6 bodily functions science cant explain?

Probably one of the most interesting articles I have read in a long time. Here are 6 functions of your body that are still baffling modern day scientist who claim to understand the origins of the universe when they cant explain whats happening in their own bodies. I wish them good looking proving string theory or relativity :)

http://www.cracked.com/article/161_6-things-your-body-does-every-day-that-science-cant-explain_p1

The Heart contributes to human personality?

A while back I had a discussion with some peers about whether the heart was a contributing factor to your make up and personality. A friend told me about a story where after a heart transplant, the person with the new heart experienced similar emotions and joys to the donor. This was from as little as a suddenly acquired taste to the memory of the donors old family relatives. Whilst "stumbling" I ran into this site that further develops this theory.

A remarkable story, with a sad ending :

A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.
"I felt like I had known her for years," he said.

source: planetofstrangethings

Photographic Memory.

Spanish researches may have found a way to provide photographic memory to all humans. Their testing has found that with a boost of RGS-14 to a special area in the brain named the visual cortex, people may be able to greatly enhance their visual memory. After testing on mice they found that the drugged mice were able to remember objects for up to 2 months while the non affected mice would forget within one hour.

This could be a major breakthrough for many areas of life, proffessions and much more however there is still a long way to go before you will be able to photographically remember every visual object you view.

Read full article: io9.com/5306489/a-drug-that-could-give-you-perfect-visual-memory

Interesting Facts about our Planet.

Human Beings all live on the planet we like to call earth. Our Earth is very unique and different from any other planets or large bodies ever seen in the universe. The earth has the ability to sustain life in many forms and is perfectly placed with the right conditions to host the life phenomena. A bit closer to the sun or a bit further away and life would cease to exist. Here are some interesting facts about our planet.

The North Magnetic Pole is about 1600 kms from the true North Pole. While the South Magnetic Pole is about 2570 kms from the South Pole.
Life on Earth began about 3,500 million years ago, just after 1,100 million years of its origin.

Among the 50 big rivers of the world, Nile is 6,650 km long and Amazon 6,450 km long.
Atacama desert of Chile never had any rainfall for about 400 years until 1971. It is considered as the driest plateau across the world.

The oldest known rocks, found in Western Australia are about 3,200 million years old - about 300 million years younger than the planet itself.
Water which has been evaporated today from the oceans will reach back after a period of 1,000 years.

The greatest tides occur in the bay of Fundy.
Man has made beautiful and long bridges all over the world, but Nature has made bridges of its own. Such a highest natural bridge exists in sinkiang, china, which is 312 mts high with a span of 45 mts.

Due to the global warming effect, the level of water in the caspian sea has started rising. This is a warning to human race that any day, the continents may become over-flooded.

Lowest point : Dead sea

Largest Desert : Sahara

Deepest Lake : Lake Baikal

Largest Island : Greenland

Highest peak : Mt. Everest-8848 mts

Largest sea : South China Sea

Largest and Deepest ocean : Pacific

Newest Island : Lateiki

Highest waterfall : Angel falls

Largest Delta : Ganga & Brahmaputra in Bangladesh

Largest salt water lake : Caspian sea

Largest fresh water lake : Lake superior

Longest Glacier : Lambert Glacier

Surface area of earth : 510,101,000 sq. kms.

Source: hubpages.com

Alien Hijack?

This is a story I found on couriermail.com.au that was very interesting. Has voyager 2 been hijacked by aliens or is it a computer error? You decide.

IT left Earth 33 years ago, now it's claimed the Voyager 2 spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens after sending back data messages NASA scientists can't decode.
NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format! The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message?

Alien expert Hartwig Hausdorf said:"It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth" Read more in Bild

Engineers are working to solve the data transmissions from the Voyager 2 spacecraft near the edge of the solar system, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said today.
The spacecraft late last month began sending science data 8.6 billion miles to Earth in a changed format that mission managers could not decode.
Engineers have since instructed Voyager 2 to only transmit data on its own health and status while they work on the problem.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, explored the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and kept on going. Nearly 33 years later, they are the most distant human-made objects.

