Delhi automobile Expo 2012 collapse and anarchy

2012-01-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

The 2012 Delhi Auto Expo, which the majority would have consideration is an perfect platform to showcase cars, vehicles, and concept has obviously left terribly wrong. For starter, the auto show jointly organized by Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India (ACMA), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) have collectively failed. The CII was wholly in charge of registration and sharing of media passes. Except for a few pass that made it to Gate 1 on the worried day, the rest of the passes weren't printed or register. The economy grace here was the executives from Mavcomm Consulting Pvt. Ltd., who work tirelessly to appease irate media, and arrange for day passes for those left in the lurch. Of course this in no way justify the multiple trips many had to build to Pragati Maidan to find a solution.

Amazing World of Insect-Wing Color Exposed

2011-01-04T03:50:00.000-08:00

A closer look at apparently drab, transparent insect wings has revealed realms of before unappreciated color, visible to the naked eye yet overlooked for centuries.

Until now, the wing colors of many flies and wasps were sent away as random iridescence. But they may be as trait and marvelous as the much-studied, much-celebrated wings of butterflies and beetles.

“Given favorable light conditions, they display a world of brightly decorative wings that are apparently unnoticed by contemporary biologists,” wrote researchers led by University of Lund entomologists Ekaterina Shevtsova and Christer Hansson in a December 3 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.

Wasp and fly wings are made from two dense layers of transparent chitin, with light bouncing off both layers and mixing to produce color. The same is true of oil slicks and soap foam, and scientists considered see-through wing coloration “a soap bubble iridescence effect, with randomly changing colors flashing over the wing surface,” wrote the researchers.

Instead, the researchers found that surface differences in chitin filtered out the iridescence. Remaining colors proved to be steady, and were visible from almost any angle. They varied consistently between species and sex.

Generations of biologists seem to have missed this partly because they didn’t look for it, and partly because the colors are most obvious against a dark background. Against a white background, they’re imperceptible which is exactly how most entomologists study transparent wings.

“You hold the wing up against the light, so you can see the veins,” said study co-author Daniel Janzen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you’re looking through a microscope, you try to get a clear view at the back the wing. It’s the antithesis of getting wing color.”

The researchers studied wings under microscopes, against black backgrounds. But once Janzen, who breeds wasps for his research on caterpillar-parasite symbioses, started to look, colors could be seen by the naked eye as wings passed over insects’ black bodies.

“They flash like little diamonds,” he said.

The researchers think the coloration has specific functions, particularly for mating, just as it does in butterflies and beetles and other insects with better-appreciated markings.

The patterns will also help scientists distinguish between species difficult to differentiate in other ways. Already the researchers used transparent wing colors to identify three new species of wasp.

According to Janzen, at least a dozen other orders of insects, spanning dragonflies and cockroaches and grasshoppers, have transparent wings likely to be as colorful as those of wasps and flies.

“I envision taxonomists going back to their animals, and looking to them in a new light,” he said. “It’s like discovering a whole new piece of the animal.”

stelladellasperanza

Delhi automobile Expo 2012 collapse and anarchy

Amazing World of Insect-Wing Color Exposed