Daily Current Capsules
07th July 2022

Factoids
NAIROBI FLIES

What's the NEWS

• Around 100 students of an engineering college in East Sikkim have reported skin infections after coming in contact with Nairobi flies.

• Nairobi flies, also called Kenyan flies or dragon bugs, are small, beetle-like insects that belong to two species, Paederus eximius and Paederus sabaeus.
• They are orange and black in colour, and thrive in areas with high rainfall, as has been witnessed in Sikkim in the past few weeks. Like most insects, the beetles are attracted by bright light.
• Usually, the insects attack pests that consume crops and are beneficial for humans - but at times, they come in contact with humans directly are cause harm.
• These flies do not bite, but if disturbed while sitting on anyone's skin, they release a potent acidic substance that causes burns.
• This substance is called pederin, and can cause irritation if it comes in contact with the skin, leading to lesions or unusual marks or colouring on the skin. The skin begins to heal in a week or two, but some secondary infections can occur, especially if the victim scratches the irritated skin.
• Nairobi flies is a species of insect native to East Africa.
• Major outbreaks have happened in Kenya and other parts of eastern Africa.
• Outside Africa, outbreaks have happened in India, Japan, Israel, and Paraguay in the past.

• The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment - which is investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark", or "b quark" - has observed three never-before-seen particles

• The three "exotic" additions - a new kind of "pentaquark" and the first-ever pair of "tetraquarks" - to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles.
• CERN - Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire - is the original name of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which runs the particle accelerator complex that houses the LHC, the world's largest and most complex collider.
• The LHC, re-ignited after three years in April, was cranked up to unprecedented levels of energy on July 5, and has begun smashing together protons at almost the speed of light, which could throw up "new" physics beyond the Standard Model.

• Quarks are elementary particles that come in six "flavours": up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
• But they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, called tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
• These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists about six decades ago - around the same time as conventional hadrons - but they have been observed by LHCb and other experiments only in the past 20 years.