For many species of caterpillar, the first meal is their own egg shell. It is thought that the shell contains vital food substances.

A carrotmob is an event where environmentalists queue up to buy goods from a shop which goes green. This is a sort of incentive for their intentions. The concept uses the carrot and stick method, hence ‘carrot mob’. Environmentalists mob a ‘green’ store for mass purchases as a reward. This is planned in advance and executed as an event.

A camel uses its hump as a portable storehouse of fat from which to draw nourishment when food is scarce. A chemical process enables the camel to covert some of this fat into water, an advantage which enables it to survive for up to 17 days in the desert without drinking. The Arabian camel or dromedary, found in Arab countries …

The phrase Busman’s Holiday means to do the same thing on one’s day off as one does all week. The accepted origin of the phrase traces it to drivers of London’s horse-drawn omnibuses in the 19th century, who would supposedly spend their days off checking up on how the substitute drivers were treating their horses. In a nutshell, it refers …

It’s a Spanish dance and song in moderate tempo and triple metre that was popular at the end of the 18th and throughout the 19th century. Its rhythms are closely related to the polonaise, a Polish slow dance. The Cuban Bolero, which superseded the Spanish version in Latin America, is in double time. Beethoven wrote the ‘Bolero a solo WoO …

A combination of the words blizzard and disaster, blizzaster is a massive snow storm or the negative impact of such a storm. It means the same as a snownami, snowpocalypse or snomageddon – anything used to describe a severe snow storm.

A Black Corner Notice is one of the seven major types of notices issued by Interpol to its member countries to share information related to criminal investigation. Six of these are known by the colour in which the Interpol logo is printed, different colours denoting notices carrying different types of information. The Black Corner Notice contains information related to unidentified …

During the drought of the 1930s in America, with no natural anchors in place, the soil dried, turned to dust and blew eastward and southward in large dark clouds. They blackened the sky and reached all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington DC. Much of the soil ended up as deposits in the Atlantic …

The Clouded Yellow is a butterfly found in almost every country in Britain. Its name belies its color as it is orange with black borders, and both sexes have a black spot near the center of the forewings and a deep orange spot in the middle of the hind wings.

2010’s is one telecom story that will keep ringing in people’s minds for years to come – leaked tapped conversations of a clutch of India’s over 700 million phone subscribers outed how lobbying may have led to an alleged Rs 1.76 lakh crore scam in the sale of radio waves. All hell broke loose after the publication of the tapes, …