Sometimes, resemblances between parent and child or siblings can be uncanny. Other times, such resemblances can pop up between aunt and niece or grandfather and grandchild. And still, other times, resemblances don’t exist at all.One child may look like one parent, and their sibling may look like the other parent. Sometimes, certain facial traits seem to jump from one generation to the next repeatedly.All of these outcomes lead us to wonder what impacts facial features. What part of our DNA is ...read more
Humans derive their sense of taste from tastebuds, which allow us to identify bitter, salty, sour, and sweet. In 1990, umami was identified as the fifth taste. Many animals also get their sense of taste through tastebuds, although there are other methods in the animal kingdom for identifying taste. Let’s take a look. What Animals Have the Best and Worst Sense of Taste?(Credit: MEDIAIMAG/Shutterstock)The animal with the best sense of taste is the catfish. Possessing over 100,000 (and in some c ...read more
Many fish owners have tapped on their aquarium and hoped little Bubbles was merely taking a nap inside the tiny castle.It can be difficult to determine whether a fish is sleeping, and even scientists have struggled to understand the sleep process of fish in the past.In recent years, technology has made it possible for researchers to scan fish brains and learn how they snooze.Do Fish Sleep?“Fish sleep, but not the same as humans or mammals,” says Jared Guthridge, the aquarium curator at the A ...read more
One of the curious features of the laws of physics is that many of them seem to be the result of the bulk behavior of many much smaller components. The atoms and molecules in a gas, for example, move at a huge range of velocities. When constrained in a container, these particles continually strike the surface creating a force. But it is not necessary to know the velocities of all the particles to determine this force. Instead, their influence averages out into a predictable and measurable bulk p ...read more
The cell is a biochemical factory of immense complexity. As fundamental units of life, cells harvest energy from the environment and use it to synthesize complex molecular machinery, to build replicas of themselves and to move. This is a 4-billion-year-old trick that even today mystifies biologists who struggle to understand the processes and principles at work.To change this, life scientists have modeled cells at various levels of detail. These models can simulate some important biomolecular pr ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine