Probably because of social pressure. In Britain and the USA, older girls like pink more than boys do, but they could already have been influenced by expectation. So studies have tested one – to two – years-olds by using the ‘preferential looking task’, which measures what the children like to look at the most. The …
During the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, the developing foetus is making melanocytes – the skin cells that produce ordinary skin colour. These aren’t always evenly spread out: random areas will acquire a cluster and during your life, these clusters can grow into a mole. Moles are quite different from freckles. Almost everyone has from …
Not really. Epigenetics is when genes alter their activity in response to external factors such as diet, exercise and chemical exposure. The sequence of letters in the DNA doesn’t change, but the DNA molecule acquires other chemical changes that can be passed on to your offspring. These inherited traits last for two or three generations. …
Aren’t Epigenetic Effects Evidence For Lamarckism? Read More »
Stonehenge is at least 4,000 years old and still visible today, and monuments buried nearby could be even older. Most modern buildings aren’t that robust, but some traces would likely remain for at least 10,000 years, even if it was just the magnetic trace of the steel bars inside concrete blocks. When Hong Kong Airport …
If Humans Became Extinct, How Long Would It Take For All Traces Of Us To Vanish? Read More »
This seems like defiance of the laws of physics, but it just needs the right shape and size of sail to trap enough of the air-mass blowing in the wind. The resulting transfer of momentum can propel yachts to impressive speeds, especially if friction is minimised – some sleek catamarans can achieve 80km/h using 35km/h …
Yes. In research that was published in August this year, teams in Cambridge and Zurich built robots that evolve through successive generations. The ‘mother’ is a robotic arm that builds ‘baby’ robots out of small cubes. Each cube has a mechanism where one side can waggle. When you place it on a surface, it clumsily drags …
Honey bee stings have a barbed ratchet mechanism that pulls the stinger into the initial wound. This didn’t evolve as a suicide mechanism – honey bees can pull their stings out after stinging other insects. It’s meant to drive the stinger in as deep as possible; it just happens that mammal skin is too fibrous …
Just about all of them! But our least-used muscles are probably the lumbar multifidus muscles in the lower back. Studies have shown that prolonged slumping in front of the TV can inactivate these muscles. This can lead to back pain, and once inactivated they can take months to recover.
It doesn’t! The oxygen level of the planet has varied quite dramatically in the last 500 million years. It was 35 per cent during the Carboniferous period, around 300 million years ago; as the climate cooled and land plants died off, oxygen fell to as low as 12 per cent by the beginning of the …
How Does Earth Maintain A Constant Level Of Oxygen? Read More »
About five billion years from now, the Sun’s usual source of nuclear energy will be depleted. It will begin to expand and cool significantly, becoming a ‘red giant’. Its outer layers will be thrown off into space. As the Sun loses mass, its gravitational pull will weaken and the planets’ orbits will widen. We know …
Water turns to ice when its molecules move slowly enough to form rigid bonds. Normally, the molecules in the waterfall move under the influence of both the flow and thermal agitation. But if it gets cold enough, the heat effect becomes so low that not even the waterfall’s motion can stop ice forming, gradually at …
