Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers have said.

While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said.

The 2,550 square km block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160 km spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne, researchers said yesterday.

Some 400 metres thick, the iceberg could fill Sydney Harbour more than 100 times over.

It could also disturb the area's exceptionally rich biodiversity, including a major colony of emperor penguins near Dumont d'Urville, site of a French scientific station, according to the scientists.

"The ice tongue was almost broken already. It was hanging like a loose tooth," said Benoit Legresy, a French glaciologist who has been monitoring the Metz Glacier via satellite images and on the ground for a decade in cooperation with Australian scientists.

The billion-tonne mass was dislodged by another, older iceberg, known as B9B, which split off in 1987.

PTI

Plotting, treachery rife in ant royal families

Social insects, ants in particular, are usually thought of as selfless entities willing to sacrifice everything for their comrades. However, research suggests that ant queens are also prepared to compromise the welfare of the entire colony in order to retain the throne.

A team from the University of Copenhagen, led by Luke Holman of the Centre for Social Evolution, found that ant queens are much more devious than previously thought.

Often, an ant colony has more than one queen. Multiple queens can produce a larger initial workforce in incipient colonies, increasing the chance that the colony will survive the hazardous first year.

But queens do not happily cohabit forever; soon after the young workers hatch, they begin to slaughter surplus queens until only one remains.

Ant queens were found to cleverly adjust new workers they produce for the colony. Queens produce fewer workers when sharing the colony with other queens, especially if the colony already has many developing workers.

Queens, therefore, seem to know when they can expect a showdown for the throne, and conserve energy accordingly.

Such strategic investment in worker production is complemented by sophisticated chemical communication by queens.

Ants have been called "walking chemical factories" because they produce many different odours for tasks such as recognising friends and enemies and signalling their status and role within the colony.

Workers appear to select the fertile queen as their ruler, based on smell, said a Copenhagen release.

"Execution of the most selfish ant queens by workers would increase the incentive for queens to be team-players that work hard to help the colony. This rudimentary 'legal system' could have helped ants to evolve their highly-advanced societies, just as in humans," says Holman.

IANS

Cannibal star is devouring a planet

Like the Roman god Saturn who ate his own children, a star 600 light years from Earth is slowly gobbling up one of its own planets, according to a study released on Wednesday in Nature, the British science journal.

The planet, whose discovery was reported last year, is a "gas giant" with a mass about 40 percent greater than that of Jupiter, the biggest planet of our Solar System, and with a radius 79 percent bigger.

But whereas Jupiter takes nearly 12 years to plod around the Sun, it takes WASP-12b a mere 26 hours to race around its star, WASP-12, located in the constellation of Auriga.

So close is its orbit that the gravitational tug of the star has helped to squeeze the planet into a prolate shape, meaning that it has taken the form of a rugby ball, or American football.

Searing heat is stripping away layers of the gas, whose mass is then captured by the star.

The disk of captured matter around the star may mask "a detectable resonant super-Earth," whose presence may cause WASP-12b to orbit in a remarkably egg-shaped path, suggests the study.

Most planets that orbit close to their sun have a more circular track.

The investigation is led by Shu-lin Li of the Department of Astronomy at the Peking University, Beijing.

More than 400 so-called exoplanets -- the term for planets that orbit stars other than the Sun -- have been spotted since 1995, although none has turned out to be a rocky, watery world like our own.

Most, like WASP-12b, are so-called "hot Jupiters," or huge gassy balls that are heated to scorching temperatures by proximity to their planets.

A planet with water would have to inhabit what has been termed the Goldilocks Zone, meaning that it is not so close that its precious water evaporates nor so far that the water freezes, but somewhere in between so that water can exist in liquid form.

IANS

Whale kills trainer as horrified spectators watch

A SeaWorld killer whale seized a trainer in its jaws and thrashed the woman around underwater, killing her in front of a horrified audience. It marked the third time the animal had been involved in a human death.

Distraught audience members were hustled out of the stadium immediately, and the park was closed yesterday.

Trainer Dawn Brancheau, 40, was one of the park's most experienced. It was not clear if she drowned or died from the thrashing.

