Birds

 

Birds are amazing winged animals that have very intricate designs. Many birds that are kept as pets prefer to have a "friend', so that it doesn't get lonely while its owner is away. Hummingbirds lay the smallest eggs. Ostriches lay the largest. Penguins are the only birds that swim but don't fly. They are also the only birds that walk upright.

 

Owls can turn their heads almost 360 degrees, but they cannot move their eyes. Birds' eyes take up about 50% of their head. Humans' eyes take up about 5% of our head. Males usually have the prettier coloring, better feather shapes, and more beautiful songs to attract mates.

 

The first bird domesticated by a human being was the goose. Birds eat twice their weight each day. So when people say "you eat like a bird", it usually isn't the truth. Chickens that lay brown eggs have red earlobes. Mockingbirds can imitate naturally-parrots have to be taught to do so. Though mockingbirds can't talk like parrots can learn to, they can mimic many different sounds.  Info Credit

Flexible, Paper Sculptures

These are flexible, paper sculptures. They are able to do this because it is made from thousands of sheets of paper glued together in a special way. It is made of parallel lines of glue and then a sheet of paper is added and then another parallel lines of glue and another piece of paper is added and this is done over and over again. When it is finished and dried, the artist can carve it out to create a sculpture that moves and can be pulled apart.

Liquid Earth

This is weird grass on a golf course. There are two layers underneath this grass. On the top, there is a layer of topsoil containing sand and slit. Underneath, there is a layer of clay made up of particles 1000 times small than a grain of sand. After a heavy rain, water can get through the top soil layer because of its larger particles and gaps in between them but when it reaches the clay layer it cannot. The clay layer is smaller and more dense so the water gets trapped at that level until it can't fill anymore. The rainwater is unable to penetrate the clay layer which is called waterlogging. This is what creates the liquid effect of the ground.

Mind Blowing Fact About Atoms!

This is an image of the Atlantic ocean which is huge. Now in your head imagine it being measured in teaspoons. That would be a very big number. Did you know that one teaspoon of water has more atoms than there are teaspoons in the Atlantic ocean? In one teaspoon there are 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 water molecules, and each of these is made of three atoms. If you lined all of these atoms end to end you would get 50 billion km which is 10 times the width of our solar system.

photo credit

SO MUCH DNA!!!!!!!!!!

Did you know that in your body there is enough DNA to go from the sun to Pluto and back 17 times!

DNA is a code in our bodies that is responsible for how our body operates. It controls how we grow what functions our organs do and how we differ from others.The human cell contains 23 DNA molecules each containing between 500,000 to 2,500,000 nucleotide pairs. When uncoiled these molecules are 5 cm long on average. In our bodies there are 37,000,000,000,000 (trillion) cells. So if you uncoil all of the DNA in your body and lay it end to end the distance it would stretch over would be 200,000,000,000,000 meters long which is enough to complete thee round trip from Pluto to the sun about 17 times. ( the round trip is 12,000,000,000,000  which if you divide the 2 distances would give you 16.6666666666667 round trips)

Photo Credit

Daddy Long Legs

In Puebla, New Mexico, some biologists might call this creepy. The ball isn't really a ball. This ball are Harvestmen or otherwise known as Daddy Long Legs. Daddy longs legs aren't spiders but are closely related. They are combined in this video to form a ball of fluff called an aggregate. They spend their nights hungtin and in the daytime they huddle close together for protection and defense. When you touch this ball they scatter to confuse their predators. It's called the dilution effect.

Dry Ice

Dry ice is carbon dioxide in solid form. The temperature for carbon dioxide to become a solid is at least -109.3 degree F. When the dry ice is exposed to room temperature it changes from a solid directly to a gas which is called sublimation; it bypasses the liquid phase. The sudden drop in temperature causes water vapor to condense into tiny droplets, or fog.

How does smog affect your vision?

If you've ever had  smoke blown in your eyes

you know it can dry out your eyes and

it makes you very irritated. It's something

you generally want to avoid smog. If you

hadn't known already by the 12,000 plus

times we blink on average a day, we blink

because our eyes need moisture almost

constantly. Smog is something that causes

ours to get very irritated and can, if long 

enough, cause some vision problems.

In Beijing, China they have one of the highest

smog pollution rates in the world and they have

many people who have medical problems from

this pollution. Imagine smoke getting blown in

your eyes right now, then Imagine living in Beijing

and having that same feeling frequently. Doesn't feel

good does it? Well smog isn't good for your eyes 

and you should stay away from it as much as possible.