Voyager 1 is 10.5 billion miles from Earth and in about five years is expected to pass through the heliosphere, a bubble the sun creates around the solar system, and enter interstellar space.

Voyager 2 will follow after that.

Amazing Pictures from our Planet:

Here are some amazing and cool pictures i found that are a combination of Man made and Natural wonders.








Sources:
http://makefive.com
http://photo.net

Coincidence or Fate?

Here are some amazing stories of so called "coincidences", Some are so amazing you will be wondering whether there is an upper hand in these occurences.

Finnish Twins:
Finnish twin brothers, aged 71, were killed in identical bicycle accidents along the same road two hours apart, police said. "This is simply a historic coincidence. Although the road is a busy one, accidents don't occur every day," police officer Marja-Leena Huhtala told Reuters. "It made my hair stand on end when I heard the two were brothers, and identical twins at that. It came to mind that perhaps someone from upstairs had a say in this," she said.

Two Brothers:
This is a similar story of coincidence, not of twins but of two brothers. In 1975, while riding a moped in Bermuda, a man was accidentally struck and killed by a taxi. One year later, this man's bother was killed in the very same way. In fact, he was riding the very same moped. And to stretch the odds even further, he was struck by the very same taxi driven by the same driver and even carrying the very same passenger!

Falling Babies:
In Detroit sometime in the 1930s, a young (if incredibly careless) mother must have been eternally grateful to a man named Joseph Figlock. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother's baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby's fall was broken and both man and baby were unharmed. A stroke of luck on its own, but a year later, the very same baby fell from the very same window onto poor, unsuspecting Joseph Figlock as he was again passing beneath. And again, they both survived the event.

More Twins:
The stories of identical twins' nearly identical lives are often astonishing, but perhaps none more so than those of identical twins born in Ohio. The twin boys were separated at birth, being adopted by different families. Unknown to each other, both families named the boys James. And here the coincidences just begin. Both James grew up not even knowing of the other, yet both sought law-enforcement training, both had abilities in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and each had married women named Linda. They both had sons whom one named James Alan and the other named James Allan. The twin brothers also divorced their wives and married other women - both named Betty. And they both owned dogs which they named Toy. Forty years after their childhood separation, the two men were reunited to share their amazingly similar lives.

These accounts are truly amazing and a little freaky...

Exposure to Space

While wondering the internets i stumbled upon a very interesting article from damninteresting.com that addresses the affects of exposure to outer spcae.

In scores of science fiction stories, hapless adventurers find themselves unwittingly introduced to the vacuum of space without proper protection. There is often an alarming cacophony of screams and gasps as the increasingly bloated humans writhe and spasm. Their exposed veins and eyeballs soon bulge in what is clearly a disagreeable manner. The ill-fated adventurers rapidly swell like over-inflated balloons, ultimately bursting in a gruesome spray of blood.

As is true with many subjects, this representation in popular culture does not reflect the reality of exposure to outer space. Ever since humanity first began to probe outside of our protective atmosphere, a number of live organisms have been exposed to vacuum, both deliberately and otherwise. By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.

In the 1960s, as technology was bringing the prospect of manned spaceflight into reality, engineers recognized the importance of determining the amount of time astronauts would have to react to integrity breaches such as a damaged spacecraft or punctured space-suits. To that end, NASA constructed an assortment of large altitude chambers to mimic the hostile environments found at varying distances above the Earth, accounting for factors such as air pressure, temperature, and radiation. Adventurous volunteers were subjected to simulations of the conditions found several miles up, and a handful of animal tests were conducted with even lower pressures.