A former contractor with SeaWorld told the Orlando Sentinel that the whale, Tilikum, is typically kept isolated from SeaWorld's other killer whales and that trainers were not allowed to get in the water with him because of his violent history.

There were conflicting accounts of the attack. The sheriff's office said Brancheau slipped or fell into the whale's tank, but at least one witness said the animal leaped from the water and dragged the woman in.

A retired couple from Michigan told The Associated Press that yesterday's killing happened as a noontime show was winding down, with some in the audience staying to watch the animals and trainers.

Spectator Eldon Skaggs said Brancheau was on a platform with the whale and was massaging it. He said the interaction appeared leisurely and informal.

PTI

Elephants communicate at low frequencies also

An elephant's trump is heard by all, but a new study has found that the animal can communicate at such low frequencies which are not audible to the human ears.

Researchers led by Matt Anderson of San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research studied the "secret language" of elephants.

They monitored the animal's growls that cannot be heard by human ears. These growls are only partly audible as almost two-thirds of these calls are at frequencies that are too low to be picked up by our hearing.

To learn more about the inaudible part of the growl, the team attached a microphone sensitive to these low frequencies and a GPS tracking system to eight of the zoo's female elephants.

They then correlated the noises the animals were making with what they were doing and were able to learn that pregnant females use this low frequency communication to announce to the rest of their herd that they are about to give birth.

"We're excited to learn of the hierarchy within the female herd and how they interact and intercede with one another," Anderson was quoted as saying by the BBC.

"We've seen that after their long gestation of over two years, in the last 12 days we see a manipulation of the low part of the growl, the low part that we can't hear.

"This we believe is to announce to the rest of the herd that the baby is imminent," Anderson said adding this warns others to look out for predators.

The team are further analysing the data to learn more about this secret elephant language.

PTI

The deeper you look, the deeper you become

Via
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Bonobos share food like humans

The act of sharing something with another may not be entirely exclusive to humans, as a new study has found that bonobos, a sister species of chimpanzees, don't hesitate to share their food with others.

Researchers, from the Duke University in North Carolina, who conducted their study on unrelated pairs of hungry bonobos at Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Democratic Republic of Congo, found that the primates choose to share their food with their other hungry companions, instead of eating themselves.

For their study, the researchers kept one animal in an adjacent room and gave food to others. The test subjects had the opportunity to immediately eat the food or to use a "key" to open a door to an adjacent empty room or a room that had another bonobo in it.

The test subjects could easily see into the adjacent rooms, so they know which one was empty and which was occupied.

"We found that the test subjects preferred to voluntarily open the recipient's door to allow them to share highly desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone -- with no signs of aggression, frustration, or change in the speed or rate of sharing across trials," said lead author Brian Hare.

"This stable sharing pattern was particularly striking since in other, non-sharing contexts, bonobos are averse to food loss and adjust to minimize such losses."

Reporting their findings in the Current Biology journal, the authors pointed out that it is possible that the bonobos in their study chose to share in order to obtain favours in the future.

Additional studies are needed to gain further insight into why bonobos and humans share.

"Given the continued debate about how to characterize the motivation underlying costly sharing in humans, it will certainly require future research to probe more precisely what psychological mechanisms motivate and maintain the preference we observe here in bonobos for voluntary, costly sharing," added Hare.

PTI

Hottest temperature ever heads science to Big Bang

Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.

They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds.

But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed.

"That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons," Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor told a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington on Monday.

These particles make up atoms, but they are themselves made up of smaller components called quarks and gluons.

What the physicists are looking for are tiny irregularities that can explain why matter clumped out of the primeval hot soup.

They also hope to use their findings for more practical applications -- such as in the field of "spintronics" that aims to make smaller, faster and more powerful computing devices.

They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), a particle accelerator and collider that is 2.4 mile around and buried 12 feet underground in Upton, New York to collide gold ions billions of times.

"RHIC was designed to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe," Vigdor said. They calculate the 4 trillion degree temperature gets pretty close.

"How hot is it?" he asked.

