Do you know what a food allergy is? A study several years ago showed that twenty-five percent of adults believe they have food allergies. According to doctors, the number of adults who actually have food allergies is more like one or two percent. Int...
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...
Many spiders make their webs attractive to insects by using special silks that reflect ultraviolet light, according to a study by two scientists working at Yale University. Ultraviolet light is the component of sunlight that causes suntans and sunbur...
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...
Studies suggest that when we eat a variety of foods, we are less likely to get bored. But therefore we are more likely to eat more. That might contribute to the current obesity problem in Americapeople like the taste of different foods and keep eatin...
Modern medicine is all about precision. When you have a cold, you want the virus gone but everything else in your bloodstream untouched. The perfect stitches would leave absolutely no scar behind, and so on. It turns out that precision is especially...
Approximately one-fifth of the animal kingdom, including ants and wasps, use this system. What it boils down to is that males are the result of unfertilized eggs whereas females are born from fertilized eggs. But in bees there is an added complicatio...
What most people know about the prostate gland is that it tends to develop infections and cancer in men over the age of sixty-five. But unlike another organ prone to infection called the appendix, the prostate does important work. In fact, the human...
Imagine this. Youre coming home to your gated community after a long day of work. As you stop to show the guard your ID, a mugger jumps out from behind a bush and grabs you by the mouth. Okay, that last part sounded a little weird, but thats pretty m...
The trick to preparing the perfect pop, therefore, is to keep as much of this dissolved CO2 inside the liquid as possible. One way to do this is to refrigerate your soda as cold as possible, although you dont want to freeze it. When soda is cold, the...
However, when birds migrate, they cant afford to spend all that energy on digestion. And so their digestive system partially shuts down and stops renewing itself, so all that energy can be diverted into fueling flight. In other words, migrating birds...
Dozens of studies over the past few years have shown that a thick waist raises the risk for heart disease. Now a new study finds that the thicker your waist, the greater chance you have of dying of cancer and other diseases. Researchers looked at hea...
If you thought birds were amazing before, wait until you hear what they put their bodies through in order to migrate. Although its probably no surprise that migration requires a lot of energy, until recently, ornithologists thought migrating birds go...
The four species of piranha that are carnivorous, however, certainly earn their reputation as fierce fish. These meat-eaters have powerful jaws and razor sharp teeth that fit together like cutting shears when they bite. Piranha travel and hunt in sch...
The movie Jaws was so frightening that many people who saw the film swore off swimming in the ocean. Consequently, when most people think of fearsome sea creatures, sharks come immediately to mind. Less well remembered is the movie Piranha , a Jaws k...
