Strongest Biological Material Yet

And the award goes to... Limpet teeth! Limpets are mollusks with cone-shaped shells. They even beat spider's webs in strength. Some of you found limpet shells in Monterey last month. Why do they need teeth? Check out this article to learn more. 

http://sciencefriday.com/blogs/05/27/2015/picture-of-the-week-limpet-teeth.html?series=31#path/blogs/05/27/2015/picture-of-the-week-limpet-teeth.html?series=31

Why Do We Like Music?

People love music. Almost everyone has a favorite song, or a reason to listen to music. But why does it satisfy us? When the brain hears music, a special structure in the human brain is released. This structure is called dopamine. Dopamine is usually only released with eating and very addictive drugs. So when you hear a song and you like it, your body is liking it as well (your brain in particular). Even when you hear a song you'e never heard before; if you like it, your brain will release dopamine. Also, when you hear a new song that you like, your brain's memory changes; it adds "space" for you to memorize the song. So, in a way, if you like a new song, your brain already knows you'll listen to it again. This all shows just how amazing God created human beings.

Here are two songs I really like. The one above this is called "You Can't Stop Me" by Andy Mineo and the second one is called "Power Trip" by Lecrae. They're both Christian songs. Enjoy!

志摩の看護師!

This is an extremely cute species of birds. When they are mature enough to fly the look like they have eyebrows but that quickly goes away in adulthood. They are found only at a certain place in Japan called Hokkaido which is known for their volcanoes and is commonly mistaken as Mt. Fuji. They have no name in English so they are called 志摩の看護師 (Shima no kankoshi) in Japanese.Their diet is unknown to us.

Dumbo Octopus

Photo credit

• Little is known about them
• They live on the ocean floor or hoover above it and others appear to be open water only
• There are 14 species
• They are suspected to live in every ocean
• Typically they're found at 100 to 5,00 meters underwater but have found at 7,00 meters
• They can make quick escapes and are excellent swimmers
• By dissecting females scientists have concluded that they mate all year long
• They lay eggs underneath rocks and shells and leave them on their own
• They eat their prey whole
• The ones that live on the bottom eat mainly crustaceans, bivalves, and worms
• The ones that live above the bottom eat pelagic copepods and small fish occasionally

Dropping a slinky

A slinky is a toy that is a flexible helical spring that can be made to somersault down steps. It's a toy that was invented by Robert T. James in 1943. But what happens when a slinky is dropped. The attached video shows a slinky being dropped. You can see that the bottom of the slinky appears to remain in one place as the top of the slinky catches up to. It almost looks like the slinky is floating in air. How does this happen? The gravity of the top of the slinky is pulling down and the spring tension of the bottom of slinky goes up. The rest of the video will explain more.

Why Do You Forget Their Name?

It is from long term memory and short term memory.

What Causes Phantom Pains is Amputees?

Phantom pain is what most amputees feel at the end of the remaining part of their amputated appendage. While the exact cause of phantom pain remains unclear, it seems to originate in the brain and spinal cord. During MRI and PET scans, parts of the brain that were neurologically connected to the appendage show activity when a person experiences phantom pain. Most experts believe that phantom pains can be explained partially by having mixed signals sent to the brain. The spinal cord and nerve endings no longer have input for the missing appendage and try to adjust in unpredictable ways. This can trigger the most basic signal for something not being right: pain.
Studies show that, because the missing appendage can no longer receive sensory information, the information is sent somewhere else; from a missing hand to a cheek that is still present. When that cheek is touched, it's as if the missing hand is also being touched. This is just another version of tangled sensory wires, so it can result in pain.
Other factors believed to cause phantom pain include damaged nerve endings, scar tissue at the amputation site, and the physical memory or pre-amputation pain.

Why do we have heart attacks?

Photo Credit (Warning: Not actual Image of a real heart) Source Credit

Heart attacks are caused mostly by blockage

or clots in the veins and arteries in the heart.

This can lead to the pain this can lead to the

pain that causes heart attacks. The action that

causes the pain is if the muscle dies, it offsets

the electrical stability of the heart, causing it

to go off its stable function, therefore, resulting

in a painful reaction in the chest that attacks on

the heart can cause.

Black Hole Facts

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• Time slows down in black holes. According to Caleb Scharf if you threw a clock into one, assuming it wasn't destroyed, the ticking would slow down and eventually seem to freeze. The gravity inside one is so strong that it can slow down time.
• There is no possible way to escape a black hole without exceeding the speed of light, which is impossible.
• If you were to fall feet first into a black hole, the gravity at your feet would be stronger than at your head, causing you to be torn apart.
• They create a noise when stuff is pulled into them.
• They are incredibly dense. A black hole with the mass of earth would be 9 millimeters across. A black hole that could fit between Mercury and the Sun would have 4 million times the mass of our sun.
• Depending on their mass they can be put into one of the three main groups of black holes - supermassive, stellar, and miniature.
• Astronomers are certain that their is a  supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy .
• You can't directly see a black hole because no light can escape from it.
• The first black hole discovered was Cygnus X-1 in the 1960s but wasn't identified as one until a decade later.

