Mercury, in comparison, is about 60 million km from the Sun.

The short distance between this super-Earth & its red dwarf begs the question: how could it possibly be habitable? Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 15, 2022
#Japan is making grand plans of creating interplanetary #trains and champagne flute-like glass habitats in its bid to send and host humans on the #Moon and #Mars!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sp…

📸: Youtube SC/Kajima Corp.

Thread. 👇
An interplanetary transportation system dubbed the 'Hexatrack', which maintains a gravity of 1G during long-distance travel to mitigate the effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity, has been proposed by #Japanese researchers.
The #trains will also possess 'Hexacapsules', which are essentially hexagon-shaped capsules with a moving device in the middle.
Read 7 tweets
Jul 14, 2022
A new species of #dinosaur has just dropped and word on the street is that it’s pretty similar to the #TRex

In fact, researchers think this discovery could explain why these beasts evolved to have tiny arms!

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sc…

📸: Jorge A Gonzalez

Thread. 👇 Image
In 2012, the almost-complete skeleton of a new kind of #dinosaur was found in the northern Patagonia region of #Argentina.

The dinosaur has been christened #Meraxes gigas. The generic epithet is an ode to a dragon in the #GameOfThrones series.
Standing at the height of 11 m (36 ft) and weighing roughly 4000 kgs, the #dinosaur sported several crests, bumps and horns on its skull, which lent it a menacing appearance.

But the highlight of the findings is that the dinosaur had teeny-tiny arms, just like the #Trex! Image
Read 6 tweets
Jul 14, 2022
#NASA-led #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope's breathtaking images of the universe's past have taken the world by storm.

As we inch closer to unravelling more cosmic secrets, here's how researchers from #India plan to use the #JWST.

Read: weather.com/en-IN/india/sp…

Thread👇
#NASA had opened up submissions for Guaranteed Time Observations to reward scientists with 16% use of the JWST observatory for the first 3 cycles.

Out of the 1,173 proposals, two astronomers hail from India: Dr #JessyJose from @IiserTirupati & Dr #Puravankara from @TIFRScience.
Dr Jose, along with an international research team from the US, UK and Australia, will be examining the Galactic Centre Cloud (GCC) — the central molecular zone of our Milky Way — in April 2023.

They have been allotted 27.3 hours over the access period of 12 months.
Read 8 tweets

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