In comparison, "The predicted melting temperature of protons and neutrons is 2 trillion degrees. The temperatures at the core of a typical type-2 supernova is 2 billion degrees," he said.

PTI

Why fewer stars are born today than in the early universe

University of Arizona (UA) astronomers have helped solve why fewer stars are born today than in the early universe, a mystery that has long puzzled scientists.

“We have known for more than a decade that in the early universe - three to five billion years after the Big Bang or nine to eleven billion years before today - galaxies churned out new stars at a much faster rate than they do now,” said Michael Cooper, a postdoctoral Spitzer fellow at the UA’s Steward Observatory.

“What we haven’t known is whether this was because they somehow formed stars more efficiently or because more raw material - molecular gas and dust - was available,” said his colleague Benjamin Weiner, an assistant astronomer at Steward Observatory and one of the co-authors on the paper.

Compared to the average galaxy today, which produces stars at rates equaling about 10 times the mass of our Sun per year, the rate of star formation in those same galaxies appears to have been up to 10 times higher when they were younger. In its efforts to find an answer, the scientific community has tended to turn telescopes toward few, rare, very bright objects.

By focusing on the rare, bright objects, the results obtained cast doubts as to whether they are true for the majority of galaxies populating the universe.

He and his coworkers took advantage of more sensitive instruments and refined surveying methods to hone in on more than a dozen ‘normal’ galaxies.

“Our study is the first to look at the ‘five-foot eight’ kinds of galaxies, if you will,” Copper said.

“Our results therefore are more representative of the typical galaxy out there. For the first time, we are getting a much more complete picture of how galaxies make stars,” he added.

Cooper and his colleagues used data from an earlier study, in which they had surveyed about 50,000 galaxies, to pick a sample representing an ‘average’ population of galaxies.

They then pointed various telescopes toward their study objects.

“By observing those galaxies in the infrared spectrum and measuring their radio frequency emissions, we were able to make their cold gas clouds visible,” explained Cooper.

“What we found now is that galaxies like the ancestors of the Milky Way had a much greater supply of gas than the Milky Way does today,” said Weiner.

“Thus, they have been making stars according to the same laws of physics, but more of them in a given time because they had a greater supply of material,” he added.

ANI

Researchers design archaeological 'time machine'

Researchers have designed a new archaeological tool which could answer key questions in human evolution.

The new calibration curve, which extends back 50,000 years, is a major landmark in radiocarbon dating -- the method used by archaeologists and geoscientists to establish the age of carbon-based materials. It could also help determine the effect of climate change on human adaptation.

The curve called INTCAL09 not only extends radiocarbon calibration but also considerably improves earlier parts of the curve.

It has taken nearly 30 years for researchers to produce a calibration curve this far back in time. Since the early 1980s, an international working group called INTCAL has been working on the project.

The project was led by Queen's University Belfast's Paula Reimer and Gerry McCormac, professor at the Centre for Climate, the Environment and Chronology (14CHRONO) at Queen's and statisticians at the University of Sheffield.

Ron Reimer and Mike Baillie, professor emeritus from Queen's School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, also contributed to the work.

Reimer said: "The new radiocarbon calibration curve will be used worldwide by archaeologists and earth scientists to convert radiocarbon ages into a meaningful time scale comparable to historical dates or other estimates of calendar age," according to a Queen's release.

"It is significant because this agreed calibration curve now extends over the entire normal range of radiocarbon dating, up to 50,000 years before today."

"Comparisons of the new curve to ice-core or other climate archives will provide information about changes in solar activity and ocean circulation," Reimer concluded.

These findings have been been published in Radiocarbon.

PTI

Dark matter 'seen for first time'

For over 80 years, it has eluded the finest minds in science. Now, planetary scientists believe they may have finally caught the first glimpse of dark matter, the mysterious hidden substance accounting for three-quarters of matter in the universe.

No one knows what it is, but physicists came up with the theory of dark matter to explain strange anomalies in the rotational speed and clustering of galaxies. It is believed to have played a central role in the evolution of galaxies and large scale structure of the universe.

