Mr. Negi has personally turned the barren land in the cold desert of Himachal Pradesh into a green oasis. (Source: YouTube) In 1977, the Government of India began an ambitious program to reduce the negative effects of desertification in the hot and cold deserts of this Asian country. Mr. Anand Dhawaj Negi was working in the finance department in charge of the Desert Development Program at the time and had seen millions of dollars spent with no real results. Whenever he asked the scientists and program officials about the results, the answer was always that they lacked the technology to grow any sustainable crops in harsh environments. desert . The son of a farmer himself, Negi was tired of excuses and took a leave of absence in 1999 to fix the problem himself. In 2003, he decided to quit his job to focus all of his energy on his growing desert oasis. Mr. Negi has personally turned the barren land in the cold desert of Himachal Pradesh into a green oasis just for everyone, especially the farmer struggling in the region, seeing desert reclamation as entirely possible. It was not an easy thing to do, but the former official knew what he had to do and had the ambition and patience to get through it. Mr. Negi’s first attempt failed as the seeds did not have enough water to grow. He overcame this first challenge by planting by contour, tilling the soil along a consistent height to capture rainwater and reduce soil erosion. At the same time he works with the local community to create irrigation canal The shallows channel runoff from glaciers about 25km away. After witnessing this process, the local irrigation department also began to cooperate. “The irrigation department supplies water to this area. Before that, water was not provided until before June. I connected to the Kuhls area and managed to get a water supply in April and May. When we did, the Irrigation Department also cooperated and ensured a regular water supply here,” Mr. Negi told Down to Earth. But water is just one of the challenges this frigid desert region poses. Sandy soil lacking nutrients is another problem. To provide enough nutrients for the crops he wanted to grow, Mr. Negi started a farm with about 300 Chigu goats and mixed their manure with earthworms to effectively double the nitrogen content of the soil. . This also helps the clover hectares he planted around the oasis to thrive. In the past, clover would fade away as new plants grew. It was the clover growing area that overcame the problem Mr. Negi had at first, a rodent attack. These species will come to eat the delicious plants, so the farmer must plant clover in the legume family around the more valuable crops. Because hares love clover, when there is an abundance of this plant, they don’t bother with other plants. Since starting his job in Himachal Pradesh, Mr. Negi has spent all his money experimenting with combining local farming techniques with more scientific farming methods. It’s a laborious process, but over time the tree mortality rate drops from about 85% to just 1%. After proving that valuable crops such as peas, potatoes, green beans, apples and apricots could be grown even in harsh desert environments, the former official began to focus on long-lasting greenery. years, as he considers them essential to combat climate change in the region. “My first priority here is reforestation. Fake acacia is the most planted. Then there are willows and wild apricots. As for fruit trees and other crops, including green beans, I planted them only as a model for people to replicate,” said Mr. Negi. With just the help of two volunteers, Mr. Anand Dhawaj Negi transformed a cold desert area of ​​more than 90 hectares into a green oasis, receiving praise from both locals and scientists. People come from far and wide to witness this real-life miracle, some buying Negi’s natural fertilizer to grow their own crops and others bringing their livestock to eat clover, the fodder for livestock. cattle are considered the best in the region. Mr. Anand Dhawaj Negi has turned a cold desert area of ​​more than 90 hectares into a green oasis. Sadly, Anand Dhawaj Negi, the desert healer, passed away last month at the age of 74 from a stroke. He will be remembered as a local hero and the green oasis project hopes to be preserved as a reminder that nothing is impossible. Negi’s family intends to continue his work, but has asked the government to take responsibility for the oasis and help the family in its conservation. Virender Sappa Negi, Mr. Negi’s wife, told The Better India news site: ‘Before he said goodbye to us, he planned to plant some evergreen or conifers such as pines and deciduous trees. We want to fulfill these last wishes of his. In addition, we want the state government to take responsibility for this oasis so that his work can inspire future generations.” Anand Dhawaj Negi has become one of the many Indian legends who devoted their lives to afforestation like Uttarakhan’s “Tree Man” or Aditya and Poonam Singh.

