Incredible Stories From Incredible India

An inconspicuous platform sits by the road near Thottada in Kannur. The structure may not, architecturally, resemble a temple. Even the circular sanctum sanctorum is different from those in temples constructed in the recent past. Though there is no idol, believers feel the invisible presence of the presiding deity, Urumbachan or Father Ant, who helps fight an army that invades all homes — ants.For local residents, the temple of ants is Urumbachan Gurusthanam. The faithful offer coconuts to Urumbachan, to free their residences of ants without using any insecticide. The belief dates back to several centuries, though there is no historical evidence. The Gurusthanam is associated with the nearby Udayamangalam Ganapathy temple, considered to be the second important Ganesha mandapams in Kolathunadu.

According to local legend, the original plan was to construct a Ganapathy temple, where the Gurusthanam now stands.

“The carpenter fixed a stick at the site,” said M Narayanan, a former office bearer of the temple’s devaswom, managed by the Chaliya community.

“The next morning, the stick was not seen and an anthill had come up at the spot where it was fixed. The stick was later found a few hundred metres away,” he said. Taking it as the wish of the gods, the Ganapathy temple was constructed where the stick was found. “A circular platform—the sanctum sanctorum—was built around the anthill,” Narayanan said. After the appearance of the anthill, the local residents started worshipping the eusocial insect, believing that the ants had replaced the stick.

“Though the lamp is lit at the Gurusthanam every evening by residents of a nearby house, pujas are performed only on the ‘Samkrama’ and other special
days,” said Jenuayichankandy Janardhanan, a local resident.
He added that people from even far off places offer coconuts to Urumbachan to get rid of ant menace. As a strict practice,
we don’t kill or hurt ants,” Janardhanan added. It is believed that the place has the holy presence of Lord Subramanya and hence the temple’s annual festival is held on ‘Karthika’ in ‘Vrischikam’.





Goalkeepers facing penalty shoot-outs make a predictable error that could influence the outcome, say researchers.British psychologists have found that after three kicks in the same direction, goalies were more likely to dive the opposite way on the next shot.
A University College London (UCL) research that studied 361 kicks from the 37 penalty shoot outs that occurred in World Cup and UEFA Euro Cup matches over a 36-year period shows penalty shoot-outs in international tournaments resemble a psychological game.
It found each team of kickers produced more or less random sequences of kicks to the left or the right of the goal. Goalkeepers' dives to the left or the right were not related to the direction of the kick, suggesting goalkeepers at this elite level make their decisions in advance, rather than reacting to each kick.
However, their decisions were non-random in one crucial respect: when the kickers repeatedly kicked in the same direction on consecutive penalties, goalkeepers became more likely to dive in the opposite direction on the next penalty .
The goalkeepers, therefore, display what has been called the `gambler's fallacy' -like a person who believes that after coin flips produce a run of `heads', the next flip is bound to produce `tails'. “Complete randomness is generally the best strategy in competitive games,“ says lead author Erman Misirlisoy of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who studied penalty shoot-out videos from all World Cup and Euro finals tournaments between 1976 and 2012.
“Because the goalkeeper displays the gambler's fallacy , kickers could predict which way the goalkeeper is likely to dive on the next kick. That would obviously give the kicker an advantage -they would simply aim for the opposite side of the goal. Surprisingly , though, we found that kickers failed to exploit this advantage.“
Four knockout games in the recently concluded football World Cup in Brazil were decided by penalties.





An illustration of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor as it pounces on a nest of primitive birds (sinornis). A study led by a University of Adelaide scientist has shown how massive, meat-eating, ground-dwelling dinosaurs -the theropods -evolved in over a period of 50 million years into agile flyers: they just kept shrinking and shrinking. The study presented a detailed family tree of the dinosaurs and their bird descendants which maps out this unlikely transformation. They showed that the branch of theropod dinosaurs which gave rise to modern birds were the only dinosaurs that kept getting smaller. These bird ancestors also evolved new adaptations like feathers and wings four times faster than other dinosaurs