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Coffee, Cigarettes, Vampire Spiders, Birds Of A Different Color, Ants Working For Mark Zuckerberg, And Much More…
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This Week in Science… coming up next
Mantis Shrimp Body Armor?
The club of the mantis shrimp is made out a very unique structure that could be very beneficial to us humans. These club structures withstand over 50,000 high velocity strikes during the shrimp’s lifetime, equivalent to withstanding 50,000 bullet impacts. What’s more, it’s light weight, which could solve the problem of current body armor in use that weighs upwards of 30 lbs. It’s time for the military to take a lesson from this invertebrate!
Coffee and Cigarettes – one is bad for you, the other one might save your brain. Can you guess which is which?
Vegetables and Fruits can help you stop smoking!
Whether it is because of the bad taste smoking gives you after eating the stuff, or if there is some chemical reaction in your brain that keeps you from craving the nicotine post-roughage, we don’t know yet, but veggies and fruits appear to improve your chances of kicking the habit!
What makes Cool so Cool?
A new study indicates that what was “cool” when the word originated is no longer the rubric for “coolness.” After speaking to around 1,000 people in Vancouver, British Colombia, the researchers found that coolness tended to rely on positive, socially desirable traits, as opposed to the rebellious, bad guy personality we are so used to associating with “cool.”
Blair’s Animal Corner
BIrd’s colors indicate personalities
Red-headed finches are more aggressive, whereas black-headed birds showed more bold and risk-taking characteristics. The question is, which came first? Did the colors develop after the personality traits to indicate to other birds how they might act and therefore who to team up with?
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Coffee could keep you from developing Alzheimer’s
Those with high blood caffeine levels are much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, or at least delay its onset. Along with preventing many other life-threatening diseases, coffee appears to have turned into an important medicinal substance, as apposed to a harmful addiction.
An Alzheimer’s Vaccine?
In a clinical trial, 80% of patients developed antibodies against beta-amyloid, the plaque that builds up in the outer membrane of your brain and kills brain cells. While the vaccine can not prevent or reverse Alzheimer’s, it could potentially have a “leveling effect,” where it stops further degradation.
Sharp-Eyed Vampire Spiders are picky eaters
Vampire Spiders can identify their prey – female mosquitos engorged with vertebrate blood in two ways. They look for swollen abdomens, obviously, but they also can identify the mosquitos by their antennae.
Out of Asia, not Africa?!
Teeth found in Asia lead scientists to believe that perhaps anthropoids arose in Asia about 37-45 million years ago before colonizing to Africa. All this information, from just four popcorn-kernel-sized molars. You be the judge on this one, but perhaps we need a little more than four teeth to present such an earth-shaking hypothesis…
Ants may be able to make Facebook better.
University of Madrid suggests that ants could help create new algorithms to improve social networks. Food foraging techniques of ants, involving a pheromone trail for other ants to find the food they’ve located, could help website developers build referential chains between people, events, pictures, and more.
Financial Mania?
It turns out that the financial world was suffering from collective mania in 2008 prior to the economic collapse. Bankers, economists, and politicians shared manic behavior such as denial, omnipotence, triumphalism, and over-activity. Perhaps that could explain it, but that doesn’t make it ok. Should we have sent our economists and bankers to an asylum?
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Mantis Shrimp: http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/6737
9:23 So, do they think that it would be bullet proof?
9:30 Yes, [the material resists] the equivalent of 50,000 .22 caliber bullet strikes …
9:40 [Therefore] it should be completely effective as a body armor.
This is profoundly naive, and is almost certainly wrong.
Many properties of materials differ as you scale up.
For example:
1. Strength changes with scale.
A bone twice as big cannot carry twice as much weight.
This is why elephants bones are thicker, as compared with thinner mouse bones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_breaking_length
2. Surface tension changes scale.
Consider the water strider, which is able to walk on water.
The force of surface tension is comparable to it’s body weight.
A water strider the same shape, but twice as big, would sink.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension#Surface_curvature_and_pressure
3. Surface area to volume ratio changes with scale.
To stay alive, cells must exchange chemicals with their environment.
They do so through their outer surface, the cell membrane.
This is why cells are limited to being microscopically small.
Double a cell’s size, and its surface area to volume ratio shrinks.
This means the cell is creating more waste per unit surface area.
It will drown in it’s own waste products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio
10:50 Boiling the water? That’s crazy!
11:00 Some little shrimp needs more containment than, potentially, a shark.
I think you’ve hugely misunderstood the article.
Obviously, these shrimp doesn’t cause the water around them to boil.
This would be bad in evolution, because cooked shrimp can’t have offspring.
Cooked shrimp sure are tasty, though!
The article uses the word “boiling” in a poor attempt to describe cavitation.
This is yet another example of how the wold is very different at small scales.
There are no magical, self-boiling shrimp… yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation