|
Subject |
Comments |
Views |
Author |
Date Written |
Can anyone whisper, evolution?
|
view preview
Zookeepers at Central Park Zoo in the US assumed their cotton-top tamarins were falling silent every time someone entered their enclosure, but spectrograms, which provide visual representations of sound, revealed what was really going on. These little monkeys were actually whispering their alarm calls instead of shouting them, which is the first evidence of whispering in a non-human primate species.
|
|
|
1 |
3064 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
Brain defects go a long way
|
view preview
This is a human brain without grooves and folds, a condition known as lissencephaly. It belonged to a patient who died in a mental health facility in 1970, and almost a year ago a photographer found the jar containing the brain in a collection at the University of Texas, Austin. People with this rare condition suffer from seizures, muscle spasms, a range of learning difficulties, and usually die before the age of ten. ...
|
|
|
0 |
5185 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
Blue blood is quite costly
|
view preview
Did you know one quart of horseshoe crab blood costs $15,000 dollars? The critter's blue blood is a sort of bacteria killing machine that clots around ‘invaders’, eliminating them and protecting horseshoe crabs from lethal infections. Researchers have been harnessing the power of this blue blood to test medical supplies for contamination.
|
|
|
2 |
3716 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Birds of Paradise
|
view preview
A must see introductory video about paradise birds. This video reveals the astounding beauty of 39 of the most exquisitely specialized animals on earth. After 8 years and 18 expeditions to New Guinea, Australia, and nearby islands, Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photojournalist Tim Laman succeeded in capturing images of all 39 species in the bird-of-paradise family for the first time ever.
|
|
|
2 |
3262 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Birds evolving from fish, a possibility?
|
view preview
A flying fish moves its tail up to 70 times per second to propel itself up and out of the water. Those specialised pectoral fins are spread wide and tilted slightly upward to provide lift, and then folded back against the body to lower the fish back into the ocean. Flying fish (family: Exocoetidae) are eaten by dolphins, tuna, birds, squids and porpoises, so they needed to develop an ingenious mode of escape - such as flying - in order to survive.
|
|
|
1 |
2878 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
Beetles the size of period
|
view preview
The water beetle is about 1 mm in length and has been named Hydraena ateneo. Most of the discoveries made in the Philippines occur in their forests, making this discovery even more surprising.
|
|
|
2 |
3546 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
A sculpture made from light
|
view preview
This sculpture is constructed by quickly rotating a rope stretched from ceiling to floor through white light. The vibrating string becomes invisible, but the white light that’s being reflected off the rope becomes visible in an exchange that let’s our eyes see magic, as real as science can make it. The colors change and twist, forming double-helixes that stem from the shape of the swinging rope. Some of these light sculptures are small and handheld, but many of the larger ones include touch screens that allow viewers to adjust the beams. All of them are spinning at very high speeds that result in a constantly moving body of light. ...
|
|
|
2 |
3604 |
savio |
10 years ago |
A cratered inferno
|
view preview
Mercury's surface looks similar to our Moon's. Each is heavily cratered and made of rock. Mercury's diameter is about 4800 km, while the Moon's is slightly less at about 3500 km (compared with about 12,700 km for the Earth). But Mercury is unique in many ways. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting at about 1/3 the radius of the Earth's orbit. As Mercury slowly rotates, its surface temperature varies from an unbearably cold -180 degrees Celsius to an unbearably hot 400 degrees Celsius. The place nearest the Sun in Mercury's orbit changes slightly each orbit - a fact used by Albert Einstein to help verify the correctness of his then newly discovered theory of gravity: General Relativity. The above picture was taken by the only sp ...
|
|
|
0 |
2714 |
savio |
10 years ago |
|
1 |
2581 |
savio |
10 years ago |