To stay healthy, your cells must continuously perform a wide variety of chemical tasks. Your DNA genes, in the nucleus of every cell, help orchestrate this activity. A cell uses its genes as a kind of biochemical cookbook: whenever it has to do anyth...
Scientists studying emotions have found that basic emotions like amusement, anger, fear, and sadness are common among all cultures. And people from different cultures, whether theyre modern Americans or pre modern aborigines, recognize sound cues lik...
Seinfeld was one of the funniest TV shows ever. Pretty much everyone loved it. Everyone, that is, in the United States. And probably in many other developed countries, too. Because, after all, anyone engaged in the daily grind would connect with the...
An Australian computer scientist named Brendan McKay set out recently to demonstrate that the same thing can be done with any long book. He applied Drosnins observational selection technique to Moby Dick and produced such eerie phrases as M L King ne...
Science is all about rationality. Its about figuring out the way things really work. But my believe has been shaken , I heard about Michale Drosnins book The Bible Code. Oh, Michale Drosnins book The Bible Code. Thats the bestseller where the author...
Infants in the next generation saw their mothers washing potatoes, and virtually all the next generation, both male and female, grew up washing their food, but not the older males! Older males were resistant to the new idea, refusing to wash their fo...
I heard the story about how one monkey on an island figured out how to wash his food, and then other monkeys starting doing it too. Thats the true story of Imo the macaque monkey! In 1952 on the island of Koshima, a primatologist was leaving sweet po...
One study found that people who smoke pipes or cigars are more likely than non-smokers to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. People with the disease have trouble breathing. Finally, if youre not already convinced, pipes and cigars can be jus...
We all know that smoking cigarettes is bad. But what about smoking a pipe or cigars? Since you dont inhale, is it better for your health? Or at least less bad? Good question. So first, its true that cigarettes are in a league of their own when it com...
We would never know about diamonds were it not for volcanic activity, for thats what delivers diamonds from deep inside the earth to where we can get to them. Theoretically diamonds can remain diamonds only at high temperature and pressure. In theory...
You walk into a fancy party. What is the oldest thing there? No, not your in-laws, or even your grandparents. It will be a diamond someone is wearing. Its not completely clear how natural diamonds are formed, and although it is known they are made fr...
Its not clear why, exactly, heavy traffic could cause premature birth. Air pollution from car exhaust could have something to do with it. Some studies have found that women exposed to high levels of carbon monoxide were up to twenty-five percent more...
Ideally, pregnant women should do everything they can to have a full term pregnancy, because babies born even a few weeks early risk being less healthy and possibly suffering from long term disabilities. So what can moms to be do to keep their babies...
Turbines with one or two blades are actually even more efficient. But because theyre also lighter and tend to spin faster, theyre also noisier. These designs also require a special tilting hub that acts as a sort of shock absorber, which is expensive...
If youve ever driven by a wind farm, you may have noticed that the turbines most likely have three blades. Not two, not five, but three. Now, you may think that if the point of a wind turbine is to capture wind, wouldnt five blades capture more wind...