Using the data from these experiments and their knowledge of outer space, scientists were able to make some reasonable conclusions about how the human body would respond to sudden depressurization. A series of accidents over the years proved most of their extrapolations to be accurate. In 1965, in a space-suit test gone awry, a technician in an altitude chamber was exposed to a hard vacuum. The defective suit was unable to hold pressure, and the man collapsed after fourteen seconds. He regained consciousness shortly after the chamber was repressurized, and he was uninjured. In a later incident, another technician spent four minutes trapped at low pressure by a malfunctioning altitude chamber. He lost consciousness and began to turn blue, but escaped death when one of the managers kicked in one of the machine’s glass gauges, allowing air to seep into the chamber.

Artist’s rendering of a Soviet Soyuz spacecraftIn 1971, three Russian cosmonauts aboard an early Soyuz spacecraft tragically experienced the vacuum of space first-hand, as described in the Almanac of Soviet Manned Space Flight:

“…the orbital module was normally separated by 12 pyrotechnic devices which were supposed to fire sequentially, but they incorrectly fired simultaneously, and this caused a ball joint in the capsule’s pressure equalization valve to unseat, allowing air to escape. The valve normally opens at low altitude to equalize cabin air pressure to the outside air pressure. This caused the cabin to lose all its atmosphere in about 30 seconds while still at a height of 168 km. In seconds, Patsayev realized the problem and unstrapped from his seat to try and cover the valve inlet and shut off the valve but there was little time left. It would take 60 seconds to shut off the valve manually and Patsayev managed to half close it before passing out. Dobrovolsky and Volkov were virtually powerless to help since they were strapped in their seats, with little room to move in the small capsule and no real way to assist Patsayev. The men died shortly after passing out. [...] The rest of the descent was normal and the capsule landed at 2:17 AM. The recovery forces located the capsule and opened the hatch only to find the cosmonauts motionless in their seats. On first glance they appeared to be asleep, but closer examination showed why there was no normal communication from the capsule during descent.”
When the human body is suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space, a number of injuries begin to occur immediately. Though they are relatively minor at first, they accumulate rapidly into a life-threatening combination. The first effect is the expansion of gases within the lungs and digestive tract due to the reduction of external pressure. A victim of explosive decompression greatly increases their chances of survival simply by exhaling within the first few seconds, otherwise death is likely to occur once the lungs rupture and spill bubbles of air into the circulatory system. Such a life-saving exhalation might be due to a shout of surprise, though it would naturally go unheard where there is no air to carry it.

In the absence of atmospheric pressure water will spontaneously convert into vapor, which would cause the moisture in a victim’s mouth and eyes to quickly boil away. The same effect would cause water in the muscles and soft tissues of the body to evaporate, prompting some parts of the body to swell to twice their usual size after a few moments. This bloating may result in some superficial bruising due to broken capillaries, but it would not be sufficient to break the skin.

A NASA altitude chamberWithin seconds the reduced pressure would cause the nitrogen which is dissolved in the blood to form gaseous bubbles, a painful condition known to divers as “the bends.” Direct exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would also cause a severe sunburn to any unprotected skin. Heat does not transfer out of the body very rapidly in the absence of a medium such as air or water, so freezing to death is not an immediate risk in outer space despite the extreme cold.

For about ten full seconds– a long time to be loitering in space without protection– an average human would be rather uncomfortable, but they would still have their wits about them. Depending on the nature of the decompression, this may give a victim sufficient time to take measures to save their own life. But this period of “useful consciousness” would wane as the effects of brain asphyxiation begin to set in. In the absence of air pressure the gas exchange of the lungs works in reverse, dumping oxygen out of the blood and accelerating the oxygen-starved state known as hypoxia. After about ten seconds a victim will experience loss of vision and impaired judgement, and the cooling effect of evaporation will lower the temperature in the victim’s mouth and nose to near-freezing. Unconsciousness and convulsions would follow several seconds later, and a blue discoloration of the skin called cyanosis would become evident.

