Mozart effect.

Today's interesting fact has to do with the Mozart effect.


In double blind tests, children were played various types of music and then tested with various mental challenges. The music included Mozart, Pop Music, Drums and random discordant noises.

Children did best in the tests after random discordant noises and Pop Music, but in all cases the effects were temporary and soon lost.

However in double blind tests it was found that learning to play a musical instrument especially if done over a long period of time, can the increase the IQ and has been shown to make beneficial changes to the brain tests have shown that the effects were maintained.

Yawn

Today's interesting fact has to do with yawning.

Yawning is contagious in humans and other primates.

If any primate sees another yawn, the odds are it will also yawn.

But with humans, the contagiousness of yawning greater.

Not only can we humans yawn when we see other humans, dogs, cats, or primates yawn, we also can start yawning if we read about it, write about it or even just think about yawning.

As no other animals has successfully learnt to read, humans are unique.

Samoa is moving in time

I'm off doing stuff tomorrow, so tomorrows interesting fact is coming today.

The country of Samoa, will be going to bed on the 28th of December and waking on the 30th of December.

They will not be sleeping a whole 24 hours, instead the country is changing time zones, moving itself officially from one side of the international date line to the other.

The idea is to help with trading with other countries, where they feel they are at a disadvantage.

Coffee and Cancer

Today’s interesting fact has to do with the coffee and cancer.

A recent study of 72,921 participants has shown that women who consumed more than three cups of coffee per day had a 20 percent reduction in risk for basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and men who consumed more than three cups per day had a nine percent risk reduction compared with people who consumed less than one cup per month.

It has been suggested that coffee might increase squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) or melanoma  e.g.skin cancers but they did not find any inverse association between coffee consumption and the risk for skin cancers.

So another coffee myth dispelled, it's good for us.

White and Black or Black and White?

Today’s interesting fact has to do with the Zebra.

Zebras were traditionally considered to be white animals with black stripes.

This is because some zebras have white underbellies.

However recent research, involving the development of zebra embryos, have shown that their skin colour starts as black, and the white stripes and under belly are added on later in their development.

So Zebras are black with white stripes instead of the other way around.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with Xenophyophores.

They are amoung the largest living single cells, reaching 10 cm in diameter.

They can be found in the deepest parts of the oceans and have been found as deep as 10,641 meters (6.6 miles).

Today’s interesting fact has to do with the internal hydrogen combustion engine.

The first hydrogen-fueled interanl combustion engine was designed in 1807 by Francois Isaac de Rivaz a French politician and inventor.

In 1808 he fitted it to a working vehicle, creating the worlds first internal combustion powered automobile.

Genes that make you fat and alcoholic

Today's interesting fact has to do with fat and alcohol.

They have recently discovered that there chemicals that are produced in the hypothalamus that control your desire to eat fatty foods and/or drink alcoholic liquids.

The amount of these chemicals produced have been found to be controlled by specific genes, and they have shown that certain alleles of those genes produce more than others.

I've already discussed about how they found there are additional taste buds that identify different types of fats on your tongue, and that they've shown that we can suffer cravings for specific types of fat and oil in our food.

This suggests that we are less under control of what we desire to eat, than doctors thought.

Coldest place in the known Universe

Today's interesting fact has to do with the coldest place in the known universe.


You might find this hard to believe, but by studying the sky with telescopes, both visual and radio, they've been able to show that the temperature of the universe is pretty constant.


The coldest places we've found yet are not in outer space, not in the depths between the stars or galaxies.


The coldest places we've found so far was generated using our own refrigeration equipment.


Absolute zero corresponds to –273.15 degrees Celsius (or –459.67 degrees Fahrenheit).


Scientists have gotten matter to within 100 picokelvins (pK), or 0.000 000 000 1 of a Kelvin of absolute zero.

Today's interesting fact has to do with the German 30 years war

This war ended in 1648 and was fought by soldiers from all over Europe.

It is estimated that up to 30% of the German population was wiped out during the war, many in atrocities that echo what happened 300 years later.

The end result was the division of Germany into many states, and the basic East / West German divide that has only recently been undone.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with earthquakes.

Earthquakes are caused when tectonic plates slip past, under or over other tectonic plates.

You wouldn’t think that changes in sea level, or changes in the atmosphere could cause earthquakes, but recent studies of the frequency of earthquakes along fault lines and comparing sea levels and atmospheric changes have shown some surprising results.

When El Nino, a weather phenomenon occurs, it moves water from one side of the Pacific Ocean to the other. 

This can cause variations of more than 20 cm in the sea level in some areas.

They found that during the lowest levels, earthquakes can increase from the yearly average of 2 a year, to 8 a year.

Similar studies have suggested that earthquakes are more likely during atmospheric low pressure, than high pressure.

