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Showing posts from May, 2014

Urban Legends: Mice don't like Cheese

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You'll not believe this, but is actually true! In fact, as many mice owners or pest exterminator knows, mice don’t like cheese at all and they’re even disgusted eating certain types, due to their excellent sense of smell that permits them to identify repulsive smells given by some kinds of cheese. According to Dr. David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University, who recently did a study on whether mice liked cheese or not, mice will pretty much eat anything if hungry enough. Most type of mice mainly prefer grains, fruits, and sweet things ; certain types of mice will also eat insects and other small animals. Basically, they like to eat what they've learned eating since before humans started making cheese around 10 thousands years ago. Nobody knows how the myth that mice like cheese got started.  It’s been around for a long time, even being mentioned by philosopher Seneca about 2000 years ago: " Mouse is a syllable.  Now a mouse eats its cheese; therefore, a syllab

Random Facts About... Time Conception

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Here are some facts that will twist your vision of time! If you want your sense of time to be destroyed, definitely check it out! 1.  France was still executing people by guillotine when "Star Wars" came out. The movie premiered in theaters in May 1977. The last execution by guillotine took place on September 10th of the same year. 2.  Harvard University was founded before there was even calculus. In fact Harvard is the oldest higher education institution in the US, founded in 1636.  Calculus wasn’t derived until later in the 17th century, with the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. 3. Speaking about prestigious universities, Oxford University is actually older than Aztec civilization. Oxford University was opened by 1249, while the Aztec civilization as we know it began with the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325. 4.  If the history of Earth were compressed into a single year, modern humans would appear on December 31st, at about 11:00pm. The human race has ‘do

Did You Know...How do fireflies glow?

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As a child I've always thought fireflies were magical creatures. And that is due to the lower part of their abdomen. The magic has a name: bioluminescence , the light produced by a small cells called photocytes, reflected off several layers of reflective cells, with a consequent emission of a greenish-yellow glow. Inside this light producing cells within the firefly is an organelle called a peroxizome . The chemical part within it is what creates the light. Magnesium and ATP (so it's called energy in biology) combine with an enzyme known as luciferase and the protein luciferin . This combination creates a very excited molecule. When oxygen is introduced into the mix, the molecule goes from excitement back to a steady state. This transaction releases energy in the form of a photon of light . The mechanism that starts this light show is not very well known. The main theory revolves around the firefly’s ability to control oxygen within photocytes. The organelle that controls A

Did You Know That...Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way to Orientate?

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Dung beetles, as only few people know, have remarkable navigation abilities, despite the relatively small sizes of their brains. It seems also that after dung beetles collect the dung (the most common characteristic of these animals), they do a little dance on top of it before moving it in a straight line to their final destination. The dancing actually helps the dung beetle get its bearings as it dances around in circles, looking at the stars. This behaviour, as well as the fact that dung beetles have specialized eyes which analyse the direction of light polarization , first led researchers to affirm that the beetles might be using the sky to orientate. During the day, it was easy to see that they were using this polarized light found around the sun in order to navigate. But nowadays it wasn't exactly known how they manage to navigate at night. This have led scientists to say they might be using the moon. To test this, there are a variety of different experiments conducted by

Images From The World: Miracle Garden (Dubai)

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Let me be the first to welcome you to the wonderful "Miracle Garden". This giant garden is the largest garden in whole world with the most impressive landscaping that will get you out of breath. Here are planted over 45 millions flowers in many stunning and creative arrangements : peacocks, butterflies, bigger flowers, pyramids and many more. It has a riot of colors as far as the eye can see in many different tiers and levels, and there are even arches shaped like hearts that mark out romantic passageways to walk through. This can be an ideal destination for lovers or for couples , and  perhaps it's no coincidence that it was opened right on Valentine's day !! In this fantastic masterpiece you can see all kind of flowers, from ordinary ones to some exotic species more often found in the jungles of Asia and South America. Each area has special vertical and horizontal landscaping designs from arc-shaped walkways, pathway covered with colorful mini-umbrellas

Random Facts About...Your Brain

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The human body is one of the most amazing machines ever created . And   among the organs inside this wonderful creation, the brain is without a doubt the most amazing . It's useless  to mention the enormous capacity that you all know, so let's d iscover some interesting facts about this not very well-known organ. 1. Your brain keeps developing until your late 40s . 2. New brain connections are created every time you form a memory . 3. When awake, the human brain produces enough electricity to power a small lightbulb . 4. In this case, size doesn't matter. In fact the weight and size of a brain has nothing to do with intellectual ability. Albert Einstein’s brain actually weighed less than the average weight of a human brain! 5. Your brain uses 20% of the total oxygen and blood in your body. 6. Did you know that when our eyes receive images, they are actually upside-down? Our brain automatically corrects them, so that we see them the righ

Snooping Around....Molten Aluminum Creations

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Ants are highly social creatures who live in colonies of thousands of members. Humans often use poisons to get rid of these creatures to protect their home and property, but an artist did something quite weird with Molten Aluminum . In this process the aluminum is carefully poured into the top of an ant nest , and the metal goes throughout all of the tunnels and settles into all of the crevices. Once the Aluminum has cooled and the dirt has been washed away, the resulting structure makes a perfect representation of the nest’s internal structure. Actually these seems to be a very rude process because all of the ants die in the process, but given the ants’ invasive nature it’s hardly worth for most of people losing any sleep over. But these have given scientists a wide knowledge . In fact making models of the nests allow scientists to study differences between species, as not all ants make the same nests. For example, carpenter ants have simple nests with only a few tunnels while

Random Facts About...Jellyfish, The Elves of the Ocean

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First I have to tell you...these are my favourite animals ever! And as you saw in my previous article about Poisonous Animals (check it out if you haven't yet ) are also very dangerous!! Let's find out other random facts about these amazing creatures!! 1. Jellyfish are found in every ocean of the world. They are even found in some freshwater lakes and ponds. 2. Jellyfish reproduce both asexually and sexually. They are usually male or female, though hermaphroditic species have also been found. 3. Even a dead jellyfish can sting. 4. Jellyfish are invertebrates, which means they are animals without a skeleton. Approximately 95% of their body is water. 5. Jellyfish have lived in the waters of the world for more than 650 million years, long before the dinosaurs, making them the oldest multi-organ animal. 6. Jellyfish move in essentially two ways. They take water in their bell and then squirt it out behind them, which creates a jet of water that moves them forward. The