Source

Creating False Memories

Neuroscientists in France have implanted false memories into the brains of sleeping mice. Using electrodes to directly stimulate and record the activity of nerves cells, they made artificial associative memories that lasted while the animals slept and then influenced their behavior when they woke up.
Manipulating memories by messing with brain cells is nothing new in neuroscience labs. In 2014, one team of researchers used a technique called optogenetics to label the cells encoding fearful memories in the mouse brain and switch them on and off, and another used it to identify the cells encoding positive and negative memories, so that they could change positive memories into negative ones and vice versa.
This new work, published March 9, 2015 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, shows for the first time that artificial memories can be put into the brains of sleeping animals. It also gives scientists more details about how populations of nerve cells encode spatial memories and the important role that slep plays in making these memories stronger.
Karim Benchenane of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris and his colleagues put electrodes into the brains of 40 mice, targeting the medial forebrain bundle(MFB), a component of the reward circuitry which has at least 3 different cells types that encode the memories needed for spatial navigation. Then they left the mice to explore their environment and monitored the responses of their neurons to identify place cells, each of which fired when one of the animals was in a specific location in their surroundings. In one experiment, performed on 5 awake mice, they timed the electrical stimulation of the MFB to correspond with the firing of a specific place cell.
This paired stimulation gave the mice a false memory. The mice linked the MFB stimulation with the specific location encoded by the cell, and thus spent 4- to 5-times more time in that location than two control mice who received MFB stimulation that did not correspond with a place cell firing. Place cells are known to 'replay' their activity patterns during sleep, and this is thought to strengthen newly formed memories.
To research further, the researchers repeated their experiments in 5 sleeping mice. Having already identified place cells while the mice explored their environment, the researchers let them fall asleep, and then paired the firing of each selected place cell in each one with the stimulation of the MFB. Later on, these mice, as well, showed a large preference for that specific location. In contrast, the control mice, who received random MFB stimulation that was not paired with the firing of a place cell wandered around with no liking to any particular place.
Even so, other work shows that false memories can be implanted into the human brain without advanced technology. In a recent study, nearly 3/4 of participants reported having in depth false memories of a crime they didn't commit.
Photo Credit

The Neurobiology Behind Individuality

When a group of genetically identical mice lived together in the same complex for three months, mice that explored their surroundings more broadly grew more new neurons than those who were less adventurous, according to a study published May 9, 2013 in Science Magazine. This link between inquiring behaviors and the adult growth and development of nervous tissue shows that brain plasticity can be shaped by experience and suggests that this may promote individuality, even in genetically identical organisms.
Scientists have long tired to tackle the question of how individual differences in behavior and personality develop in terms of the way genes and the individual's surroundings interact. "But there is next to nothing [known] about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying individuality" says Gerd Kempermann of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Dresden.
A logical way to study this would be to look at how the brain's structure and function change over time (the brain's plasticity). This plasticity is hard to study, though, because it takes place mostly at the synaptic level, so Kempermann and his colleagues decided to look at the growth of new neurons in the adult hippocampus, which can be found easily. Earlier studies have shown that activity increases the adult growth an development of nervous tissue in groups of genetically identical mice, but there were differences between individuals in the amount of neuron growth.
To find out why, Kempermann and his colleagues housed 40 genetically identical female inbred mice in a 5-square meter, 5-level enclosure filled with different sorts of objects made to encourage activity and exploration. The mice were tagged with radio-frequency-infer-red transponders and had 20 antennas in the complex that caught their every movement. After 3 months, the researchers assessed the growth and development of nervous tissue in the mice by counting their fast-multiplying precursor cells, which had been numbered before the study began.
The researchers saw that individual differences in exploratory behavior corresponded with individual differences in the numbers of new neurons generated. "To our knowledge, it's the first example of a direct link between individual behavior and individual brain plasticity," said Kempermann.
However, be cautious about putting all the differences on their surroundings. Even though the mice in the study were genetically the same, they were not behaviorally identical to begin with. It is clear that some variation happens at an extremely early stage, making the mice more or less likely to explore.
These findings could help explain why human identical twins raised in the environment end up with different personalities. Photo Credit

EDM | Ten Scaly Facts About American Alligator

This is a video of me doing some rad facts about American Alligators. Enjoy.

EDM | DAWN SPACE PROJECT

Today the Rice Farmer and The Indian dive into

the wonderful world of space and talk about the interesting

space probe called DAWN commissioned by NASA.

ENjoy Lads :^)

Sources:

http://dawnblog.jpl.nasa.gov/

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/

Grafting like a pro | EDM

Grafting is the act of taking off a limb off a tree/plant and taping it on on another tree/plant of the same family to have more than one fruit/vegetable growing on the same plant. In other words you put the tissues of two plants together to make it grow more stuff. This is a video of Anya and i doing rad stuff in our grafting adventure. If you look far back on the science blog you can see a post on a tree that bears more than 40 fruits.