Fiona Adams, an Australian farmer, holds a rat that was killed by her dog. Photo: Sydney Morning Herald. As cats give up chasing mice and dogs risk death from ingesting rat bait, farmers across Australia have no choice but to improvise to deal with the raging rat disaster. For Eris Fleming, an artist and rancher on her family farm near Bakers Swamp in New South Wales, Australia, the creative approach was to create mini water traps – 15 – everywhere around my house. Mr. Fleming, 78, has seen the current large population of rats once before, in 1984. Although he initially tried placing rat baits like his neighbors, his German Shepherd “started eating the bait faster than the mice.” His dog started bleeding and needed urgent and expensive care to stay alive at the local veterinary clinic. “Vets are going to make a lot of money in this short time,” he said. Rats that have eaten bait will eventually decompose on the ceiling, in the walls and under the floorboards. “The stench is unbelievable,” he said. And so, buckets of water, narrow curtain rods coated with PVC and a layer of canola oil, and some peanut butter decoys, all designed to trap and kill rodents relentlessly. . Just like that, every morning, Mr. Fleming started by collecting dead mice, at least 300 a day. They will then be buried away from the house. It took him three hours a day to clear the bucket of dead rats, dig, bury the rats and reset the trap. However, he also saves time from having to clean every surface, such as clearing rat droppings off the table, and getting rodents out of bed or even out of the refrigerator. Several of Fleming’s neighbors followed his method, and they all reported massive exterminations of rats. Fleming currently counts only a handful of dead rats each morning, but the significant and welcome drop is probably more related to the fact that the rat population is turning to forage elsewhere, such as near Sydney than. Other techniques used by people in his county include a woman mixing powder with plaster to trick rats, although that still risks the rat decomposing in hard-to-reach nooks and crannies. Elsewhere, many people prefer to use traps made of expandable latex rings – like those used to castrate pets. Rats were killed by traps made of expandable rubber latex rings. Photo: Sydney Morning Herald. Improvisation will probably still be required as the supply of rat bait and rat traps continues to be strained. Rat-killer retailer Bunnings says demand started picking up in December and accelerated even further after April. “We have seen an increase in customer demand for rat control products across New South Wales,” said Belinda Rakers, Bunnings product manager. “Due to high demand, supplies are currently at a low level. However, we are continuing to work closely with our suppliers to get more stock in stores as soon as possible,” she said. In Neurea, near Wellington, Fiona Adams is using rat bait to at least keep the rats under control, but they still rummage through her barn at night. Her dog killed one even as she was talking to guests from the Herald visiting the farm on May 20. “I certainly don’t like them, but unfortunately, you have to get used to them,” she said. “They have cute little faces, but they are stinky little animals. Driving along the road at night, they are like toy cars.” Although the cold weather has begun to slow their growth, that hasn’t stopped them from eating all of the lupine beans Fiona planted on May 19, leaving only empty husks. For Fiona as well as Fleming, the scale of the epidemic was hard to imagine for many in Sydney and elsewhere. Rats can breed after just six weeks and then lay multiple litters within three weeks, triggering a population explosion. Farmers in the area who sold their livestock turned to hay production to take advantage of the bountiful rains, but only saw entire haystacks eaten by rats within a few months. After all, it will be up to science rather than temporary or other methods to control such a massive rat population explosion. “The only way you can prevent this is by doing research,” Mr. Fleming mused.

Recently, the team upgraded the technique to power and program the multipoint biostimulator from a single transmitter. Thanks to new research, electrical and computer engineer Kaiyuan Yang and colleagues at the George R. Brown School of Engineering (Rice University) won an award at the Society of Electrical and Electrical Engineers’ Custom Integrated Circuits Conference death (IEEE). The researchers performed experiments showing that an alternating magnetic field can be controlled by a battery-powered generator outside the body. The transmitter can be mounted on a belt or harness, powering and programming two or more implants at least 60 millimeters away. The implant can be programmed with a delay measured in microseconds. That could allow them to coordinate the activation of multiple wireless pacemakers in individual heart chambers, says engineer Yang. “Our study shows that it is possible to program the implants to stimulate in a coordinated pattern. We sync every device, like a symphony. That gives us a lot of scope in stimulant treatments, whether it’s for the heart rhythm or the spinal cord.” The scientists also experimented using small implants. Each tissue is about the size and weight of a vitamin. Experiments performed on hydra vulgaris rodents have demonstrated that, for at least a short distance, such devices can stimulate two separate hydras to contract. Then, activate a fluorescent tag to respond to electrical signals and respond at controlled amplitudes along the rodent’s sciatic nerve. “A study on spinal cord regeneration showed that multipoint stimulation in a certain pattern helps restore the nervous system. Several clinical studies are underway, but all are using desktop devices. There is no implantable tool that can do this,” said engineer Yang. Lab devices, called MagNI (for electromagnetic nerve implantation). MagNI was introduced early last year as a cordless spinal cord stimulator for power and programming. That means the wire does not need to be passed through the patient’s skin. Because, putting the wire through the skin is a method that can cause infection.