Now, after nine years of searching, detectors buried some 2,000 feet underground in Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) observatory, located half-a-mile underground in the disused Soudan iron mine in Minnesota, registered two "hits" by what could turn out to be dark matter particles.

Both bear the hallmarks of the "weakly interacting massive particles" or "Wimps", one of the most likely dark matter candidates, according to the scientists.

Though two detections, published in the latest edition of the 'Science' journal, are not quite enough to clinch the discovery, they believe five detections will be sufficient to confirm the presence of Wimps.

"With one or two events, it's tough. The numbers are too small. Many people believe we are extremely close -- not just us, but other experiments.

"It is expected or certainly hoped that in the next five years or so, someone will see a clear signal," 'The Daily Telegraph' quoted Dr Tarek Saab of University of Florida, one of the physicists working on CDMS II, as saying.

PTI

Lack of oxygen forced animals to breathe

A massive plunge in global oxygen levels, not freshwater frolicking, could have led to the rise of air-breathing animals, argues a new study.

Researchers made the claim after analyzing the fossilized remains of a new lungfish species from Gogo in northern Western Australia that lived roughly 375 million years ago.

Doctoral candidate Alice Clement from Australian National University (ANU) and John Long, its adjunct professor, now based at the Natural History Museum in US, have just conducted this study.

It linked low global oxygen levels in the mid-Devonian period with the fossil Rhinodipterus, a marine lungfish species discovered in 2008 that is believed to be the first of its kind.

"The Rhinodipterus specimen has a number of features that suggest it was air breathing, including a long mouth cavity and articulations of its cranial ribs, which are important in the living forms of lungfish air-gulping behaviour," said Clement from the Research School of Earth Sciences at ANU.

"Yet Rhinodipterus lived in the ocean, not in freshwater, which runs counter to the standard theory that fish evolved the ability to breathe air once they moved to freshwater habitats."

In order to explain the existence of air-breathing adaptations in a marine lungfish, researchers looked to environmental factors other than habitat.

They turned to existing knowledge about global oxygen levels in the Devonian, which fell to as low as 12 percent of the total atmosphere. Today oxygen levels are around 20 percent.

"This plunge in global oxygen levels would have been a strong selection pressure on lungfish and other animals, including the tetrapods - the fish-like ancestors of land animals," explains long.

"This makes us believe that breathing air arose twice at this early time in vertebrate evolution: once in lungfishes, and once in the fish lineage leading to land animals, and ultimately to us."

The researchers say this discovery adds an important piece to the puzzle of how life on Earth evolved. The next step will entail searching for more specimens similar to the Rhinodipterus in order to bolster the theory, said an ANU release.

IANS

Sumatran tiger may become extinct in 2015

The endangered Sumatran tiger in Indonesia's Riau province is predicted to become extinct in the next five years as illegal hunting and habitat loss threatens their survival, an activist said on Sunday.

"With the conditions of the existing threats, Sumatran tigers in Riau is predicted to become extinct the most quickly in five years. It may start from the extinction of ecosystems, where tigers are left no longer allowed to breed," said Osmantri from the Animal Trade Monitoring Coordinator of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Riau.

The threat from habitat loss and illegal hunting are not comparable with the ability to breed tigers, the state-run Antara news agency quoted Osmantri as saying, explaining a female tiger can expect to live in the wild for 15 years.

During the lifetime, each individual can only give birth three times, he said. Sadly, only two maximum of the cubs are managed to survive until adulthood, while weak law enforcement is believed as the main cause of the difficulty of combating tiger poaching activities.

During the period 1998-2009, as many as 46 tigers were found dead as a result of man-tiger conflicts and illegal hunting, meaning that an average of seven tigers had been murdered every-year in Riau province. Only three cases of tiger poaching ended up in court in that period.

"But jail sentences handed down by the judges did not trigger a deterrent effect because the perpetrators are only punished up to one year in prison," Osmantri said.

"Law enforcement against poaching and killing tigers in Riau is the most weakest than other regions in Sumatra."

Environmentalists said the destruction of the species' natural habitat by illegal logging triggered the rise of conflicts between tigers and humans living in nearby forests.

