Match the pictures, the headlines and the news items.
Rio de Janeiro, Tuesday, 8 March 2016: This is a heartwarming story of the friendship between a penguin and a 71 year old Brazilian man called Joao Pereira de Souza. Joao is a retired bricklayer who lives in Proveta, a fishing village close to the coast of Rio de Janeiro. One day in 2011, he found a four month old Magellanic penguin on the beach near his house. The penguin was starving and was covered in oil. Joao brought him home. Over a week, Joao gently cleaned the penguin’s feathers and fed him sardines (fish) till the bird was stronger. After that Joao tried to release him in the sea but every time the bird swam back to his home.
Joao named the penguin Dindim. Dindim stayed with Joao for nearly 11 months. In February, he got new feathers and coat. One day,
he disappeared. People thought Dindim had left Joao’s house.
Imagine Joao’s surprise when a few months later, Dindim walked up to him on the beach and returned home with him. For the last five years, Dindim has been following this routine. He goes away towards the end of January and returns in June. Where does he go? Magellanic Penguins swim thousands of kilometres to go to their breeding spot on the southern coast of Argentina and Chile Every year Dindim makes the trip South, and swims back home to stay with Joao again.
You are not allowed to keep wild animals as pets in Brazil. But in this rare case, it is Dindim the Magellanic penguin who chooses to stay with his human friend every year!
Ahmedabad, Feb 15, 2016:
A team of Indian and German scientists working near Bhuj in the Kutch region of Gujarat had found a big fossil of a dinosaur in a hill in Lodai village. On Saturday, they found a few more fossils. The new fossils include skull, jaw and some teeth of dinosaur. Their work of excavation or digging very very carefully still goes
- It will take some time to take the fossils out. A sample of the fossils found earlier has been sent to Munich, Germany for further testing.
The fossils show that the dinosaur may have been 10-15 metres long. It was carnivorous (the meat eating type.) It lived 135 million (13.5 crores) years ago. This could be the oldest dinosaur fossil found in this century.
Fossil remains of other dinosaurs have been found earlier in the same region. Scientists think that at least 13 species of dinosaurs roamed this region once upon a time – more than one hundred million (10 crores) years ago. Later on, due to a meteor strike, or volcanic eruption or some such reason all these animals were destroyed.
February 11, 2016: For the first time in history scientists have detected ‘Gravitation Waves’. Many people believe that this could be the greatest discovery of this century. It was made possible by the Advanced LIGO Project (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) set up for this purpose. The LIGO project includes two identical wave detectors located about 3000 kilometres away from each other.
Einstein, the great man of Science had guessed long ago that these waves exist but in those days there was no way to prove that. After nearly a hundred years, he has been proved right by a group of about 900 scientists working on the project in many nations including India.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel outward from their source. They are generated in certain gravitational interactions. On 11 February 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration team announced that they had made the first observation of gravitational waves caused by two black holes colliding against each other about one billion light years ago. Detecting the ripple or wave is a remarkable accomplishment.