This is also known as the “island law”, which is an ecological geographic law in evolutionary biology. In general, among animals that migrate from land to island, large animals tend to be smaller, and small animals tend to get bigger – this is called giantism. Island gigantism. For example, an extinct species of giant hutias in the Western Indian Ocean Islands is the largest known rodent. Its weight can reach a staggering level (about 200 kg), equivalent to that of an American black bear. Another famous example is the Dodo bird on the island of Mauritius. Due to the fact that the island’s environment is devoid of predators, they have also grown to form large and flightless. In contrast to island giantism, a condition where body size becomes smaller after immigration to an island is called Insular dwarfism. The most typical example is the dwarf elephant found many times on islands around the world. Elephants have always been known to be the largest terrestrial stump, but some dwarf elephants can only reach the size of a pig. Those who have read Odyssey will be impressed by Cyclops. According to speculation, the Cyclops prototype was a dwarf elephant. 2000 years ago, the Greeks probably excavated the remains of a dwarf elephant on an island near the Mediterranean Sea. Its skull size was almost twice that of a human skull. Perhaps it was because they had never seen an elephant, so the Greeks imagined it as the skull of a one-eyed giant, and related rumors and myths were born from this. Animal species that also dwarfed the island environment also included species such as dwarf mammoths, small hippos and Florida island deer, all of which were one size smaller than their terrestrial counterpart. Among them, the most extreme dwarf island fauna is the mini chameleon (Brookesia micra) of Hara Island in northeastern Madagascar, Africa. It is the smallest chameleon known to mankind, the largest one measuring no more than 3 cm. It is worth noting that this dwarfism does not only occur in ordinary animals. Even we humans cannot escape the law of the island. The pop culture dwarves are not unfounded, the “hobbits” are real. Flores island in Indonesia has an area of ​​only 14,000 square kilometers, but on this small island there used to be a small group of people who used to live. They are also “cursed” by dwarfism and this affects their stature. According to estimates from nine known fossils, this ancient human was only 1 to 1.2 meters tall and weighed about 25 kg. As we all know, the average 6-year-old modern person’s average height is more than 1.1 meters tall. This inevitably reminds people of the hobbits in “The Lord of the Rings”, so the ancient people on Flores were also known as “hobbits”. From a taxonomic point of view, the Flores belong to the same genus as us. Hence, they are also the smallest known human species. The ancestor of the Flores was Homo erectus. About 200,000 years ago or earlier, they moved on to Flores Island. Compared to the mainland, the island’s resources were very limited and the Homo erectus people were often hungry due to lack of food. If the people are short, there is a better chance of survival because they need to eat less. As a result, the dwarf gene is passed from generation to generation, and eventually develops into Floresians. Biological evolution has shown more than once that some strange things will happen on the islands. And from the changes in body shape of the other animals on Flores Island, you can feel the power of the law of the island. At that time, on the island there was a species of elephant named Stegodon florensis, only 1.5m high and weighing no more than 800kg. Their land-based compatriot is the elephant Stegodon zdanskyi. They are stronger and more powerful than modern African elephants, this species is about 3.8 meters tall and weighs 12 tons. But not all of the animals on this island have been reduced to the same size as the Flores and the Stegodon florensis, in fact, the small terrestrial animals that migrate here will achieve a Giant size beyond imagination. The most typical example is the Flores Giant Rat, since without natural predators, they are not even afraid of humans. Of course, this giant rat does not threaten the survival of the Flores Island biological population. Except for some insects, the giant rat Flores is mostly vegetarian. It can be said that biological evolution on the islands took place in a very strange way. Therefore, scientists always think of the first word “island” when discovering creatures with anomalous body shape. So what is the factor that causes the animals on the island to change their body shape? For many years, scientists have always wanted to summarize the general nature of the rules on the island, and try to solve that mystery. The first person to try to explain this phenomenon was a biologist named J. Bristol Foster. Therefore, this ecological geophysical law is also known as “Ford’s Law”. In 1964, his dissertation compared 116 island species with terrestrial species and plotted them in a table. In an article titled “Mammal Evolution on Islands,” Foster said that among the new “inhabitants” of the island, rodents tend to grow larger. Predators and ungulates will tend to be dwarfed. In general, large terrestrial species will be smaller and smaller land species larger on islands. In this regard, Foster also provided some tentative explanations. The number of species on the islands is much less than on the mainland, and the number of predators and competitors will decrease accordingly. This seems to be an advantage for small rodents. Because they do not have a predator, they always have a sufficient source of food and can control their fertility rate well. But hippos, deer and other large animals cannot do this. A lack of predators would also mean an overabundance and a shortage of food. Consequently, the smaller members of the population will have a higher survival rate and begin to affect the entire population. They grow from generation to generation and their sizes are getting smaller and smaller. Foster’s paper is simple, but at the time it aroused strong interest in the scientific community. Thereafter, more extensive research was conducted on the island’s organisms, and the island law was a little more refined. In fact, large organisms have more food choices and more easily control other species. Small organisms, on the other hand, require fewer resources, shorter reproductive cycles, and adapt faster. Therefore, in the island ecological environment, where every aspect is limited, these factors are very important and have special effects. Subsequent studies also found that the speed at which the island’s animals change body shape was indeed staggering. 24 km from the French coast, there is an island named Jersey. About 6000 years ago, the deer came here and completely isolated from the mainland. As a result, in this short time of thousands of years, the red deer on the island has shrunk by 1/6 of that of the people on the mainland. Fossil records show that it only took 5,000 years to dwarf a population of elephants from 4 meters in height to about 1 meter. However, it should be noted that the island laws are only a general model of evolution, not absolute law. The environment on an island includes many different factors, such as the size of the island, climate, natural history, habitat, biological relationships, etc.These factors will also affect the size of the island. animals on the island to a certain extent.