Amazing facts about the human body

ATOM COUNT
It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

OTHER LIFE
On sheer count of cells, there is more bacterial life inside you than human. There are around 10 trillion of your own cells, but 10 times more bacteria. Many of the bacteria that call you home are friendly in the sense that they don’t do any harm. Some are beneficial.

ATOMIC COLLAPSE
The atoms that make up your body are mostly empty space, so despite there being so many of them, without that space you would compress into a tiny volume. The nucleus that makes up the vast bulk of the matter in an atom is so much smaller than the whole structure that it is comparable to the size of a fly in a cathedral. If you lost all your empty atomic space, your body would fit into a cube less than 1/500th of a centimetre on each side. Neutron stars are made up of matter that has undergone exactly this kind of compression. In a single cubic centimetre of neutron star material there are around 100 million tons of matter.

FUR LOSS
It might seem hard to believe, but we have about the same number of hairs on our bodies as a chimpanzee, it’s just that our hairs are useless, so fine they are almost invisible. We aren’t sure quite why we lost our protective fur. It has been suggested that it may have been to help early humans sweat more easily, or to make life harder for parasites such as lice and ticks, or even because our ancestors were partly aquatic.

Lots more here.

Unborn sharks freeze to avoid predators

Faced with a dangerous predator, baby sharks hold their breath and stay still – even before they’ve been born.

Bamboo sharks (Chiloscyllium punctatum) lay eggs, unlike many sharks that give birth to live young. As a result, the developing sharklings are more vulnerable to being eaten.

New research shows that the shark embryos can detect the bio-electric fields of approaching predators. When they do, they freeze by stopping their gill movements. This suggests that even at these early stages, embryonic sharks can recognise dangers and instinctively try to avoid them, say the researchers. Learn more here.

Watch a Spiders Web being made

This is cool:

Which Came First – The Chicken or the Egg?

It has perplexed humanity from as early as the Ancient Greeks. So which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Dance of the weedy seadragons

Named for their uncanny resemblance to the plant life around them, a male weedy seadragon seduces a female with some very fancy fin work. Two months later, however, its the male whos left carrying the eggs.

Living off the coast of southern Australia, weedy seadragons (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus) are the only known species along with sea horses and pipefish – where the male carries the eggs. Although the eggs start out in the female, she lays about 120 of them onto the tail of the male where they are then fertilized and develop until they hatch.

Happy Valentine’s Day

We call it love. But the most exhilarating of all human emotions is probably nature’s beautiful way of keeping the human species alive and reproducing. That’s right, it can all be explained by science!

Psychologists have shown it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you like someone. And research has shown this has little to do with what is said, rather:

• 55% is through body language
• 38% is the tone and speed of their voice
• Only 7% is through what they say

Next comes love and the 3 stages of love are lust, attraction and attachment.

Stage 1: Lust

This is the first stage of love and is driven by the sex hormonestestosterone and oestrogen – in both men and women.

Stage 2: Attraction

This is the amazing time when you are truly love-struck and can think of little else. Scientists think that three main neurotransmitters are involved in this stage; adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin. For example, adrenaline has the charming effect that when you unexpectedly bump into your new love, you start to sweat, your heart races and your mouth goes dry.

Stage 3: Attachment

Attachment is the bond that keeps couples together long enough for them to have and raise children. Scientists think there might be two major hormones involved in this feeling of attachment; oxytocin and vasopressin.

So there you go, it’s all about hormones and neurotransmitters.

But finally, if you are wondering how to fall in love, it’s simple just:

• Find a complete stranger.
• Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
• Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.

A psychologist asked some subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married! Read lots more here or here and watch a video here.

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

First-Ever Incredible Footage Of A Thought Being Formed

A team of Japanese researchers has achieved something incredible: it has captured, for the first time ever, a movie that shows how thoughts form in the brain.

OK, so it’s a thought forming in the brain of a zebrafish. And its the fish’s reaction to seeing food, so it’s probably along the lines of “HUNGRY!”. But we shouldn’t play this down: this is a fundamental leap forward in our understanding of how brains work.

The researchers used a new technique to record the footage: a super-sensitive fluorescent probe that detects neuron (brain cell) activity. That lets us see neurons glowing when they are active — and the cascade of light you see in this video is the neuronal response of a zebrafish responding to the presence of its prey. In other words, you’re seeing what the fish thinks when it sees its lunch.

Clearly zebrafish aren’t the brainiest creatures in the world, but that’s why the researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Genetics are now working out how to use the technique in other creatures — and get a better insight into how our brains really work. Learn more here.

Life by the Numbers

Wow:

Nature by Numbers

The Fibonacci Sequence is the series of numbers:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …

The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it — and it is in nature …

The Survival of the Sea Turtle

Watch the miraculous journey of infant sea turtles as these tiny animals run the gauntlet of predators and harsh conditions. Then, in numbers, see how human behavior has made their tough lives even more challenging.