Category: Biology

Taste and Temperature

By Anupum Pant

Unlike what is popularly believed, specific areas on your tongue do not actually sense different tastes. That part of science taught in elementary school is absolutely wrong. Different areas do have some kind of specialization, but essentially all of them can sense all kinds of taste because of the presence of clusters of specialized cells which sense all of the flavors together.

However, the temperature of your food greatly determines how the taste of it will be perceived by your tongue. A study published some time back studied and found this.

An increase in the temperature of food was responsible to send better electrical signals from the tongue to your brain. That’s the reason why warm beer tastes bitter and ice cream tastes much sweeter when it is molten.

Now, since ice cream is supposed to be consumed cold, it means that the perceived sweetness of it is much lesser. So, ice cream manufacturers have to add a significantly greater amount of sugar to it to make it taste sweeter at even lower temperatures. That extra sugar is definitely bad.

Crackers, as discussed in the podcast below actually taste extra salty when you cool them. That’s because saltiness perception is more sensitive when something is colder. A cold soup would definitely taste saltier.

Sweetness works opposite. Hotter it is, more sweeter.

Evil Pineapples

By Anupum Pant

Everyone knows pineapples and everyone who has eaten a lot of it in a single go knows how it can make your tongue sore. Pineapples, the sweet/sour tropical fruits, are evil. They contain protein digesting enzymes that can divide the proteins in your tongue, as well as in steak – which makes it tender.

One of the two protein breaking enzymes found in pineapples is Bromelain. The concentration of it is relatively high in the central stem and that’s one good reason we skip the stem when we eat a pineapple. Because bromelain can breakdown amino acids, the organic compounds found in living cells. This makes the muscle cells lose their shape and also makes your raw meat just tender enough.

A slice of pineapple in liqiuid jelly when you are making jelly will prevent the jelly from forming that wiggly solid. It will remain liquid. The enzyme breaks down gelatin too.

It does breakdown aminoacids in your tongue too, but then your tongue has a self-healing mechanism. Or you would no longer have a tongue after eating a couple of pineapples. The same damage, more than the body can repair, happens to the hands of people who have to keep cutting pineapples in a factory, or somewhere else. But it’s a myth that it erases fingerprints.

[Source]

The Smell of Freshly Cut Grass

By Anupum Pant

Freshly cut grass certainly smells nice, doesn’t it? So does the smell of rain and the musky odor of books. There’s a reason why the freshly cut grass smell feels so good to humans, but first let’s see why does it even exist.

Some incorrectly believe that the freshly cut grass smell is a distress signal for other nearby plants to communicate to them that there’s something, either a plant eating insect or animal, coming towards them and that they need to move their nutrients to the root as soon as possible. That’s not quite right, or that is what science believes. Although there might be some truth to it because these things haven’t been extensively studied due their complexity. Researchers however have a strong feeling that this smell might not even be detectable by other plants.

But that smell, as studies have shown, definitely sends down signals that other insects can react to. This smell that comes from the fatty volatile substances released by plants is in fact really is a distress signal, however not for other plants to detect directly, it serves two purposes.

  1. It is a plant’s way of repelling the insect that’s eating it by making itself smell less appetizing to the insect.
  2. It’s  also a way for plants to call the parasitic insects to protect them from these plant eating creatures. Parasitic insects like wasps are expected to come and lay eggs inside herbivorous insects like caterpillars. And that ultimately saves the other plants from being eaten.

Another study conducted by Department of Physiology, Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine says that this odor, composed of a mixture of  trans-2-hexenal and cis-3-hexen-1-ol, both of which can be bought from a chemical supplier, is called green odor and has a psychological effect among apes.

It can in fact heal the psychological damages caused due to stress. The mixture of these two chemicals causes local blood flow in the part of your brain that processes information for you to be able to smell it, obviously. But it also does the same in some other parts which isn’t usually effected by other common smells. That, they think indicates that the smell of freshly cut grass does in fact explains the healing effect. So, it’s good for apes and they like the smell.

It also reduces stress among rats and decreases the sensation of pain to some extent among humans. The smell also does help us tap into deep touching memories too, often referred to as the Proust Effect.

[Audio for more]

Savior Dolphins

By Anupum Pant

A group of researchers lead by  Maddalena Bearzi of Ocean Conservation Society were doing their routine logs of behavior of feeding Dolphins near the shores Los Angeles, California. Suddenly, one of the dolphins turned around from the feeding circle and in a seemingly unusual fashion started rushing off shore. Researchers were quite confused, but they decided to follow. So did the other dolphins.

The dolphins reached a place some distance away from the shore and started circling what looked like a dark object floating in the sea. Upon moving closer, the researchers understood that the dark object was actually the body of a young girl towards which dolphins had moved.

The lifeguards were alerted and they were on the way. The girl seemed lifeless, but then one of the lifeguards on board their boat ventured out to get her, despite knowing that life guards were on the way. The girl survived and it was only dolphins to thank for pointing the researchers towards the drowning girl.

Later it was found that the drowning was from Germany, had come to LA for vacationing and it was a suicide case, as indicated by a letter in a sealed pack that hung from her neck.

via [dodo]

Stoplight Loosejaw

By Anupum Pant

Stoplight Loosejaw is actually the name of a kind of fish that lives really deep in the ocean. Here, the waters are so deep that every single speck of light dies off till it reaches there. In the dark, stoplight loosejaw has a nice light in front of it to spot the prey. But then lights are a problem because they attract predators. So, stoplight loosejaw has, over the years, evolved to throw red light and see red light. Only it can see the red light. And thus, it doesn’t get spotted easily by predators.

Ants Tricked into Carrying Heavy Stuff

By Anupum Pant

Once in a while it is just fun to see what scientists trick these little creatures into doing…

This was a study carried on  longhorn ‘crazy ants’ by the researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to study their behavior. They found that there are two roles played by them. A role of heavy lifting and the other is the role of scouting. Ants keep changing their roles continuously. The ones who scout keep directing their heavy lifting counterparts to the right direction in case they drift around into the wrong path. These roles keep changing in about a time span of 15-20 seconds.

Little Deep Beauties of Nature – Butterflies

By Anupum Pant

If you have ever handled a butterfly, you must have noticed that the wings of a butterfly leave a kind of dust on your fingers. If you look closely, using a scanning electron microscope of course, you’ll find that these dust like things are in fact scales! Butterfly has scales on in wings. Whatever purpose it serves to the butterfly.

The name Lepidoptera means “scale wing” in Greek.

The scales, so tiny themselves, have much tinier grooves on them. The grooves are so evenly spaced that they match the wavelength of a particular colour of light and that is what gives them their distinctive colour. May be some of it comes from the pigment too, but most of the colour comes only from the grooves, the topology of it. The colour comes from the nano-structure on the surface of a tiny tiny scale. Amazing!

We indeed have a lot to learn from the world around us.

This is clear when you fill the grooves using a liquid like propanol. The colour disappears as the grooves are filled with the liquid. Once the liquid evaporates, the colours come back to life.

These colours that come due to the topology of the scales serve various purposes like camouflage, warning, attracting mates, absorbing heat by looking darker and deceiving predators.

Sharks Living in a Volcano

By Anupum Pant

Science gets really interesting when you go posing one question and come out with a ton of other new questions. This kind of a chest of questions opened up when this team of NatGeo researchers decided to lower a camera into an active volcano which has a summit that’s 66 feet under water – Kavachi submarine volcano. What they found was nothing less than extraordinary.

The acidic sea, as they thought, would be interesting to see around here, they never expected to see a variety of sharks and other fish living in the crater of this active volcano which keeps bursting out every now and then.

No one had ever though there can be animals living inside active volcanoes. They apparently have no reason to take a risk like that because it would blow them to bits if it erupted, and that can happen any time. How do they know when to leave? and so many more questions…

Billion Year old Stromatolites

By Anupum Pant

Billions of years ago, yes, with a ‘B’, just about when life had started on earth, some very interesting kinds of fossils started forming which can be found even today.

Mats of algae which had mud trapped in them layered over one another and over time formed into a hard fossil which we see several Billion years later. Some of these fossils can be as old as 3.5 billion years. These rock like fossil structures give us a peek into the far past when the earliest organisms started forming.

In  1999 in Western Australia, near the town of Marble Bar, the oldest one of these was found and was about 3.46 billion years old..

incredible-complete-cambrian-stromatolite-head-found-near-roanoke-virginia-the-boxley-stromatolite-720x340As rare as these may sound, the fragments of stromatolites are in fact not that hard to find. But the intact heads like the on in this image are extremely rare.

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Pee Shivers

By Anupum Pant

Post-micturition convulsion syndrome is a pretty normal things and almost every guy knows what I’m talking about when I say, that phrase means “pee shivers”.

For ladies, not that you MUST know, when men pee, or just finish peeing, an involuntary convulsion, or a shudder of some sort rushes through their bodies. Why this happens is not very clear to science yet. However there are 2 major hypotheses which explain this.

1. When you let out a lot of warm pee, you drop your body’s temperature by some amount which causes you to shudder, to react to the lower temperature.

2. The other one explains this with neurotransmitters – chemicals, basically. When you pee your body gets flushed with certain chemicals like dopamine. So, it is thought that these released chemicals make you shudder.

But, then this doesn’t happen to women. There might be some other explanation to it…

[More about it]

The Most Dangerous Spider

By Anupum Pant

9 times out of the 10 times they attack you, they’ll inject an extremely toxic venom in your body which will make you literally cry for air – it will asphyxiate you within seconds. It can cause paralysis or even kill you. Another interesting thing about the venom is that it can cause an erection that lasts for hour.

This is the world’s most dangerous spider and it is called the Brazillian wandering spider, A.K.A the banana spider.

This spider is usually found in the south american tropical forests, especially living in banana bunches. During the day time it hides under rocks and inside trunks and starts roaming around on the ground, wandering, when it is dark. If it manages to invade your home, it is pretty big (about 15 cm) to spot, but it likes to hide in tiny dark spaces. Like the inside of your shoes.

Ability to Smell the Asparagus Pee

By Anupum Pant

A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour – Benjamin Franklin

Asparagus transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume. – Marcel Proust

It’s a long known fact that your pee smells bad when you eat an asparagus. However not many must have realized this had they not known that this actually happens. That is because, after a lot of rigorous study it has been found that only about 22% of the world’s population can smell asparagus in the pee.

At first it was a debated fact that its either that not everyone’s body produces this bad smell in their pee because of the difference in the way their body digests asparagus. Later someone thought that maybe most people do produce this smell but only a few have the ability to smell it. The second hypothesis turned out to be true.

Most people actually digest asparagus in a way that it produces bad smelling urine. But only about 22% of the people have the ability to detect the smell.

Koko the Speaking Gorilla

By Anupum Pant

Koko is a female western lowland gorilla who is named after the day on which she was born – 4th of July 1972. Koko is short for Koko Hanabiko which literally means “fireworks child” in Japanese – a reference to the American independence day. She is known for having learned about 1000 different hand signs from a modified form of American Sign Language (ASL). She even has a website. [Koko.org]

Francine Patterson, her trainer has been teaching Koko with english since a very young age and now it is thought that Koko understands spoken english quite well (about 2000 english words).

Koko once made good friends with Robin Williams, they shared wonderful moments and laughed together.

Koko often gets visited by kittens and she loves them.

Koko knows how to have a fine breakfast, eating veggies with a spoon. And she likes them.

Koko has favourite movies, loves watching them and she responds to the sad moments.

Koko can even have conversations…

Rabbit’s Panoramic Vision

By Anupum Pant

Animals which hunt usually have eyes in the front. Both the eyes have the same field of view. However, since they are separated by some distance, there’s a parallax – information which their brain uses to calculate the three dimensional depth. This 3D vision is a boon for the animals who hunt because it helps them to exactly gauge the prey’s depth.

The good 3D vision also comes with its own cons. As both the eyes have the same field of view, the total amount of field they can cover is less. That means they can only see what’s happening in front of them. But can see it well in 3D. To see behind they might as well tilt their heads.

Rabbits on the other hand are themselves prey. The 3D vision wouldn’t have benefited them much. So, they have eyes on the 2 different sides of the head. And the eyes bulge out a lot. This means both the eyes see different things and a greater field of view is covered. However, the 3D stereoscopic vision is compromised. Thanks to the big field of view, they are easily able to spot predators coming down on them from the behind without even turning their heads.

Rabbits actually have a 360 degree vision, a panoramic view of the world. The only 3D vision rabbits have is 30 degrees of view in the front and 10 degrees behind them, because that is the region where the vision from both eyes overlaps.

via [Steroscopic vision]

Eating Ants

By Anupum Pant

You’d say it’s gross, but then someone would find eating chicken gross. In Australia, you have these green ants called the weaver ants which are green in colour and can be eaten. According the people who’ve tested the taste in the video below, they taste good, like candy. Also, these ants are high in protein, fatty acids and vitamin C. They taste slightly soud because of their Ascorbic acid content.

But you have to careful when you eat them because like any other ants these can bite you while you are trying to eat them.