Eyelash Invaders

Depending on how old you are, it's pretty likely that you have eyelash mites. These tiny creatures live on old skin cells and the natural oil (sebum) produced by human hair follicles. They are usually harmless, though they can cause an allergic reaction in a minority of people. Eyelash mites typically grow to a third of a millimetre and are near-transparent, so you are unlikely to see them with the naked eye. Put an eyelash hair or eyebrow hair under the microscope, though, and you may find them, as they spend most of their time right at the base of the hair where it meets the skin. Around half the population have them, a proportion that rises as we get older.

Goosebump Evolution

 

Goosepimples are a remnant of our evolutionary predecessors. They occur when tiny muscles around the base of each hair tense, pulling the hair more erect. With a decent covering of fur, this would fluff up the coat, getting more air into it, making it a better insulator. But with a human's thin body hair, it just makes our skin look strange.

Similarly we get the bristling feeling of our hair standing on end when we are scared or experience an emotive memory. Many mammals fluff up their fur when threatened, to look bigger and so more dangerous. Humans used to have a similar defensive fluffing up of their body hairs, but once again, the effect is now ruined. We still feel the sensation of hairs standing on end, but gain no visual bulk.

Photon Detectors

 

Your eyes are very sensitive, able to detect just a few photons of light. If you take a look on a very clear night at the constellation of Andromeda, a little fuzzy patch of light is just visible with the naked eye. If you can make out that tiny blob, you are seeing as far as is humanly possible without technology. Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. But "near" is a relative term in intergalactic space – the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5m light years away. When the photons of light that hit your eye began their journey, there were no human beings. We were yet to evolve. You are seeing an almost inconceivable distance and looking back in time through 2.5m years.

The Internet

The Internet is the fastest-growing tool of communicationever. It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, and the Internet just 4 years. A NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee was the world’s first web server.

Domain registration was free until the National Science foundation decided to change this on September 14th, 1995. The first ever domain name registered online was www.symbolics.com. All three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names. One million domain names are registered every month. Almost half of people online have at least three e-mail accounts.

According to Message Labs spam accounts for over 60 per cent of all email. Google says at least one third of all Gmail servers are filled with spam. Anthony Greco, aged 18, became the first person arrested for spam (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21, 2005. Yahoo started out as “Jerry and David’s guide to the world Wide Web”. Jerry Yang and David Filo were PhD candidates at Stanford in 1994 when they started the site.

The first internet worm was created by Robert Morris, Jr, and attacked more than 6,000 Internet hosts. Only 4 per cent of Arab women use the Internet. Moroccan women represent almost a third of that figure. Official statistics in the UK say that 29 per cent of women have never used the internet, but only 20 percent of men. 220 million tons of old computers and other technological hardware are trashed in the United States each year.

The United States generates more e-waste than any other nation. An estimated 50-80% of e-waste collected in the United States for recycling is exported to areas such as China, India or Pakistan. In February 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth (of users) of over 1300 per cent several times more than Facebook. Facebook is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago, writes The New York Times’s Miguel Helft.

 

Doggie Toy

Doggie Toy rftarsy of 203 kilometers per hour in space travel. Auster ylya Canberra a unique gift for my nephew, a man made ​​of wool, produced bloom is the Doggie in the vacuum has been reached successfully. Doggie person with the helium gas-filled balloons and a camera e been touched by connecting fzamyn a few seconds in the 70-thousand-foot distance.

Cat Chasing Mosquito Survives 11-Story Fall

The 2-year-old cat, named Wasabi, survived but suffered a fractured leg and broken bones. The Juneau Empire reports the cat was chasing the mosquito Monday in her owners' apartment in Juneau, about two blocks from the state Capitol. The mosquito escaped out a window, and Wasabi went after it. Stephanie Gustafson says her mother watched the female cat fall.

Wasabi landed in a parking lot, and Gustafson found her huddled nearby, bloody and wet from rain. The cat underwent an operation, and has pins and wires holding together her fractured leg and broken bones in a joint. She also is sporting a pink cast. Gustafson says Wasabi is expected to heal in about six weeks.

E-Cigarettes as Effective as Patches to Stop Smoking

PARIS: Tobacco-free electronic cigarettes are as effective as nicotine patches in weaning smokers off their habit, but both techniques are only modestly successful, a study said on Saturday.

It is the first trial to compare the increasingly popular "e-cigarette" -- a plastic tube which heats a liquid to an inhalable vapour -- against nicotine patches as an anti-smoking aid.

Researchers in Auckland, New Zealand, recruited 657 smokers who wanted to quit, and assigned them randomly to three groups.

Two groups of around 290 people were given a 13-week supply of either patches or e-cigarettes that delivered nicotine vapour.

Another 73 were given e-cigarettes without nicotine.

Six months later, the volunteers were then questioned, and their breath was analysed for carbon monoxide telltales of smoking, to rate their success in giving up tobacco.

The success rate among the nicotine e-cigarettes was 7.3 percent, compared with 5.8 percent in the patch group and 4.1 percent in the non-nicotine e-cigarette group.

None of the e-cigarette users fell ill from using the product, but the researchers stress that its long-term safety -- an issue that has emerged in the European Union which plans to class e-cigs as medicinal products -- remains unclear.

"E-cigarettes, with or without nicotine, were modestly effective at helping smokers to quit, with similar achievement of abstinence as with nicotine patches, and few adverse events," says the study, published by The Lancet.

But, it adds: "Uncertainty exists about the place of e-cigarettes in tobacco control, and more research is urgently needed to clearly establish their overall benefits and harms."

The probe, led by Chris Bullen at the University of Auckland, was presented this weekend at a conference of the European Respiratory Society in Barcelona, Spain, The Lancet said.

Re-Interested in NASA's Moon

Tyarkrdh huge amount of eight million dollars sophisticated robotic spacecraft is being dispatched to the moon today.

Snails

 

A species of snails named as Garden Snail have about 14,175 teeth that are located on its tongue. Another cool and interesting fact about snails is that they can sleep up to 3 years without any break.

Woodpecker

A woodpecker can peck on wood 20 times per second. A woodpecker was represented successfully by an artist Ben Hardway as fictional Woody Woodpecker.. Their average total pecks are 8,000 to 12,000 a day.

BMW Gina Concept Car Made From Textile Fabric

BMW unveiled the GINA Light Visionary Model concept car on June 10, 2008 and shows the direction of how BMW’s design may take. The concept car uses fabric as the skin over a wire frame and carbon fiber and allows drivers to change the shape of the car at will.

The flexibility of car can be seen when the car door or bonnet opens and it is also much lighter as it is made out of light weight materials. The BMW Gina Visionary Model concept car may or may not find its way into production but it may be the precursor of new material alternatives that are lighter and more fluid.

In the video, Chris Bangle gives us a first impression of the ideas behind the process of sculpturing an experimental study.

6 more pics of the BMW Gina Concept Car and 1 videoclip after the jump.