There are between 300 and 400 Sumatra tigers left in the wild. The Sumatran tiger is believed to be the last remaining sub-species of tiger indigenous to Indonesia. The Bali and Java tigers are believed to be extinct.

IANS

Scientists 'grow' edible insects in Costa Rica

The day when restaurants will serve garlic grasshoppers or beetle larva skewers is getting closer in Costa Rica, where scientists are "growing" insects for human consumption.

Entomologist Manuel Zumbado's research into this alternative food source is inspired by practices in Africa, where insects have long been part of people's diet.

With its rainforests playing host to countless insect species, including thousands that have yet to be identified, Costa Rica is a perfect breeding ground for the work.

From leaf-cutting ants to rhinoceros beetles and a dizzying flurry of butterflies, the Central American nation is also a haven of ecotourism. But is it the next hotbed of mouth-watering bugs?

The food diversification program at the National Biodiversity Institute in Santo Domingo de Heredia, a small city close to the capital San Jose, looks into indigenous insect species.

But it also examines mushrooms, inspired by their importance in diets from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

At the institute, Costa Rican scientists mingle with Bhutan mycology expert Ugyen Yangchen and Elisabeth Zannou, an entomologist from Benin.

Costa Rica and Benin share historical ties, as many slaves were taken from the western African country to Central America during the colonial era.

"Benin knows a lot about insect consumption and Bhutan about eating mushrooms, while Costa Rica is bringing its experience in managing biodiversity," Marianella Feoli, who manages the foundation coordinating the research program, told AFP.

In Benin, termites, grasshoppers and crickets, as well as butterfly and moth larvae are a common part of people's diet, explained Zumbado, who traveled with his colleagues to explore the phenomenon in the coastal country.

"In other countries, gourmet restaurants serve insects," he noted.

"In the beginning, people thought we were a bit crazy, but I think this is an alternative, not only as a survival food, but also as a cultural concept."

Esperanzas, a large grasshopper species with long antennae that abound in Costa Rica's forests and rural areas are "far more savory than shrimp" when seasoned with garlic, according to the researcher. Zumbado should know -- he has consumed scores of insects during his travels in Costa Rica and Benin.

PTI

Solarstorm in 2012 could cause blackouts at Olympics

A likely solar storm in 2012, coinciding with the Olympics in London, could disrupt all communication systems on earth, including live broadcasting of the mega-sporting event, scientists have warned.

"The sun's activity has a strong influence on the earth. Space weather can affect the whole population. The Olympics could be bang in the middle of the next solar maximum which could affect the transmissions of satellites," said Professor Richard Harrison, head of space physics at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

The warning comes in the wake of scientists detecting the signs of a fresh cycle of sunspots on the sun's surface that could lead to a solar storm.

Harrison said: "The Sun is now waking up. The first significant active regions of a new solar activity cycle are forming. In the last two weeks, we have seen the first major flares of a new cycle".

The scientists warn that at the peak of the cycle, the flares erupting from the surface of the sun could fling billions of tonnes of electrically-charged matter towards the earth that could result in a communications blackout.

They predict that the cycle would be at its peak during 2012 when the Olympics are scheduled and fear that the ensuing solar storm could jam telecommunications satellites and internet links transmitting live coverage.

Sunspots are the physical manifestation of the Sun's natural fluctuations in magnetic activity which operate on a roughly 11-year cycle.

PTI

Weird Fish With Transparent Head

Macropinna microstoma is the only species of fish in the genus Macropinna, belonging to Opisthoproctidae, the barreleye family. It is recognized for a highly unusual transparent, fluid-filled dome on its head, through which the lenses of its eyes can be seen.

The eyes have a barrel shape and can be rotated to point either forward or straight up, looking through the fish's transparent dome. M. microstoma has a tiny mouth and most of its body is covered with large scales.

