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Do shrimp have a heart? Ginger, Kerrville, Texas Yes
they do. It's a longitudinal blood vessel lying along the middle of the
shrimp's back. Shrimps have a blood system (like insects) that opens into the
body cavity so that all the organs are bathed in blood. Do giraffes see in colour ? Jackson, Arusha, Tanzania
Yes, they distinguish between red, orange, yellow-green, green, blue
and violet. Can giraffes swim? The established wisdom seems to be that
they can't. However, someone (who left an online comment) saw giraffes swimming
on a TV program. I would love to know for sure. Zen, London, England
Probably they can, but rarely do. In fact, nobody has ever seen
giraffes swim, says NatureWildlife.com, but we have found wild giraffes on an
island surrounded by water at least 14 feet (4 m) deep. What does a octopus do when it is threatened by a predator?
Brittany, Orange, New South Wales, Australia It depends on
the octopus. The extremely toxic blue-ringed octopus displays his
brilliant blue rings to warn a predator off. "Many
octopus have a pair of 'eye spots' that they can flash", says biologist
Roy Caldwell. This may startle predators just as the
eyespots on a moth do. Most octopuses release a reservoir of dark
inky dye, which might serve as a smoke screen and/or be noxious
disabling the predators chemosensory organs. Other species can release ink
mixed with mucus. This forms a brown or black glob that hangs in the water
and looks somewhat like the octopus. Often, as the octopus releases the
deceptive glob, it changes color (usually to white) and gets away. The
predator attacks the glob and gets nothing more than a mouth full of bad
tasting ink. Octopuses also can change their skin coloration to
go unnoticed. Several octopus species drop their arms off their body
when attacked. "The wiggling autotomized arms will even lock onto the
predator with its suckers," says Caldwell. "This is usually
sufficiently distracting to allow the octopus to escape." Re-growing lost
arms is a snap for an octopus. I have a female cockatiel, 3 years
old. How come she lays eggs? Since there is no male, at all and never has been,
this is very strange! Rachael, Shoalhaven, NSW, Australia All
female birds lay eggs, whether or not there's a male present. The eggs are
unfertilized in your case, and won't hatch. It's important to let your bird sit
on her eggs and not to throw the eggs away because otherwise she might keep
laying eggs to replace the ones thrown out, and get exhausted.
If you let her sit on the eggs undisturbed, she'll probably reach a total of
between 6 and 10 eggs, which she will sit on for several weeks until she loses
interest. When she neglects sitting on the eggs for several consecutive days,
then you know it's safe to toss the eggs out. Female cockatiels will go through
this egg-laying process once or twice a year.
Why do aircraft use electrical components that run at 400 Hz frequency?
The higher 400 Hz frequency cause [up to seven times] more reactive
losses compared to 60Hz frequency. So why do aircraft use it?
Bharti, Faridabad, India The reason aircraft use 400 Hz
frequency instead of 60 Hz is to save weight and volume. 400-Hz devices are
usually smaller and lighter. The lighter the aircraft, for a given power
system, the higher it's performance. That's why Charles Lindbergh didn’t
take a radio when he flew across the Atlantic.
Are the photons or electrons (not sure which) that we see in TV
snow/static left over from the big bang? Maria, New York State.
Yes (the radiation is microwaves now). "Turn your television to an 'in
between' channel, and part of the static you'll see is the afterglow of the
big bang," says NASA.
Reader's Comment:
My comment has to do with seeing the residue of the Big Bang in snow on the TV
screen. A good answer, but becoming vanishingly small in applicability. I think
it applies only to *analog* TVs.
There are three things that keep it from being approximately correct for digital
TVs -- the nonrandomness that comes from the screen's inherent quantization,
effects of noise rejecting RF digital filters in the receiver, and the way that
PLL digitally synthesized signals work in the presence of little or no input
from the RF and IF stages of the receiver. In digital TVs, what the snow
represents is a bad digital approximation to wandering around in the quantum
noise weeds of the transistors in the PLL synthesis circuitry.
BTW, I have an experimental validation of the nonrandomness of snow on digital
TV screens. Get an old analog TV and tune it to no channel and get a nice
uniform field of snow. Lean close to the screen so the screen image fills your
visual field and stare at it without blinking for as long as you can. Soon you
will start seeing circular patterns in the snow. These are not actually there;
they are being created by your optic nerves and brain in an attempt to deal with
pure randomness of input. (This has a sensory analogy in Delirium Tremens...) If
you try the same experiment with a digital TV you will find it is much harder,
if not impossible, to get the circular patterns to begin forming. This is
because the human nervous system is happy with nonsensical input as long as it
is not truly random. Bob, Marietta, Georgia
What is the time frame for a black hole? If a black hole is infinite or
near infinite in density does that mean that it's time frame relative to us is
stopped or very slow? Tom, Jersey City, New Jersey The
gravity of a black hole is, indeed, enormous --- so great it bends light back
down into the black hole, says physicist
Rod Nave. Light cannot escape the event horizon. Suppose
daredevil you are in a spacecraft, and decide to dive into the black hole.
How does time pass for you and me, far away watching? You perceive no
difference in how time passes. In you go, time passes normally.
