Info Unveils

  WHY HERPES IS THE MOST TALENTED VIRUS EVER?  Getting sick is never pleasant, but at least many viral infections are one-and-done. We’ve talked before about how the measles virus is the poster child for lifelong immunity. Once your immune system recognizes it, it never forgets, and it will not hesitate to kick it to the curb if it shows its face again. Unfortunately, however, there’s also a poster child for lifelong infection: herpesviruses. These viruses are so good at sneaking past our immune system and hiding out in our cells that once we have‘em, we… have ‘em. Because herpesviruses have some unique features that make them master squatters. Which seems kind of embarrassing for our immune systems — but actually, we may have evolved to coexist . There are eight members of the herpes virus family that routinely infect humans. These include herpes simplex virus 1 and 2, which cause oral and genital herpes, as well as the viruses that cause chickenpox and shingles, and most — b...

  WHERE ON THE EARTH DO YOU WEIGH THE LESS? Something’s mass–a kilogram of feathers, a kilogram of steel, or you and me–is constant everywhere in the universe, because mass is a measure of how much stuff there is, all your atoms added together. But weight isn’t a constant. It’s the force gravity applies to all that stuff at one specific spot, so depending on the gravity where you are, your weight will be different. This makes sense if we think about being, say, on the moon, where your moon weight is about sixteen and a half percent your Earthweight because gravity is about sixteen and a half percent of what it is on Earth.  But the same thing is also true here. Things don’t weigh the same everywhere on earth. So, a question: Where on Earth would you, or feathers, or steel, weigh the most? And for that matter, where would you weigh the least? What makes this question so confusing is there more than one definition of “weight”. To most of us, weight’s just the numbers you see whe...

  WHY DO OLDER PEOPLES SLEEPS LESS?  It is a well-known stereotype that older people sleep less than younger folks, often rising at like, 4 AM. But even though it’s a stereotype, there does seem to be some truth to this. Like, surveys have found that many seniors wake multiple times in the wee hours before finally rising at the crack of dawn. This doesn’t happen because their bodies need less shut-eye, though; older adults need just as much sleep as younger ones. And although sleep can be disrupted by many things associated with aging, like pain or medication, that’s not the full story, either.  Instead, studies suggest there are some fascinating and sometimes bizarre reasons older adults may wake up with the chickens. Including this stuff called brain sand. Which is even weirder than brain sand sounds. The general explanation here is that something changes with your circadian rhythm as you get older. That’s the roughly 24-hour cycle your body is on, which affects everyth...

  WHY DO THESE BEES STAB PLANTS?  We know a lot about the way bees and other pollinators impact our lives. We have to because without them we Wouldnt have things like almonds and apples and blueberries. Yet there is something we have completely missed about the humble bumblebee. And it might give them a leg up in weathering climate change. In a paper published in 2020 in the journal Science, researchers reported a previously undocumented behavior in bumblebees.  In tough times, when the colony is hungry, bumblebees will use their mouthparts to deliberately damage the leaves of plants that haven't yet flowered which seems like a bad idea when you need those plants for food. The researchers observed the bees and concluded that they’re not consuming pieces of the plant or taking them back to their colonies. Instead, they appear to be damaging leaves because it induces the plant to flower sooner. The researchers found that bee-damaged plants flower up to thirty days earlier t...

    DO TREES TALK? This network trades resources transmits information, and can even go to war. I know what you’re thinking, and no, this isn't the worldwide web. It’s something much older. 450 million years older. And it makes life on Earth as we know it possible. This is the wood wide web. The most important social network on Earth. Walk into a forest and just listen. You can’t hear it, but the forest is communicating. If you’ve never noticed this before its because all of this is happening below your feet.  The wood wide web is a network created by fungi. They’re called mycorrhizal fungi and these fungi live in and around the roots of trees and other plants. Fungi are a huge domain on the tree of life, and as you’ve probably noticed by now, nobody knows how you’re supposed to actually say it. I’m going with a “fun guy” because that's what I am. Fungi include molds, mushrooms, and yeasts, and as a whole, they are essential to making all of Earth’s organic garbage and de...

  NO EARS NO PROBLEM! FROG CAN HEAR WITH THEIR LUNGS?   :- Frogs often have a lot to say. Just ask the residents of the Big Island of Hawai'i, who get serenaded by tiny, invasive coqui frogs every night. But if you’ve ever looked at a frog’s head, you might have noticed that they don’t have external ears. So it might seem weird that they’re able to hear those calls. Well, it turns out they rely on other ways of getting information about sounds to their brains. Including... listening with their lungs. Amphibian hearing works a lot like human hearing, except instead of eardrums buried in an ear canal, most frogs have a tympanic membrane right on their heads. When a sound wave hits that membrane, it starts to vibrate.  And the vibrations starts a chain reaction that ends with fluid vibrating against special cells in the frogs’ inner ear. When these cells move, they send out an electrical signal that travels to the auditory center of the brain. Low-frequency vibrations stimul...

  THE SCIENCE OF TEAR GAS? :- Tear gas has become a go-to way for police departments worldwide to try and break up a crowd. But there’s a lot of confusion out there about these chemicals—what they are, what they do, and whether they can cause long-term harm. So we’re going to talk about the science of tear gas. And look, we’re not here to tell you how you should feel about these chemicals or their use in any context. But we can explain what is known about them—and what isn’t. Tear gases belong to a category of compounds called lacrimators. They’re chemicals that irritate skin and mucous membranes and cause symptoms like pain, coughing, an uncontrollable shutting of the eyelids, and, well, tears. Hence the name.  Though, tear gases aren’t actually gases. Instead, they’re liquids or solids that are turned into a spray or cloud with solvents or smoking reactions. Their effects can incapacitate people or just be so overwhelmingly awful debilitating that people run away. Though the...