In some, she simply said the phrase without moving her hands. Peel the banana. In others, she made the kind of hand gesture most of us would make when saying thata sort of banana-peeling mime that matches the content of the phrase. In a third group,...
You know radio is a great thing. Communicating by voice alone has its drawbacks, though.For example, I cant use hand gestures to clarify what I mean. And, as it turns out, that makes a big difference. Researchers at the University of Otago in New Zea...
Not so, however, with a tiny water bug off the coast of Australia called the Zeus bug. The male of this species gets a free ride, literally. You see, the male Zeus bug is about half the size of the female Zeus bug. He travels around piggy-back in a l...
The typical scenario between the sexes of much of the animal kingdom is that males work for the opportunity to mate with females and thus spread their genes. This work often consists of providing females with gifts such as food, as well as risking hi...
Dear Annie: My husband and I are expecting a baby soon. One of his sisters has asked if she and her husband could be the godparents. She is not who I would have picked because of her difficult attitude, but my husband says we should agree because she...
Ancient people believed comets were omens. Sometimes they were thought to signal the fall of empires, other times the birth of kings. Even today, when were all supposed to be much more intelligent, people do crazy things when comets pass by. But even...
But cat eyes do have some cones, and with work cats can learn how to distinguish between colors. In experiments, scientists have taught cats to discriminate between two symbols when the only difference between them is their color. Cats have learned h...
You can look at that quilt your cat is curled up on and see a patchwork of greens, blues, and yellows. Your cat, however, cannot see color variation in the quilt.And here's Why? Both humans and cats depend on the back layer of the eye, which is calle...
In theory, if a subject lies on an important question, his polygraph response will be different from the truthful responses to the neutral questions. Does this really work? Its true that a polygraph can measure emotional stress, and its also true tha...
In an ideal world, a lie detector machine would measure some involuntary response which everyone has when they lie, but not when they tell the truth. Unfortunately, there is no such response and, because of this, no such thing as a perfect lie detect...
Heres a great story of someone using their noggin to figure out something about nature. For a long time people have been fascinated by comets passing by the earth. But nobody knew how far away they were. Aristotle, for example, figured that comets we...
The hands and feet contain more sweat glands than any other part of the body. One square inch of skin on the palm of your hand may contain as many as three thousand tiny sweat glands. But not all sweat glands are the same and sweat from different par...
These grip the surface the same way a rock climber might grip a cliff face with her fingertips. Each of these tarsi also has a tiny, sticky cushion. Sticky Cushions You might think that these cushions are suction cups, but they arent. Theyre merely s...
Its such a common sight, you probably dont think twice. You swat at the fly buzzing around your head, and it seeks refuge on the ceiling. You stomp at an ant crawling along the baseboard, and it escapes by climbing the wall. Insects seem to respect t...
These bacteria split the nitrogen atoms apart and combine them with other molecules, making the nitrogen available to the plants that the bacteria are living on. In exchange, sugars produced by the plants photosynthesis fuel the process of nitrogen-f...
