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Art is beautiful. It can liven up a space like nothing else. It’s a great conversation starter as well as a charming focal point. A piece of large artwork or several small pieces displayed interestingly has the power to lend your home a cozy, nice, and elegant vibe at the same time. But the fact is art is expensive. It can be an investment but, unless you invest in pieces by world famous artists, most artworks you can buy in the local market will only get you meager profits, that too in the very long run. But you want to adorn your home with art or create an interesting focal point on one of the walls. What can you do that doesn’t break the bank? We’ve some alternatives for you.

Frame posters and maps

Postcards, posters, and maps of places you have visited or one that is on your bucket list can be interesting to hang on your wall. Consider framing some postcards of places you have visited. Get similar frames to give them a cohesive look. You can also frame an interesting poster or a tube map for a unique touch. Best of all, you can get most of these items for free when you are traveling.

Pro tip: Fabrics come in a variety of colors and patterns. Consider framing a large piece of fabric in an interesting pattern—thinking animal prints or motifs—to give your space a pop of color.

Have a paint party

Buy a huge canvas and some paints, invite your friends over for brunch, and have a paint party. Everyone can work on a single piece, painting different areas of it. Or each person can just do their own thing to create something totally unique. You will have a fun time and end up with something that has a story behind it to display in your home.

Pro tip: Get individual canvases for your friends and let them all paint whatever they want. They can each then choose to gift their artwork to another person in the group so that everyone goes home with something lovingly made by a friend.

Make a collage

A collage is a great idea to display fun memories without cluttering your space. Get a big piece of chart paper and stick everything—from photos, ticket stubs to greeting cards and magazine cutouts that you would like to see every day to remind you of happy times or inspire you—on it. Stick to a color theme, if possible, to match the aesthetics of your space and also to prevent it from looking too messy.

Pro tip: You can also make a photo collage on Photoshop and get that printed and framed. Make sure the resolution is large enough so that the photos don’t come out too pixelated.

Hang plates, hats, or rugs

Get some inexpensive hangers or sticky hooks and rather than letting your plates collect dust, hang them on your wall. They add texture and dimension while letting you play around with different patterns and colors. If you have a rug that is just too pretty to be put on the floor or an old one that you want to save, hang it at eye-level to give it the attention it deserves. Alternatively, if you are a hat person, hang your collection up on the wall. It’s practical and pretty.

Pro tip: Buy inexpensive trays, coasters, or mats from the local market and consider hanging these on the wall. Since they come in a variety of patterns and colors and don’t cost much, you have the option of changing them up from time to time to change the look of your space.

Display pressed flowers

Framing dried flowers, plants, or leaves add a light and airy feeling to any room. It also lends it a calming effect. Plus, you will have added a little bit of greenery to your space without taking on the responsibility of tending to plants. A gallery wall of assorted framed botanicals is an inexpensive but unique way to decorate your home.

Pro tip: Get some epoxy resin and put pressed flowers on wooden coasters. Hang about a dozen (or more) of these in an interesting pattern on the wall.

AI is changing how students learn by offering personalized lessons, instant feedback, and better accessibility. It helps spark creativity but can also make students too dependent on technology, raise privacy concerns, and possibly introduce biases. AI-generated content might also affect originality and thinking capacity.

To get the most out of AI in education, it’s important to use it alongside traditional teaching methods to keep students thinking critically and developing their own ideas. Aaradhana Shrestha from ApEx spoke to three people to find out how they think AI is impacting students’ learning experiences, creativity, and originality, and if they saw AI as a positive influence on their education.

Sushant Thapa, 31

Students are relying too much on spoon-fed answers of AI rather than being research oriented. Students will be unable to do critical reasoning when AI spoon-feeds them. AI paraphrases and summarizes the information that it takes from sites like Bing and hence it only makes associations weaker. Relying blindly on AI cannot fulfill socio-cultural knowledge which is part of originality in understanding. AI will not make students self-reliant hence their creativity will be lost. Students must search for what they do not understand, and hence carry on with their research. AI is not the solution for easy learning. AI can even misguide you through incorrect text. AI mustn’t replace teachers because teaching also involves understanding the minds of the learners.

