SCIENCE NEWS - World's largest orchid show kicks off in New York.

The 8th Annual Orchid Show at the Botanical Garden in New York started on Thursday, March 4, 2010.The exhibition will run till April 11 and it is expected to showcase some 7,000 orchids.

The New York Botanical Garden was founded in 1891 and it draws over 800,000 visitors annually. This Orchid Show is titled ‘Cuba in Flower’ and it is the largest one of its kind in the world.

SCIENCE NEWS - 2010 is the deadline set for reversing declines in biodiversity.

This is a poignant year for anyone who cares about the rich diversity of life on planet Earth. 2010 was supposed to be a milestone. The 193 nations participating in a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity had agreed to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.”

Fat chance. The official document assessing the 2010 global outlook for biodiversity won’t be released until May, but conservationists and trend watchers predict at best a few bright points among worsening losses. Even a preview statement from the treaty secretariat says that, as of late January, “all the indications are that the 2010 target has not been met.”

Policy has achieved little for bio-diversity, but scientists have fared better in coming to understand just what biodiversity means for the fundamental workings of an ecosystem. From grasslands to oceans, ecologists are finding that greater diversity tends to boost an ecosystem’s productivity and reinforce its stability.

Biologists around the world are thus bootstrapping themselves out of despair and seizing the occasion to explain biodiversity and why it matters.

Entomologist Scott Miller is hosting a small event to mark the beginning of 2010, which the United Nations has declared the International Year of Biodiversity. Miller’s mini–New Year’s event may be low on champagne, but it’s a world-class demonstration of what biodiversity is. He’s using insects to convey the variety of life by giving a little tour of his workplace, which happens to be the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Miller starts with a few shallow wooden drawers topped with glass. The collection’s 135,000 drawers hold specimens from just about every kind of place an insect has ever been: tiny leaf miners that excavate within a single mangrove leaf and harvester ants that scurry over desert sands, for example.

All these insect habitats — the whole range of ecosystems on the planet — rank as a form of biodiversity, Miller says. He lifts trays holding insects grown from larvae picked out of fruits in Papua New Guinea. The assembled rows appear to contain duplicates of a tiny brown-winged thingy, but his trained eye recognizes dozens of species.

Another tray holds dozens of postage-stamp–sized brown moths pinned in evenly spaced rows. The moths also look the same at first glance, and Miller says this drawer holds nothing but a single species of spruce budworm, an infamous pest of eastern forests in North America. Staring closely, though, reveals shades of brown, from mahogany and chocolate to almost beige. And the wings are mottled with yet tinier variations on the theme.

These individual differences count as biodiversity too. Differences at the ecosystem, species and genetic levels all matter, Miller says.

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SCIENCE NEWS - In case you love the idea of a PET SPIDER!!!

People do love their pets. Some people bring dogs into their families and others prefer cats. And then there are the people who love their spiders. Many spider-lovers have a soft spot for tarantulas, big, hairy creatures that don’t have venom. And because tarantulas are usually docile — which means they’re calm and not mean — some people even buy them for children.

If you’re contemplating taking home a tarantula, however, first think about the recent case of a 29-year-old tarantula owner in England. It may show why these spiders make lousy pets. He had conjunctivitis in his right eye, which means the membrane that surrounded his eyeball had become irritated.

His doctors were puzzled because the swelling wasn’t responding to medicine, so they took a closer look at the eyeball. In a recent study, the doctors reported seeing “fine hair-like projections” sticking out of the man’s eye. When told about his hairy eye, the man knew exactly what the fine hair-like projections were: tarantula hairs.

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SCIENCE NEWS - If you are a teen habitual of sleeping late, Read this!!

Maybe this has happened to you: In the middle of class, while you pretended to be paying attention to the teacher’s lecture, your eyelids started to droop. You began having second thoughts about staying up late on Facebook the night before.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. Your computer screen may be to blame. And your clock may be too. Not the clock on your nightstand, but the one in your head. All mammals have a clock located inside their brains. Similar to your bedside alarm clock, your internal clock runs on a 24-hour cycle. This cycle, called a circadian rhythm, helps regulate when you wake, when you eat and when you sleep.

Somewhere around puberty, something happens in the timing of the biological clock. The clock pushes forward, so adolescents and teens are unable to fall asleep as early as they used to. When your mother tells you it’s time for bed, your body may be pushing you to stay up for several hours more. And the light coming from your computer screen or TV could be pushing you to stay up even later.

This shift is natural for teens. But staying up very late and sleeping late can get your body’s clock out of sync with the cycle of light and dark. It can also make it hard to get out of bed in the morning and may bring other problems, too. Teenagers are put in a kind of a gray cloud when they don’t get enough sleep, says Mary Carskadon, a sleep researcher at Brown University in Providence, R.I. It affects their mood and their ability to think and learn.

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