Road safety campaigns, a must in schools

by Ananda KANNANGARA

Education Minister Bandula Gunawardane has stressed the importance of conducting regular road safety campaigns in schools with the assistance of area police stations to create an awareness among children on ways to avoid becoming victims of road accidents. He said the danger of using mobile phones while crossing busy highways, walking on roads and travelling in fully packed private school vans and trishaws should be highlighted at these campaigns as children do not seem to realise the gravity of such actions.

He said schoolchildren should also be educated on the danger of meeting with accidents when travelling on the footboard of trains and buses, especially during peak hours when the buses and trains are crowded .

Minister Gunawardane told the Junior Observer that he had seen many schoolchildren travelling on the footboard of public transport in a dangerous manner. He called upon parents and teachers to strictly warn children to refrain from travelling in this manner.

He said drivers of trishaws and school vans should also be warned and reprimanded for transporting schoolchildren in this manner. He asked vehicle drivers not to focus attention only on earning an income by disregarding the value of human lives.

Statistics released by the Sri Lanka Traffic Police (SLTF) reveal that around 700 pedestrian deaths which includes many schoolchildren, take place every year, with two deaths reported daily.

A senior SLTF official said they have already launched an island wide programme to educate schoolchildren on the importance of strictly observing road rules as a precaution to avoiding fatal accidents.

He said it is imperative to educate people on the gravity of speeding, drunk driving, overtaking, sudden turning, transporting passengers in un-roadworthy vehicles and continuous driving without a rest as they are some of the main reasons for highway accidents. He requested motorists to refrain from breaking the highway code as it is the only way to minimise accidents where many valuable lives are lost.

Snail, thought extinct, rediscovered

In 2000, the oblong rocksnail — about the size of a nickel with a yellow body and a banded shell — was declared extinct in its home, Alabama’s Cahaba River Basin. 

However, a graduate student has rediscovered these snails on a short stretch within the Cahaba River, where it crosses the Bibb and Shelby county lines.“To be able to find a species that was thought to be extinct is always encouraging,” said the graduate student, Nathan Whelan of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in a statement, “especially considering biodiversity and conservation stories are not typically positive these days.”

It's not clear why the snail, scientifically known as Leptoxis compacta declined, but it is likely a combination of the species’ small natural range, and pollution from local mines and the Birmingham metropolitan area, Whelan and colleagues write in a study published on August . 8 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Whelan found the oblong rocksnail at only one section within its original, 50-mile (80-kilometre) range along the river.

However, at other sites along its historic range, similar snails turned up.

This gives rise to another mystery: Why did the oblong rocksnail suffer such a dramatic loss of range when other snails in the same environment did not, he and colleagues write.

The oblong rocksnail's range is so restricted now that the remaining snails could easily be wiped out. So, Whelan and colleagues argue that it should be considered for protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Researchers also hope to establish a second population of the snails elsewhere within their previous range. 

- Livescience

Massive meteorite crater found in Canadian Arctic

Researchers in Canada's western Arctic have found evidence of a crater that formed when a huge meteorite slammed into Earth millions of years ago. Measuring about 15 miles (25 kilometres) across, the formation was named the Prince Albert impact crater after the peninsula where it was discovered. Researchers don't know exactly when it was created, but evidence suggests the crater is between 130 million and 350 million years old, according to a statement from the University of Saskatchewan.

Meteors are fragments of asteroids or comets that enter Earth's atmosphere at high speeds; most are small, some as tiny as a grain of sand, so they disintegrate in the air, and only rarely are they large enough to make it to Earth's surface. When meteors slam into Earth, they are called meteorites.

A team of geologists spotted this newly identified meteorite crater while surveying the region for possible energy and mineral resources. They were initially intrigued by steeply tilted strata visible in river gorges and other features in the flat tundra of northwestern Victoria Island.

“Unless you recognised the telltale clues, you wouldn't know what you were looking at,” researcher Brian Pratt explained in the statement. “You might see a bunch of broken rocks and wonder how they got there, but we found abundant shatter cones.”

Shatter cones are surface features with distinctive wavy patterns that are known to be created only by the tremendous force of a meteorite impact or an underground nuclear explosion. What's more, Pratt said his map showed that the feature is circular, which is characteristic of impact craters.

“Impact craters like this give us clues into how the Earth's crust is recycled and the speed of erosion, and may be implicated in episodes of widespread extinction of animals in the geological past,” Pratt said. “It's an exciting discovery.”

There are about 180 known impact craters on Earth. Geologists think they would find countless more if plate shifting, volcanic activity and erosion didn't hide the evidence of most ancient impacts. Earlier this summer, researchers in Greenland documented possibly the oldest and largest meteorite crater ever found on Earth.. The crater, estimated to be 3 billion years old, currently measures about 62 miles (100 km) across.

But the researchers believe its width before erosion was likely more than 310 miles (500 km) — much bigger than the largest visible crater, the 2-billion-year-old Vredefort crater in South Africa, which measures 186 miles (300 km) across.

-LiveScience