Delhi Planet Weekends – Nature’s Mystifying Facts

Yet another weekend and yes, yet another post to make you wiser and more knowledgable

Although we don’t realise it, there are many weird and bizarre phenomena that exist on our planet. It seems that god too used a lot of his creativity while making the earth and hid a lot of clues and facts in the simple things of nature, just like Da Vinci did with his paintings (See here). DelhiPlanet checks out a few of these:

Numbers Everywhere: The Amazing Fibonacci

One of nature’s most puzzling mysteries, concerns the numerical pattern known as the Fibonacci sequence. Named after a 13th century Pisan mathematician, but discovered by Sanskrit grammarian Pingala around 250 BC, in this sequence each successive number is the sum of the two that precede it. Thus : 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144…. is the pattern that emerges.

This pattern is considered a governing law of nature as it’s evident in so many natural forms including: your very own hand, number of flower petals, the grouping of leaves along a stem, the arrangement of “scales” on the outside of a pineapple and many more (check here for more information).

Twice the Pleasure: The Male Earwig

As the owner of not one, but two penises, both of them which are longer than its own body, male earwigs of the species Euborellia plebeja are remarkable even in the curious realm of insect genitalia. Even more remarkable however, is the fact that the insect managed to keep its prodigious endowment secret until scientists “disengaged” a mating couple.

Untouched Waters: Lake Vostok

Four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, the enormous Lake Vostok has been sealed off from the outside world for some 25 million years. Discovered in 1989, scientists are now debating the best way to explore its depths without contaminating its pristine waters. Should life be discovered in this extreme environment, then it is an indication that there may also be life on Jupiter’s frozen moon, Europa, where conditions are very similar.(Check here for more.)

Killer Touch: The Queen Ant

The queen ant in a black meat any colony ensures she stays in top posiition by secreting a sticky substance which her daughters find irresistible. Instead of nourishing her offspring however, the secretion renders them infertile. And you thought that humans were crazy after power and authority.

Note: Content for this article has been inspired from The Holland Herald magazine on KLM.