Sanskar Silwal, 23

AI offers personalized learning, generative pre-trained transformers and adaptive learning platforms provide instant feedback, allowing students to grasp complex concepts more effectively. The recent Apple AI on iOS 18 has amazed Apple users with its problem-solving capabilities, helping mathematical students by providing instant solutions to complex equations and improving their understanding of advanced concepts.

As a computer engineering student, being active in the field of technology has helped me understand AI and how its use can enhance a student’s learning experience, and creativity but also bring challenges in originality of their critical thinking. The ease of access to AI tools might tempt students to rely on them rather than developing their own ideas, potentially undermining critical thinking and authentic creativity. Despite the challenges, AI positively impacts education by democratizing access, equipping students with advanced skills, and preparing them for a tech-driven future.

Rashmi Poudel, 22

The advent of AI has opened a wide horizon of learning opportunities for students. With easy access to information, overcoming various learning hurdles has become possible. Nevertheless, the boom of this seemingly omniscient technology has also diminished students’ creativity. As AI becomes more efficient at solving problems, students are undermining their cognitive abilities. Consequently, the potential of neural networks, which are biologically wired to activate and sharpen with every act of brainstorming and divergent thinking, becomes dull over time. Thus, students lose faith in their own creative thoughts and ideas, undermining the originality and authenticity of their tasks. The influence of AI on students’ education is ambivalent. To make AI a means rather than an end to learning, students must use their own judgment.

Plastics have been an inevitable part of our daily life. From dawn to dusk, our hands are full of plastic materials. From the toothbrush to health and beauty products in the morning, and  mobile, laptop, and teacups we use throughout the day, are all made up of plastics. Plastics seem to have confined our daily activities and are playing a crucial role as we humans have been embracing them. Human dynamics would be in trouble if plastics get discarded instantly. The basic needs will crumble and the modern world would seem naked without plastics. Hence, there is no doubt, everything is interweaved in plastics.

Places with no apparent human activities are disturbed by plastic pollution. Plastics and its small particles have reached everywhere from the highest peak, Mt Everest to the bottom of the oceans. The pervasive presence of plastics has the potential to transform our once vibrant world into a lifeless one.

What happens to plastics in the long run?

Eventually, these plastics degrade and break into small pieces and the process continues further like mitosis. This transformation is due to physical, chemical or biological degradation. This process continues at a very slow rate and takes several hundred years depending on the properties of plastics. Even microscopic plastics have the same potential to disrupt the functioning of the environment in which they are present, or even more than their parent form. These microscopic plastics have a name: micro-nano-plastics!

What exactly is microplastics?

Micro-plastics are small particles of plastics having a thickness less than 5 mm. However, there is a misconception among people that microplastic are microscopic only, while they are visible through naked eyes as well. Other forms of microscopic plastics include nano plastics having a thickness less than 1 nanometer, which is approximately 40 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.  These microplastics come from our kitchen while chopping vegetables and fruits and scrape them off from a plastic chopping board or even from food packaging. 

Have you ever heard of a plastic polymer, Teflon? It is used in non-stick cookware. 

Under every circumstance, our habits are generally engrained in plastics which ultimately has caused the expulsion of microplastics in the environment. 

Is microplastic everywhere?

Delving into five of our basic needs into consideration: air, water, food, clothes and shelter, we can in a way find them exposed with the microplastics. We are already  aware that the air we breathe is massively polluted. According to the research carried out in surface road dust in three cities, higher microplastics were observed in commercial areas like shops and restaurants. Among the study areas, higher concentration of microplastic was observed in Da Nang and Kathmandu as compared to Kusats in surface road dust. Even in the Polar Regions where human dominance is less or absent , plastic pollution levels have been increasing alarmingly. 

Human tissues and organs are contaminated with microplastics. Scientists from the Netherlands found microplastic in human blood with a dominant Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) polymer. A study carried out in the USA proved that microplastics have been transferred through the food chain and food web within the trophic structures. Although microplastics are omnipresent and omnipotent, it is beyond the scope of estimation. It’s all because micro-plastics are heterogeneous and do not have uniform spatial distribution. What do you think are the other reasons? 