The fish normally hangs nearly motionless in the water, at a depth of about 600 metres (2,000 ft) to 800 metres (2,600 ft), using its large fins for stability and with its eyes directed upward. In the low light conditions it is assumed the fish detects prey by its silhouette. MBARI researchers Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler observed that when prey such as small fish and jellyfish are spotted, the eyes rotate like binoculars, facing forward as it turns its body from a horizontal to a vertical position to feed. Robison speculates that M. microstoma steals food from siphonophores.

M. microstoma has been known to science since 1939, by Chapman, but is not known to have been photographed alive until 2004. Old drawings do not show the transparent dome, as it is usually destroyed when brought up from the depths.

Text: Wikipedia

How microscopic creatures survive without sex for 50 million years

Reports have it that there is one creature in the world that can survive without sex for 50 million years, by simply drying up.

For most animals, sex is not only a way of producing the next generation, but a means of keeping enemies at bay.

"If an organism stops having sex and crystallizes its genome, all of (its enemies) catch up with it evolutionarily and can quickly overwhelm it," explained Paul Sherman, a neurobiologist at Cornell University in New York.

This idea, known as the Red Queen Hypothesis, helps explain why most animals go to great lengths to find mates and have sex.

The bdelloid rotifers, microscopic asexual freshwater invertebrates, have survived by abstaining from sex for the last 30 to 50 million years.

In that time the rotifer has proliferated into more than 450 species found around the globe.

In contrast, other creatures that reproduce without sex - such as the nematode worm - are expected to die out after several hundred thousand years.

When faced with the threat of parasitic fungi, the rotifers dry up and allow themselves to be blown away by the wind.

They come back to life when exposed to freshwater. Scientists estimate that nearly 100 rotifers can fit into a single drop of water.

So while most animals are locked in evolutionary arms races with their foes, bdelloid rotifers escape them altogether simply by being carried on the wind.

To figure out the bdelloids'' trick, Sherman and his colleague Chris Wilson, also at Cornell, infected populations of rotifers in freshwater with deadly fungi and found they all died within a few weeks.

The team then dried out other infected populations for various lengths of time before re-hydrating them.

They found that the rotifers could live longer without water than their fungi enemies.

The longer the infected populations remained dried out, the more likely they were to survive.

In a second experiment, the scientists placed the desiccated, fungus-exposed rotifers in a wind chamber.

They observed that the rotifers were able to blow away and leave the fungi behind.

The scientists think that by drying out and drifting - sometimes for thousands of miles - the rotifers can continually establish new, uninfected populations.

"The bdelloids are playing this never-ending game of hide-and-seek," said Sherman.

ANI

"Mozzquit": An eco-friendly mosquito trap

An innovative mosquito apparatus that mimics the human body, attracts mosquitoes and kills them without use of any harmful chemicals is set to hit the markets soon.

"Mozzquit" is one of the prize-winning products that was displayed at an exhibition on the occasion of the vision summit organised by the India Semiconductor Association here.

The product, priced at Rs 2,990, would be available in the market in two months, its brainchild, Igantius Orwin Noronha, Managing Director of Leowin Solutions Pvt Ltd, told agency.

Noronha claimed Mozzquit is effective even in an area of 10,000 square feet, provided there are no "wall barriers" (without pillars). It attracts, traps and kills harmful mosquitoes and does not use harmful chemicals such as those found in other products.

"It's not a repellent. The apparatus attracts and kills mosquitoes instantly and they are collected in removable containers fitted in the bottom. The operating cost is negligible -- 25 paise electricity cost daily and some Rs 50 every two years for replacement of small parts," Noronha, a commerce graduate, explained.

"It even sucks invisible and minute dust particles", he said.

Noronha said the National Institute of Malaria Research has certified the product and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research initiatlly gave him Rs 75,000 as micro finance assistance.

Now DSIR has given him Rs 45 lakh to commercialise the product, he said.

In the meanwhile, he is raising Rs 3.5 crore to Rs four crore by offering 20 per cent equity in his company to Indian Angel Network to fuel his distribution, marketing and sales plans.

The product idea came to him after Noronha saw a "mosquito magnet" some years ago carrying a huge price tag of Rs 1.1 lakh, which even needed to be fitted with three LPG cylinders.

PTI