Amazing Facts

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Teeth Resist Cracking

April 20, 2002

51; Here’s a story to share with your dentist. You can crack a tooth, but it takes a lot of force. This should be surprising, since tooth enamel is as brittle as glass. The way the enamel develops, researchers found, absorbs excess energy and gives your teeth an extraordinary crack resistance. “Human enamel […]

Amazing Facts

Crows Use Tools in Sequence

April 20, 2002

51; Watch a one-minute video clip on the BBC News. A New Caledonian crow in New Zealand figures out how to use three tools in sequence to get at food that is out of reach. This amazing display of animal intelligence surprised researchers at the University of Auckland who already knew about the legendary problem-solving […]

Amazing Facts

Flies Turn on a Dime

April 20, 2002

51; A fly can turn 180 degrees in one tenth the time it takes you to blink an eye. Beating their wings 250 times a second, they don’t even have to think about each wing beat, PhysOrg said about studies at Brown University using high-speed cameras and image tracking software. “[Attila] Bergou discovered that flies […]

Amazing Facts

Bacterial Flagellum Can Tune Its Swim Speed with Network-Controlled Brakes

March 20, 2002

51; What’s new with flagella? These are the favorite toys of intelligent design supporters, because they are irreducibly complex molecular machines that evolutionists rarely attempt to explain by a Darwinian process. More fodder for their position comes from a paper in Cell1 that finds that bacteria can fine-tune their swimming velocity by means of a […]

Amazing Facts

Live at the Improv: DNA Polymerase

January 20, 2002

When a DNA reader hits an unfamiliar line, it improvises, reports EurekAlert: Prof. Zvi Livneh and Ph.D. student Ayelet Maor-Shoshani of the Biological Chemistry Department cut a DNA strand — from the bacterium E. coli — and inserted material similar to that which composes crude oil in between both its ends. As expected, the regular […]

Mammals

Bats Exhibit Aerodynamic Superiority

January 20, 2002

They may look clumsy fluttering around in the twilight air, but “Flexible, highly articulated wings give bats more options for flight than birds: more lift, less drag, greater maneuverability.” Thus reads the caption to a picture of a bat in flight on a Brown University press release. Researchers at Brown U are studying the differences […]

Amazing Facts

How and Why Whiskers Whisk

January 20, 2002

Scientists at Weizmann Institute found some interesting things about whiskers, reports EurekAlert. While working with rats, they noticed that the whiskers are always in motion, twitching and sensing objects around them. They discovered that two kinds of neurons are involved in sending whisker signals to the brain. The “whisking” neurons are active all the time, […]

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