Weeds can be useful

Weeds may soon turn out to be friends in disguise, for researchers at A.B.N. Seal College in Cooch Behar, West Bengal, have developed a method of cultivating mushrooms that puts them to good use. Mixed with rice straw in a 1:1 wet weight ratio, these plants — otherwise undesirable — could be utilised to grow oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus, locally called Chhatu), thereby helping in organic waste management too. The work was reported in the journal Bioresource Technology. The botanists chose weeds such as Leonotis sp (Hejurchei), Sida acuta (Berela), Parthenium argentatum, Ageratum conyzoides (Dhonchuty), Cassia sophera (Kalkasunde), Tephrosia purpurea (Boneel) and Lantana camara (Chotra), which were dried, chopped and mixed with rice straw. This became the spawn on which the mushrooms were grown. Leonotis sp served as the best substrate. This alternative substrate not only increased the mushrooms’ protein content but also reduced the production time.

Whale ears

By studying fossils of the earliest whales, palaeontologist Sunil Bajpai of the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, has pieced together the process through which the whale ear changed from an organ designed to hear in air to one adapted to picking up acoustic waves underwater. Bajpai and his colleagues have shown how sections of the animal’s outer ear and bones gradually changed for underwater hearing. The earliest cetaceans were the 52 million-year-old Pakicetids, and they had land mammal ears, say the scientists. Protocetids were the first to display a genuine underwater ear. And by 38 million years ago, the Basilosaurids possessed ears further adapted to the water. Last year, Bajpai had shown how whales lost their hindlegs between 45 million and 35 million years ago — another process of adaptation to the water.