Footprint of plastics and microplastics

Plastics have reached wherever humans had left their footprint. Even the arctic region has been facing plastic pollution issues. Among the seven continents, all of the continents are found to have been contaminated by microplastics. Antarctica being one of the globally important regions for carbon sink and indicator region for Climate Change, is potentially under threat due to overwhelming plastic pollution. According to one research carried out in Antarctica, microplastics of nylon and polyethylene polymer were dominant in the benthic macroinvertebrates. This shows that there is a higher probability of transfer of microplastics to higher trophic level through the food web/ food chain. However, a detailed research is missing on distribution, transfer and accumulation of micro-plastics over ecosystems.  

Plastics for birds: Boon or curse?

We’ve been witnessing incidents where fish get entangled in plastic nets and marine animals ingest plastics. Have you ever witnessed such incidents? Maybe not. However, one of my friends shared that she rescued Barn Swallow, a common neighborhood bird near houses in hills of Nepal, from the scrambled polythene bags on a road. You might have seen it atleast on social media. It is evident that bird entanglement occurs in plastic materials. Adding more to this, plastic entanglements are also observed inside the body of birds in guts, stomach, gastro-intestinal tracts, etc. Many researches show the presence of microplastics inside the body of birds. Even the lungs seem to be contaminated by microplastics by inhalation through air according to few researches. Polypropylene, polyethylene, and ethylene vinyl acetate are the major dominant polymer types found in the lungs of avifauna in Japan. Gut obstruction and subsequent starvation are health issues observed in France due to micro-plastics contamination on birds. Ever since, plastics are now nesting materials for birds, majorly in urban areas. The study carried out in Spain found that the rate of mortality and predation was higher in nests made from plastic materials than nests free from plastics. It may herald that Predators get attracted to the vibrant colors of plastics.

Are microplastic harmful?

While delving deeper, exploring the occurrence, abundance, and distribution of microplastics across different layers is a significant advancement. However, it remains crucial to urgently investigate and understand the impact of microplastic contamination on the environment and, ultimately, human health. Some research revealed that humans on longer exposure to micro-plastics through either air, water or food can face a challenge of loss of bone tissue, liver and lungs inflammation and cancer, change in metabolic activities and many abnormalities. The facial products with microplastics can enhance the rate of penetration of UV rays through skin tissues as well. One of the research exposed that even the neurological and reproductive activities get altered if we are exposed to certain chemicals contaminated by plastic polymers. Once the health of humans, the guardian of the Earth, is under threat due to microplastics, the future shall be insane. So, we must call for action as micro-plastics taint its pristine zones and devastate the ecosystem as a whole where the Earth seems to be lifeless.

The global organizer of the World Earth Day has announced the theme as Planet vs Plastics for the year 2024 with the aim of reducing 60 percent of plastics by 2040 and creating a plastic-free Earth. “All this plastic was produced by a petrochemical industry with an abysmal record of toxic emissions, spills, and explosions,” said Denis Hayes, a Chair Emeritus of earthday.org. Although if the plastic production ceased, the remnant plastics over the Earth that have been produced and distributed so far seems very difficult to manage. Attempting to reduce the use of single-use plastics and the application of circular economy is a way further to enhance the green environment. Several advances in the contemporary approach  of 3 R’s principles have been driven drastically by several global environmental issues. One of the reasons is plastic pollution and its solution.

What do you imagine when someone asks you about carnivorous mammals? Let’s think of a few names. Which animals come to mind? Probably lions, tigers or wolves but not this one. Most likely, none of you would first think of the hyena.

Striped hyena, a widely misunderstood scavenger, provides vital ecosystem services by removing the carcasses and as a predator. Despite this, they are yet to get conservation attention, and the species population is said to be declining rapidly worldwide and still unknown in Nepal, highlighting the need for urgent conservation intervention.  

The Hyaenidae family, which is one of the smallest groups of mammalian carnivores, currently includes just four species in the world: the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), the aardwolf (Proteles cristata), the brown hyena (Hyaena brunnea) and the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). The only Hyaenidae species found in Nepal is Striped hyena, locally called ‘Patey Huddar’, ‘Hausey Bagh’, and ‘Bhedey Bagh’. The Striped hyena is categorized as ‘Near Threatened’ in the IUCN Red List of threatened species while in Nepal, the species is considered endangered.