How to turn milk into stone

       In this video he mixes warm milk and white vinegar to make a custard like substance called casein. He then explains that it makes up most of the protein found in milk. He will strain the casein and let dry out. After that it has become a plastic almost as hard as stone. This plastic was used a long time make pens and  other plastic objects. www.youtube.com

Did you know that you can make diamonds out of peanut butter ?

       In this video I talk about how peanut butter can be made into diamonds.  Because of the carbon the peanut butter contains it is able to make diamonds. Anything with carbon can make them including you. In order to make the diamonds you need 50 kilo-bars of pressure which is equivalent to fifty elephants on top of one square unit of peanut butter. You also need heat about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So it seems that an average person can't  make their own diamonds out of their peanut butter.

Largest Black Hole

Largest Black Hole

Quasar OJ287 is the largest known black hole in our universe.

It is estimated to be atleast 18 billion times larger than the mass

of our sun. The black hole is so massive that it could possibly

suck in our entire galaxy. The event horizon is 11x times the 

diameter of neptune orbiting our sun. Researchers at the University

of Texas were able to discover this incredible black hole by using the

hubble telescope

Image Source

Universe Expansion

Universe Expansion

Our universe is constantly expanding at a very high rate.

The rate is approximately 46.2 kilometers per megaparsec.

A megaparsec is 3 light years. In the 1920's, an astronomer

by the name of Edwin P. Hubble found out that our universe

is not static, but is expanding at a certain rate. Later in the 1990's,

Hubble Telescope discovered that the rate at which our universe

is expanding by is speeding up! Scientists still aren't exactly sure on

why or how our universe is expanding, but efforts from groups like

NASA continue to research and find out why.

Picture Source

Artificial Skin That can Give People with Prothestics a Sense of Touch

Artificial skin made in a lab can "feel" similar to the way a fingertip senses pressure and could one day let people feel sensation in their prosthesis limbs. Researchers were able to send the touching sensation as an electric pulse to the relative "touch" brain cells in mice.
The stretchy, flexible skin is made of a man made rubber that has been manufactured to micron-scale pyramid like structures that make it extra sensitive to pressure. The researchers sprinkled this pressure sensitive rubber with microscopic cylinders of carbon that conduct electricity very well so that when the material is touched, a series of electric pulses is given off by the sensor. This series of pulses is then sent to the brain cells in a way that mirrors how touch receptors in human skin send sensation to the brain.
To test if the skin could make electric pulses that the brain could respond to, the researchers connected the synthetic skin to a blue LED light. When the skin was touched, it sent electric signals to the LED light, which pulsed in response. The sensors translated that pressure pulse into electric pulses. When the sensors in the skin sent the electric pulses to the LED- very similar to the way touch receptors in real human skin send touch sensation signals to the brain- a blue light flashed.
The researchers added a special protein that cause brain cells to react to blue light and added them to the mice brain cells. The protein let the LED act like a receptor cells in the skin. When the light flashed it sent a signal to the brain that the artificial skin had been touched. This experiment showed that, when the artificial skin was touched, the brain would respond in the same way as brains react to real skin being touched.
The next step would be to the skin in other animals and the eventual goal is to be able to stimulate the human brain and have the skin available for people.

Aerogel: The World's Least Dense Solid

Aerogels are any material of a group of very light or porous solids. The lightest aerogel is less than four times as dense than dry air. They are made by certain gels being heated under pressure, causing the liquid in the gel to lose surface tension and become supercritical, or in a state between a liquid and gas. In this state, the liquid can be removed from the gel by adding additional heat, without messing up the porous structure made by the gel's solid component.
Silica-, melamine-, and carbon- based aerogels have been manufactured in the past. The lightest are silica-based aerogels and some have been appropriately nicknamed 'solid smoke' or 'frozen smoke'. These lightweight aerogels are almost transparent. Heavier aerogels were first produced in 1931 and have since been used to detect fast moving particles given off by particle accelerators
Newer, lighter aerogels with fairly high insulating properties are being tested to replace more dangerous foams as insulation in refrigerators and as substitutes for the air between double pane windows.

Are bananas good for you ?

                                                                                       

   In this video I talk about the pros and cons of bananas. A banana contains 27 grams of carbohydrates and 14 grams of sugar compared to other fruit that is a lot. It only has one gram of protein and 0 grams of fat. A banana also has 500 MG of potassium and 32 MG of  magnesium. If you are trying to lose weight it's a bad choice  to eat a lot of them but if you're  healthy and active these are what you need.

