Category: COLLECTION

Sounds reach one of our ears first and then the other. The time delay in between is too short for us to perceive but it is long enough for the brain to process to determine the source of the sound. This deceptively simple feat is denied to frogs, lizards and birds because the distance between…

A fossil tooth could be a buffet of information for researchers at a dig. Teeth grow like trees in a sense. They add layer after layer of enamel and dentine tissues every day. And so they can help us reconstruct the biological events that individuals or even communities have undergone during their early years of…

One bizarre remark on Mona Lisa’s smile is that she doesn’t smile at all; it’s a visual illusion. And wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci a master in optics? Turns out, half of the claim is true — literally! Neurologists Lucia Ricciardi and Matteo Bolognay have interpreted Mona Lisa’s smile as asymmetric and so non-genuine because happiness…

Iron replaced bronze as the prime material for tool and weapon production during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The replacement was gradual — at different times in different regions. There were things made of iron in the Bronze Age, but the iron was different. During the formation of a celestial…

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is just one of those places that sightseers flock to — “to see it before it’s gone”! It is an example of the concept of ‘Last Chance Tourism’. The key words hovering over a site like GBR are “doom”, “dying”, “endangered” and so on. It is like a species nearing…

A study of Nobel-winning economists by Bruce Weinberg and David Galenson identifies two different life cycles of creativity — a surge in the mid-20s or in the mid-50s, depending on distinct attributes of personality. The sudy has it that those who hit the peak in their 20s tended to be “conceptual” innovators. People of this…

Light is at the core of much of what astronomers do — light scattered, absorbed and re-emitted in clouds of gas and dust. And Dr Charlie Jeynes knows that light is also at the core of a diverse range of medical advances, like measuring “blood oxygenation in premature babies, or treating port-wine stains with lasers”.…

Tentacled aliens from outer space are familiar to us from science fiction, but the octopus may be as alien an intelligence as we can meet on Earth. “It’s an alternative model for intelligence,” said Dominic Sivitilli. “It gives us an understanding as to the diversity of cognition in the world, and perhaps the universe.” Of…

Horses have both binocular vision and monocular vision. Binocular vision is used when their eyes and ears are focused on something in front of them. And monocular vision is used when they use each eye separately to watch movements — notably those of predators. This means horses have to switch from one vision to the…