Friday, June 13, 2008

Amazing Banana Tree

Banana is the common name for a fruit and also the herbaceous plants of the genus Musa which produce the commonly eaten fruit. They are native to the tropical region of Southeast Asia and Australia. Today, they are cultivated throughout the tropics Banana plants are of the family Musaceae. They are cultivated primarily for their fruit, and to a lesser extent for the production of fibre and as ornamental plants. As the bananas are mainly tall, upright, and fairly sturdy, they are often mistaken for trees, when the truth is the main or upright stem is called a pseudostem, literally meaning "fake stem", which for some species can obtain a height of up to 2–8 m, with leaves of up to 3.5 m in length. Each pseudostem can produce a bunch of yellow, green, or even red bananas before dying and being replaced by another pseudostem.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Monday, June 9, 2008

SEA BOILING IMAGE

To the scientists' surprise, they found a huge diversity of organisms whose composition swung wildly over time. The 1998 eruption produced 35 species of bacteria, compared with 37 and 57 from 1999 and 2000. But the numbers of archaea -- ancient organisms often found in hot places like those thought to exist on the ancient earth -- went in the opposite direction, declining from 63 to 60 to 52, according to paper by the same authors in the April 2002 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Biologists say the recent discovery of the extremely high-temperature, iron-breathing organism by the University of Massachusetts scientists, who included Dr. Kazem Kashefi, suggests that the dark biosphere runs deeper and hotter than previously documented. And sulfur, they add, may turn out to play a smaller role than previously believed.