Daffodil

He is homeless man but everyday he hands out flowers left over from the markets just to make people happy and smile 😊

After a bicycle accident injured one of his eyes, a 30-year-old man in India developed an unusual flower-shaped cataract, according to a new report of his case.

The man went to the doctor because the vision in his left eye had progressively worsened over several months. He told doctors that he had suffered a concussion and injured his left eye three months earlier, when he was riding his bike without a helmet and collided with a car.

An examination showed the man had a flower-shaped cataract in his left eye, with 10 "petals."

Cataracts can form as a result of a bump or blow to the eye, and when they do, these "traumatic cataracts" classically take on a star or flower shape, the researchers said. In 2013, a man in Australia was found to have a star-shaped cataract after he was punched in an eye.

Traumatic cataracts form because, when the eye receives a blow, shock waves travel through the eye, damaging the lens and causing it to become opaque in some regions, Dr. Mark Fromer, an ophthalmologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told Live Science in a 2013 interview. However, it's still not clear why these opaque regions take on certain shapes. [16 Oddest Medical Cases]

The Indian man was advised to have cataract surgery, but he has not yet undergone the procedure, the researchers said.

The report is published yesterday (April 4) in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Woolly mammoths, rhinos and other ice age beasts may have munched on high-protein wildflowers called forbs, new research suggests.

And far from living in a monotonous grassland, the mega-beasts inhabited a colorful Arctic landscape filled with flowering plants and diverse vegetation, the study researchers found.

The new research "paints a different picture of the Arctic," thousands of years ago, said study co-author Joseph Craine, an ecosystem ecologist at Kansas State University. "It makes us rethink how the vegetation looked and how those animals thrived on the landscape."

The ancient ecosystem was detailed today (Feb. 5) in the journal Nature.

Pretty landscape

In the past, scientists imagined that the now-vast Arctic tundra was once a brown grassland steppe that teemed with wooly mammoths, rhinos and bison. But recreations of the ancient Arctic vegetation relied on fossilized pollen found in permafrost, or frozen soil. Because grasses and sedges tend to produce more pollen than other plants, those analyses produced a biased picture of the landscape. [Image Gallery: Ancient Beasts Roam an Arctic Landscape]

To understand the ancient landscape better, researchers analyzed the plant genetic material found in 242 samples of permafrost from across Siberia, Northern Europe and Alaska that dated as far back as 50,000 years ago.

They also analyzed the DNA found in the gut contents and fossilized p**p, or coprolites, of eight Pleistocene beasts — woolly mammoths, rhinos, bison and horses — found in museums throughout the world.

The DNA analysis showed that the Arctic at the time had a varied landscape filled with wildflowers, grasses and other vegetation.

And the shaggy ice age beasts that roamed the landscape took advantage of that cornucopia. The grazers supplemented their grassy diet with a hefty helping of wildflowerlike plants known as forbs, the stomach content analysis found.

These forbs are high in protein and other nutrients, which may have helped the grazers put on weight and reproduce in the otherwise sparse Arctic environment, Craine told Live Science.

Vanishing wildflowers

Between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, forbs declined in the Arctic, study co-author Mary E. Edwards, a physical geographer at the University of Southampton in England, wrote in an email.

Though it's not exactly clear why, "we do know from much other evidence that the climate changed at this time," Edwards said.

The ice age was ending and warmer, wetter weather was prevailing. That climate "allowed trees and shrubs to flourish and these would have outgrown forbs — by shading them for example," Edwards said.

It's also possible that the vanishing of these high-protein plants hastened the extinction of ice age beasts such as the woolly mammoth. For example, grasslands may have been delicately balanced, with p**p from the grazers nourishing the plants, which in turn kept the animals alive. If a big jolt in climate disrupted one part of the chain — for instance by depleting the forbs — that may have led the whole system to collapse, Edwards speculated.

The findings also raise questions about modern grazers such as bison, Craine said. If the ancient beasts dined on forbs, it's possible these wildflowerlike plants play a bigger role in the diet of modern bison as well, he said.