Birds aren’t usually the first animal that people think about when they think about smart animals. In English, calling someone birdbrained means that they are stupid. And saying something is ‘for the birds’ means that it’s trivial or worthless. However, these expressions couldn’t be more off base. Some birds, particularly crows, can be amazingly smart. In fact, their problem-solving abilities are as good as those of a seven-year-old child.
Life Without Sleep
Sleep is not optional. After a long enough period of being awake, our brain starts to produce signals that we are tired. As these signals increase in strength, our brain becomes impaired. We all know what it’s like to feel tired to the point of exhaustion. We are less aware, unfocused, and more likely to have accidents. If we become too exhausted, we may even fall asleep on the spot.
Tongue Twister
Have you ever heard of a tongue twister? Tongue twisters are English sentences that are designed to be hard to say. Try saying this five times fast: She sells seashells on the seashore. Any native English speaker will have learned this tongue twister as a child, but what many people don’t know is that it is based on a real person. Who is this woman who sells seashells on the seashore? It’s Mary Anning, the unsung hero of modern Paleontology.
Love At First Sight
‘Love at first sight’ is an English expression that means to fall in love with someone instantly after just looking at him or her for the first time. Whether you believe this is real love or just shallow desire, it’s a familiar scene in today’s books, movies, and television shows.
Perfect Memory
How well do you remember yesterday? Do you remember what you wore, what you ate, or what you watched on television? If you’re like most people, you do. But you probably don’t remember what you wore, ate or watched on TV on the third Wednesday of January, six years ago. One woman can.
Frozen Future
Maybe death is just another disease that doctors will one day cure. That was the dream of Professor Robert Ettinger, who is the godfather of cryonics. First dreamed up by Ettinger in the 1960s, cryonics is the freezing of bodies in the hopes of one day being able to bring them back to life in the future. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will ever happen, but the dream is that medical science will advance to the point where this will be possible. Perhaps the idea is not so far-fetched considering that scientists have already revived a small microscopic animal in Siberia after being frozen for 24,000 years.
Where Are All The Aliens?
Our Milky Way Galaxy may be home to 2 billion planets that have the right conditions to support life. These planets have the correct temperature for liquid water. While no one knows what alien life would look like, if it is anything like life on earth, it would need water to survive. The possibility of liquid water depends on a planet’s distance from the nearest star. Too close and water evaporates; too far away and water freezes. Scientists have also looked at the effects of clouds on planet temperature. This has increased the estimate of habitable planets to 2 billion. This is only the number of habitable planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is just one of an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe.
Time Traveling Seeds And Satellites
There are more than 200,000 species of plant life on planet earth, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The history of land plants is 420 million years old, and no one can say how many species have lived and died off over the years. While many of these species are gone for good, there is hope that we can bring at least some of these plants back to life. In 2008, scientists in Israel did exactly that. They found 2,000-year-old seeds from a species of date tree that had become extinct. After planting the seeds, amazingly, one of them grew.
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