The Striped hyena is a middle-sized predator with pointed ears, pale brown skin and males are slightly larger than the females. They have a black-colored tail with white underfur and are slightly longer and bushy. Primarily, it is a nocturnal scavenger feeding on ungulate carcasses, bones, ligaments, and cartilages but can switch between scavenging and predating as per need so they are termed as ‘opportunistic predator’. It supplements its diet with fruits, insects, and occasionally by killing small animals like hare, rodents, reptiles, and birds.

Globally, the Striped hyena is found across a broad range from Africa to Central Tanzania, the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, reaching as far as Nepal. They predominantly inhabit arid and semi-arid areas with open landscapes or sparse thorn bushes, typically avoiding higher altitudes, though they have been recorded at elevations up to 3,300 meters in Pakistan. In 1998, the global population of Striped hyena was estimated to be 14,000 individuals. However, by 2007 their numbers had declined to fewer than 10,000 worldwide.

Striped hyena are expanded throughout Nepal’s lowlands, from central to western terai, as well as western hilly region, at elevation ranging from 100 meters to 1,750 meters, both within and outside the protected areas. There are claims of the presence of Striped hyena at an altitude of 2,514 meters which needs further verification, as the report was made just on the basis of a sign survey. In Nepal, population density has not been explored properly yet the experts guess the population to be nearly 100 individuals. After the guess was made in 2011 during the national red list assessment of Nepal, there are reports of the species from other parts of Nepal. Furthermore, there have been several reports of Striped hyena sightings, dens, and human-hyaena contacts in Nepal. All might indicate that their population could be slightly higher suggesting a gap and opportunity in the study of this species. 

Although the Striped hyaena is typically considered solitary, it does have some social groups. Its vocal communication is limited to mild growls and sounds during interactions. The Striped hyena is not a favored prey species of any predator. They keep a safe distance, usually around 50 meters, from larger, carnivorous mammals like lions and tigers. They also have the ability to chase or keep leopards and cheetahs away from food sources. Striped hyena lives in den and dens are often used merely for short periods of time, and therefore rarely need to be secured. They have a life span of 10-12 years in the wild with no apparent seasonal pattern of reproduction, their gestation period is 90–91 days usually springing 1-6 cubs born per litter.

Striped hyena plays a vital role to maintain forest and grassland ecosystems as an opportunistic predator, as a scavenger by clearing carcasses and by ingestion of plants and flowers which helps in remodeling of vegetation directly or indirectly.

Habitat degradation is a major issue, as forests are cleared for agriculture and development, leaving hyaenas with fewer places to live and hunt. Poaching and illegal trade of Striped hyenas for their skins and body parts, used in traditional medicine, is another significant threat worldwide. They are also often kept in cages for display purposes. Another threat is roadkill, the growing network of roads in developing countries and also in Nepal, poses a danger, as many hyenas are killed by vehicles while crossing the roads in search of food or territory. 

Humans are consistently indicated as the major source of mortality throughout the evaluated range, largely because the hyaena is hated as a grave robber, is associated with several cultures and also superstitions belief, and because of incidents of damage to agriculture and livestock. Their decline is also influenced by shifts in agricultural practices and a decrease in available carcasses due to fewer large carnivores and prey species and competition with other species. These threats highlight the need for conservation efforts to protect this misunderstood species yet vital part of our ecosystem.

Establishing wildlife corridors to connect fragmented habitats, and implementing sustainable land-use practices to minimize further habitat loss are important. Anti-poaching laws and their enforcement is essential and new technology/intervention can be installed in the forest areas or at least in the protected areas such as camera traps, conservation boards, stickers and involving community members as a citizen scientist to monitor the species. To conserve the Striped hyena, we need to think about a comprehensive approach that includes protecting and restoring their habitats, engaging local communities and working closely with various stakeholders. Prioritizing academic and non-academic research work should be enhanced by government and conservation organizations, likewise collaborating with local NGOs and INGOs can bring additional expertise and support to the desired conservation efforts. Last but not the least, the fourth organ of the nation, the media can play a multifaceted and influential role by prioritizing and highlighting content about such species for the conservation of biodiversity.

The haunting calls of the Striped hyaena are slowly fading, as Tarai forests are being fragmented and human settlements are expanding, pressing the question to each one of us: will future generations ever hear them?