If someone loves being in the limelight, that means they enjoy being the center of attention. We use the word now to mean social prominence, but have you ever wondered what limelight actually is, or how it came to be synonymous with fame? Originally...
Why, in this case, is vision not suppressed? A team of visual scientists published a study of this question in the journal Nature. They found that what gets suppressed during a saccade are large areas of light and dark. Those are the perceptions that...
The kind of quick eye motion were talking about is called a saccade, from a French word meaning to twitch or jerk. During the fraction of a second that a saccade takes, images sweep over our retinas at high speed. Yet we dont get a feeling of motion,...
Have you ever noticed that you cant see your eyes move when you look in a mirror? Put your face close to the bathroom mirror and look yourself in the eye. Notice the appearance of your eyes. Now, without blinking, look down at your nose, but continue...
Now, theres no cure for tinnitus, but there are some good treatments. In fact, in recent years audiologists have come up with some ingenious therapies. One of these involves using music to trick the brain into muting or at least lowering the volume o...
Some scientists disputed Darwins claim, arguing that the small, weak creatures werent capable of moving such massive amounts of material to the surface. Darwin responded to the criticism by conducting a more careful experiment. This time rather than...
Charles Darwin is best known for his studies of evolution by means of natural and sexual selection, but did you know he was also a pioneer in the study of earthworms? After watching an earthworm s-l-o-w-l-y drag a leaf into its burrow, Darwin became...
Its not uncommon, now and again, to hear a ringing or buzzing in the ear. The condition is called tinnitus, and it can be caused by a number of things such as ear infections, allergies and even as a medication side effect. For most people, tinnitus i...
Those yellow leaf clusters are natural artificial flowers. What happens is this: The mustard plant gets infected with a type of fungus called rust fungus. This fungus causes the plant to stop its natural flower production, and to produce a leaf clust...
Being clean is a good thing. After all, simply washing your hands regularly can help ward off flu and other contagious diseases. Is It Possible To Be Too Clean? Maybe For the past few decades scientists have been debating the so called hygiene hypoth...
The immune system is only trying to help, of course. When we get cut a cut or wound, immune cells rush to the area to fend off foreign particles that might cause infection. And some inflammation is inevitable. But too much inflammation is badit can c...
How much alcohol the yeast can tolerate depends partly on the type of yeast. And thats another reason wine is stronger than beer: beer-yeast, with a lower tolerance for alcohol, is killed by the time the alcohol reaches about nine percent. Wine-yeast...
Theres nothing more artificial than artificial flowers, right? Whereas real flowers have been around for millions and millions of years, artificial flowers are a purely human invention. Theyve been on this Earth only thousands of years, right? At any...
An EEG relies on the fact that this electrical energy can be transmitted along a thin metal wire. By placing electrodes on someones scalp, you can get the electricity from their brain to travel across the wire and into the EEG, where it is charted on...
The electroencephalograph, or EEG, is a machine commonly used by doctors and researchers who want to know what the brain is doing without having to open up someones head and look inside. In fact, even if you were to look inside the head, you still co...