アマミホシゾラフグが作るミステリーサークル!

This a new species of puffer-fish was found in Japan. Cool thing is that they make circles in sand to attract mates. Not very much is known about these species. They are very neon colored to not be seen in the very blue waters. They haven't made a real name for it in English yet so i had to use Japanese then i Google translated it then it said Zola Blowfish is the name. Article I used/Photocredit

I just visited San Francisco and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Last year I was able to walk on it. I think it is much bigger than it looks in the picture. The total length of the bridge is 8,980 feet and the elevation is 220 feet. Also, the bridge is not actually golden. The color is called international orange and painting the bridge is an on going. The Golden Gate bridge is a suspension bridge and it is built so it can move in an earthquake. The official opening of the bridge was May 27, 1937 and over 200,000 people walked across it that day. It took about 4 years to build the bridge.

The science of laughter!

Laughter is usually looked down upon in class but it is actually an interesting thing to study. Did you know that laughter is contagious. When people realized this they started putting "laugh tracks" with their shows which means that you are more likely to laugh at it. For more information on the science of laughter you can click here.

Giant squid

http://blogs.discovery.com/show-news/2013/01/top-10-startling-giant-squid-

Hammerhead Sharks

Photo Credit

Found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide,

 far offshore and near shorelines, is the hammerhead

shark, one of the nine largest sharks in the world,  

(It can grow up to 6 meters, 20 feet) and one of the

most interesting looking sharks, the head of the shark

has its shape to give the shark a wider and better visual

range, that is extraordinarily better than most sharks. It

also has the purpose of holding its sensory organs, and its

wide head allows it to scan the ocean for food. one group

of the sensory organs is the ampullae of the lorenzini, that

allows the shark to sense electrical fields generated by 

animals in the sharks vicinity. This system can allow the

shark to spot prey such as stingrays that move slowy throuh

the sand and occasionally bury themselves under it.

Source Credit

Seahorses.

Seahorses are amazing creatures. They live in shallow tropical waters. They are related to pipefish and vary in size from 0.6 in to 14 in. They use their elongated snout to feed. Their diet consists of plankton and very small crustaceans that float in the water. These fish are unique because they mate for life and the males carry the eggs until fertilization. For more information click here

photo credit

                                                    Pipefish

photo credit

photo credit

Megaladon

 

http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/ss/10-Facts-About-Megalodon.htm

Can birds deliver messages?

Carrier Pigeons are able to deliver messages for as many 1800 km. They usually go only one way but can be trained to deliver messages both ways. They can also be trained to carry messages in flocks.

The Shape Shifting Rain Frog!

This is a newly found species discovered on the slopes of the western Andes. These creatures are amazing because it can shape its form into something else like an octopus to blend in the with its surroundings in its swamp like environment in under 5 minutes. This is the first vertebrate that can shape shift which is super cool.

JPL | Videos | Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror

JPL | Videos | Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror

How did we land the Curiosity Rover on Mars? Click the link to watch the video.  The 8th graders watched this in class.

Bird

This is the New Zealand kiwi bird.  This bird is only found in New Zealand. There are only about 70,000 Kiwi left. They are losing about 2% of there kiwi every year which is about 27 per week. Yes the kiwi is threatened with extinction.

The kiwi is mostly nocturnal. they live in forests and bush areas. They make dens or nests in hollow logs or dense vegetation. Kiwi are the only bird that  have nostrils at the end of there bill. The nostrils are used for probing in the ground and sniffing invertebrates to eat, it also eats fruit that has fallen.

The kiwi has one of the largest egg-to -body weight ratios of any bird. The egg averages 15% of the females body weight compared to an ostriches egg. Female kiwi are larger than male kiwi birds. Depending on the species the kiwi can live up to 25-50 years. Adult kiwi usually mate for life.
doc.govt.nz

Babies

Did you know that when babies are born they have more bones than adults do? They do, and that's because when they're born, not all of their bones, such as the skull are as one. So as a child grows, it's skull fuses together to form one bone. Did you also know that babies can't taste salt until they're about four months old? It's thought that the reason for this is because their kidneys process sodium at about that time. Also, the first all-female set of quintuplepts in the USA born since 1969 were born April 8, 2015. There was another set born in the 1980's, but two children died after birth. Photo Credit

Here are the quintuplets
I was writing about. Their names are
Ava Lane, Hazel Grace,
Olive Marie, Parker Kate, and Riley Paige.
(That is not in order, as far as I know.)

pharaoh cuttlefish

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animal-guide/octopus-and-kin/www.phuket-scuba-club.com