But I see a big difference. The closer your spacecraft gets to the event
horizon, the more the hole's gravity bends the light reflected from your
spacecraft, and the longer that reflected light takes to reach me. It
seems to me that time has slowed, and slows more until it stops as you reach
the event horizon. There, at the horizon, the light from your craft
bends back down into the black hole, and I never see you enter the hole. What is the the name of the new planet which is found in space? Priya,
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) The planet's name is Gliese
581 C — a name derived from its sun, the dim and distant red-dwarf star
(Gliese 581), about 20.5 light-years away. The planet is about 50
percent bigger than Earth and five times more massive. It is the first
extra-solar planet found that could support life. Gliese 581 C may have
liquid water, announced astronomer Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in
Switzerland on April 24, 2007.
What would be the best way to sanitize toothbrushes? Leigh,
Closter, New Jersey According to the
American Dental Association, sanitizing toothbrushes is a waste of time.
At least, it does nothing to improve health. They recommend replacing a
toothbrush in three to four months. Reader's comments: Actually a
co worker that is a microbiologist did a test to help her
daughter in a high school science project and found that you should actually
replace your tooth brush 1 time per week (she said just go to the dollar store
and get cheap tooth brushes) because when she ran micro tests on the brushes it
was amazing that there was coliform on the brushes very quickly just from being
in the same room as the toilet and the aresol created from flushing the toilet
spread the bacteria everywhere and toothbrushes were an excellent haven for
these germs to grow. Joe, Rochester, New York.
Under "Humans" - What's the best way to sanitize a toothbrush, try OraQuel,
http://www.OraQuel.com. The
American Dental Association has in fact published several reports stating links
exist between improper oral care, cardiovascular and other serious illness.
Links are posted on the site to many reports in respected journals.
Someone, World What is the national language in England? Kikki, Plantation,
Flordia England, like the USA, has no official national language
(designated by legislation).
I have two girl babies. But I wish a boy. Can medical science help me
to born a boy baby? Saima, Lahore, Pakistan None of the
easy procedures that we have developed to influence the sex of the new born
has been proved to work, according to the rigorous standards of medical
journals. But because they haven't been proved effective, doesn't mean
they don't actually help.
If you want to try, here are some tips on how and when to have sex so it
favors a boy-child, according to Dr. Shettles, who wrote a book on the subject
(How
to Choose the Sex of Your Baby) and researched sperm characteristics
in the 1960's.
Men produce two types of sperm: y-sperms that determine the baby will be
a boy and x-sperms for a girl. Dr. Shettles noted y-sperms are smaller (verified
recently) and perhaps
faster and weaker than x-sperms. So, he recommended these practices to
give the boy-producing y-sperms their greatest chance to succeed in
fertilizing the egg:
- The most important thing is timing of intercourse in the woman's monthly
cycle. Since the y-sperms are fast, have sex close to when the woman
releases the ripe egg (ovulation). Two days before ovulation through a
few days after ovulation work best. The fast y-sperms can then beat
the slower x-sperms to the egg, and you end up, maybe, with a boy baby.
- Since the y-sperms are weaker, you need to help them reach the egg by
releasing them as close to the egg as possible. Deep penetration and
rear-entry (doggy style) helps.
- The environment in the woman's womb makes a difference. The more
acid it is, the more likely it will kill the weaker y-sperms. A woman
can help make her womb less acidic by having an orgasm.
"It's difficult to put too much faith in this type of folk-lore stuff,"
cautions Michael
Tucker, scientific director of Georgia Reproductive Specialists.
Y-bearing sperm are a little smaller and, therefore, lighter. But
whether this truly translates to being faster and weaker is "a little
dubious to me!"
"This topic is obviously an ethical minefield," says
Gail Sullivan, retired assistant research professor of medicine at the
University of Virginia Health Science Center. She, however, calls our
attention to another "interesting (and expensive)" method of sorting x- and
y-sperms by the amount of DNA the sperms carry.
The female-producing x-sperm contains more DNA than the male-producing
y-sperm. Researchers use a fluorescent dye to stain sperm in semen; the
dye binds to sperm according to the amount of DNA it carries. They shine
a laser beam on the sperm, and separate the brighter glowing x-sperms from the
dimmer y-sperms.
The procedure (called
MicroSort) costs about $6000, but shifts the 50:50 x- to y-sperm ratio in
semen to 90% x or 75% y. Then parents can choose the sorted semen they
desire for insemination, and thereby achieve family balancing. It's not
perfect, but in the 1,000 pregnancies and 900 births so far (January 2006) 91
percent of parents who wanted girls succeeded, and 76 percent of those who
wanted boys succeeded. MicroSorting can also reduce the likelihood of
having children with x-linked disease.
Using a telescope, if I could look into a mirror located far away from the
earth, would the reflection I see be in the past? James, St. Louis, Missouri
Yes, it would, James, because light travels at a finite speed; it takes
time to travel to the far away spot and back again. You would see your
reflected self from the past. Does a person get more wet running through
the rain or walking through the rain (given the same distance walking or running
from point A to point B, number of raindrops, steadiness of rain, and other
variables all constant.) Mark, Phoenix, Arizona. Run,
don't walk to stay about 40% drier.
Is a peanut a fruit? Mikayla, Smithfield, North Carolina
Yes. A peanut is the fruit of the peanut plant. After the
plant sprouts from a planted seed, and grows about 18 inches, yellow flowers
appear and bloom for about a month. After fertilization and the flowers
fade, the young fruit forms a pointed stalk called a peg. The 'digging stick'
peg points and grows downward. The fruit (i.e., peanuts) develop a woody outer
shell (the peanut shell), and the pointed fruits bury themselves — in the
ground!
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