                                                                                     

The Honey Badger

The honey badger is and amazing creation of God. They are one of the fiersest animals on earth. They can eat pretty much anything from tortices to venomous snakes to melons and honey. God gave them remarcably thick skin that can withstand even a muchete. This video is 10 surprising facts about honey badgers. hope you enjoy.

Is You'r Sense of Taste Connected to You'r Sense of Smell?

Taste is extremely connected with smell. Since our taste buds only detect 5 tastes, smell plays an important part in helping us taste flavors. The 5 categories are: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and sweet. Now imagine all of the flavors you have ever tasted and subtract any of these five that apply to a certain food. All of that flavor is because you are able to smell! We sometimes take smell for granted, but when we realize how important it is we are able to thank God for what he has given us.

If you want to learn some more click this link

Why are Lemons Sour?

Lemons are sour because they have citric acid, which is found in most fruits and vegetables. Unlike most fruits, lemons have a lot of citric acid. When lemon juice hits your taste buds, they send a message to your brain. This message lets your brain know that what you are tasting is sour. You then react to these messages by making a funny face or shaking your head.

Why Do Cats Love Boxes?

Have you ever seen a cat in a box or a photo of one and wondered why they like boxes so much? Well.. possibly not. But a few people have, and I am one of those few. The answer is rather simple: when a cat is in a box that is bigger and taller than it, it can stalk prey without being suspected, and it can hide from predators. For a cat, being in a box can relieve stress, especially when they've just moved somewhere new. Why would being in a box relieve a cat's stress? Well, say that a cat has just been brought to an animal shelter. It will most likely be very anxious and agitated. If there are other cats in the same area as it, then it will probably want to be alone. If there is a box, then it can climb into the box, curl up, and be able to get a hold of itself without having to worry about predators or territory until it has calmed.

Photo Credit

Why do people like memes?

Photo cred

Memes are part of the fantastical place called the internet whether its to grab attention to roasting others, memes have been part in our lifestyle for a while now. Why in the world do people like memes? Some scientists researched it and came up conclusions and the best one they came up with so far is people get bored but we illegal meme users really know what its about. Its about our genetics telling us to socialize and have fun with people we don't know on the internet. Here are some memes to make your day fantastic and wonderful. photo cred

Why are cats scared of Cucumbers?

Cats are curious creatures that like to explore, but why are they scared of cucumbers? Scientists have been wondering also so they came up with the idea that they are scared of anything that they don't understand like a vacuum cleaner. They also think it has to do with them being solitary animals which will probably freak you out if you turned after eating raw meat like a savage in the willderness and saw a giant cucumber wantimg to eat you.

buoyancy levels

 In this video I test the buoyancy levels of vinegar, Karo syrup, and honey all mixed                           with water. When I tested the honey it was about an inch high from the bottom of                               the bottle. After the honey I tested the vinegar and it had the same buoyancy level.
 And after I tested the vinegar I tested the Karo syrup  and had the highest buoyancy
 level it was about 2 inches high from the bottom of the battle. I put them in 1st 2nd                             and 3rd place Karo syrup in 1st, Honey in 2nd, and Vinegar in 3rd. please enjoy the
 motion picture I've put together for you.
 
                           

Why do we cry? Three different types of tears

   


       The video here explains why we cry, when we're crying, and what causes us to cry all three                  different types of tears. Basal tears are the first cry you are always crying basal tears they are not        noticeable and they keep your eyes moist. Reflex tears are your second tear and you only cry              reflex tears when you cut an onion open because of the chemicals it gives off one for example is
       amino acid sulfoxide. Your third tear is emotional tears you only cry emotional tears when you            experience something sad like the loss of a family member.

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-we-cry-the-three-types-of-tears-alex-gendler

BAROMETERS - HOW THEY WORK!

The pressure from gravity is exerted on the mercury.

This pressure thus causes the mercury to rise to a certain

height in the measuring tube. This essentially is a vacuum,

due to how its pressure works. The tube is able to suck up

the mercury in a sense that it causes there to be a space with

no matter, due to the fact that there is no air within the upper

part of the measuring tube.

Image Source

Article Source

Buoyancy-How does it work?

The term buoyancy was first discovered by an ancient

Greek philosopher Archimedes. An object that is submerged

in water displaces water according to how much it weighs. 

Archimedes discovered that the water will push against the   

object with a force equal to the weight of the water that is displaced.

The amount of water that is moved depends on the density of the 

object. A bowling ball and a beach ball have the same volume, but the

bowling ball weighs more, The bowling ball is able to move enough

water to be equal with it's own weight, so it floats.

Image Source

Source