At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat. If pressurized oxygen is administered within about one and a half minutes, a person in such a state is likely make a complete recovery with only minor injuries, though the hypoxia-induced blindness may not pass for some time. Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. There are no recorded instances of successful resuscitation beyond that threshold.

Though an unprotected human would not long survive in the clutches of outer space, it is remarkable that survival times can be measured in minutes rather than seconds, and that one could endure such an inhospitable environment for almost two minutes without suffering any irreversible damage. The human body is indeed a resilient machine.

Bizarre Science 2: Keeping a severed head alive

This another interesting science experiment from Museum of Hoaxes

What could be more horrific than creating a two-headed dog? What about keeping the severed head of a dog alive apart from its body!

Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a head alive apart from its body, but it wasn't until the late 1920s that someone managed to pull off this feat.

Soviet physician Sergei Brukhonenko developed a primitive heart-lung machine he called an "autojector," and with this device he succeeded in keeping the severed head of a dog alive. He displayed one of his living dog heads in 1928 before an international audience of scientists at the Third Congress of Physiologists of the USSR. To prove that the head lying on the table really was alive, he showed that it reacted to stimuli. Brukhonenko banged a hammer on the table, and the head flinched. He shone light in its eyes, and the eyes blinked. He even fed the head a piece of cheese, which promptly popped out the esophageal tube on the other end.

Brukhonenko's severed dog head became the talk of Europe and inspired the playwright George Bernard Shaw to muse, "I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature."

Bizarre Science1: Obediance:

An interesting article i found on human obidience from Museum of Hoaxes

#2: Obedience
imageImagine that you've volunteered for an experiment, but when you show up at the lab you discover the researcher wants you to murder an innocent person. You protest, but the researcher firmly states, "The experiment requires that you do it." Would you acquiesce and kill the person?

When asked what they would do in such a situation, almost everyone replies that of course they would refuse to commit murder. But Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, revealed that this optimistic belief is wrong. If the request is presented in the right way, almost all of us quite obediently become killers.

Milgram told subjects they were participating in an experiment to determine the effect of punishment on learning. One volunteer (who was, in reality, an actor in cahoots with Milgram) would attempt to memorize a series of word pairs. The other volunteer (the real subject) would read out the word pairs and give the learner an electric shock every time he got an answer wrong. The shocks would increase in intensity by fifteen volts with each wrong answer.

The experiment began. The learner started getting some wrong answers, and pretty soon the shocks had reached 120 volts. At this point the learner started crying out, "Hey, this really hurts." At 150 volts the learner screamed in pain and demanded to be let out. Confused, the volunteers turned around and asked the researcher what they should do. He always calmly replied, "The experiment requires that you continue."

Milgram had no interest in the effect of punishment on learning. What he really wanted to see was how long people would keep pressing the shock button before they refused to participate any further. Would they remain obedient to the authority of the researcher up to the point of killing someone?

To Milgram's surprise, even though volunteers could plainly hear the agonized cries of the learner echoing through the walls of the lab from the neighboring room, two-thirds of them continued to press the shock button all the way up to the end of scale, 450 volts, by which time the learner had fallen into an eerie silence, apparently dead. Milgram's subjects sweated and shook, and some laughed hysterically, but they kept pressing the button. Even more disturbingly, when volunteers could neither see nor hear feedback from the learner, compliance with the order to give ever greater shocks was almost 100%.

Milgram later commented, "I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

Are you a serial killer?

This is a real question, used by the FBI! There isnt a right or wrong answer to this question however if you provide a certain answer that is looked out for you are 70% likely to become a serial killer sometime in your life. Here is the question:

'You are attending a funeral for Miss X (ladies, think "Mr X"). You notice that Miss Y (Mr Y) has attended the funeral, whom you're really interested in. That night you kill Miss X's (Mr X's) sister (brother). Why do you do it?'

think before you loook for the answer

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Well this is the answer that they look for:

Miss Y is attending Miss X's funeral. So if you killed Miss X's sister, there would be another funeral and you would see Miss Y again!