It seems that less pressure on faults allows them to move easier.

Which when you think of it, makes a lot of sense.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with fresh water.

Fresh water accounts for about 2.5% of the water on the earth.

The rest, 97.5% is salt water.

Of the fresh water availble on the earth, less than 1% is available to humans, and is found in lakes, rivers, resevoirs, underground aquifers we can afford to tap.  This fresh water is renewed only by falls of rain and snow.

70% of all the fresh water is tied up in ice caps on Antartica and Greenland.

The other 29% of fresh water is tied up in soil moisture, deep underground aquifers and moisture in the atmosphere as vapour or clouds.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with Kick'em Jenny.

Kick'em Jenny is a submarine volcano located north of Grenada and south of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Its summit is thought to be about 180 meters below the surface of the sea.

It is thought to be the only live (likely to erupt) submarine volcano in the Eastern Caribbean and is the most frequently active volcano in the region.

It has errupted 12 times since it was discovered in 1939.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with transfats.

Although I’ve done transfats in the past, there is plenty more to be said about them.

Transfats are placed in foods by food manufactures to extend shelf life.  If a cake or loaf of bread will last two weeks on the shelf instead of two days, the shop wins, the manufacturer wins and only the purchaser and consumer loses.

Transfats  are mostly man-made fats, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, that are made by bubbling hydrogen gas through oil in the presence of a nickel catalyst.  This turns the liquid oil into a solid fat.

Transfats have been linked to most of the health issues long thought to be caused by saturated fats: heart disease, cardiac arrests, strokes, plaque in the blood vessels, high blood pressure and numerous other issues.  One way transfat apparently does this by somehow increasing bad and decreasing the good cholesterols as well as getting deposited on the insides of our blood vessels and hardening our arteries.

One way of limiting the transfats in your diet is to know what the ingredients are called in food speak, the way the manufacturers rename transfats to keep you from knowing they are in your food.

If you find hydrogenated vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, vegetable shortening or margarine in the list of ingredients, this is  most likely referring to the transfats within the product.  Some manufacturers have started using just shortening to refer to tranfat.

Some products in the UK can apparently have up to 40% transfat in them.

Me, I’m reading the ingredients from now on a bit more carefully.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with the Brain.

The brain is the most engergy intensive organ in our body.

It uses 20% of the energy that we get from our food.

Today's interesting fact for the day has to do with the Octopus.

The octopus along with squid are considered to have the most complex brains in the mollusc phyla.

The octopus's brain seems to co-operate with neural ganglia in it's legs, the brain giving the leg ganglia general instructions and the leg ganglia determining how to do what the brain has asked, working more or less independently.

The alimentary canal (digestive tract) passes through the octopus's brain.

Today's interesting fact has to do with Gallons, Quarts, Pints and liquid Ounces.

Most people know that the British Pint (20 British Ounces) is larger than the American Pint (16 American Ounces).

Most people automatically understand therefore, that the British Quart, (2 British Pints) is larger than the American Quart (2 American Pints), and the British Gallon is larger than the American Gallon.

But how many people know that the American liquid Ounce (29.5735296 ml) is larger than the British liquid Ounce (28.4130742)?

To make things slightly more complicated, in the US they also have what is called a US label ounce, which is 30 ml in size.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with our sense of smell.

Our sense of smell affects us much more than you might think, even odours that are below our perception.

This was shown in a recent study of students living in several dorm rooms.

If the researchers released the sent of lemon oil just under the students perception in their kitchens, the students were far more likely to clean the kitchens than if the sent wasn't there.

Been ill for the past week so haven't posted.  Sorry folks, especially Nick.

Still, here we go again.

Today's interesting fact has to do with why we yawn.

There have been many theories as to why we yawn, from threatening possible enemies, to increasing the oxygen we get into our blood, to helping us to wake up.  But lately someone looked at the roof of our mouths with specialist equipment and watched what happens to blood flow, temperature and air flow when we yawn.

The examination of the resultant data suggests that while some of the other suggestions may have some validity, perhaps the biggest reason we yawn is to cool our brains.

The soft palette at the top of our mouths are full of blood vessels that can be used to transfer warmth from the brain into our breath as we breathe out and then colder air coming into our lungs during the yawn then reduces the blood temperature further which then further cools the brain.

And this also explains why we get brain freezes when we accidentally place ice cold foods or drinks on that soft pallet.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with the Horseshoe Crab.

The Horseshoe crab is considered a living fossil. Fossils that looks almost exactly like the Horseshoe crab show that an animal with the same body and structure first appeared about 450 million years ago and has hardly changed in all that time, which is far longer than most species of plants or animals, including humans can ever hope to exist.

 The Horshoe crabs blood is blue, because it is based around the copper atom instead of an iron atom.