Mr. Gibson – Science Lecture Room 213/Laboratory 214

Spring 2011

Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than 86 degrees.

A bee sting is acidic and a wasp sting is alkali. To treat a sting by one of these you should use the opposite type of chemical.

Honey does not spoil.

A kind of jellyfish (Turritopsis nutricula) upon reaching adulthood can transform itself back to childhood by converting its cells. It may repeat this to live forever.

To avoid predators, a mother Slow Loris licks its offspring with poison before sending them off to search for food. (Their saliva mixed with a gland on their arm produces the toxin.)

The fungus Cordyceps is able to "mind-control" other insects like ants to climb plants and attach there to become its food.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/331826/ant_fungus/

The tiny Water Bear (Tardigrade) can survive environments extreme enough to kill any other animal - with temperatures as low as -273°C close to Absolute Zero to as high as 151°C.

Dolphins only "sleep" half awake - keeping one eye open while consciously breathing and floating on surface.

The length between your elbow and hand (forearm) equals the length of your foot.

If you fully stretch your arms out, the fingertip to fingertip length is almost exactly your body height.

An ostrich egg is also the largest existing single cell.

The nerves in our body are most concentrated in our fingertips.

The Horseshoe crab has blue blood due to it having copper instead of iron which turns blue when exposed to air instead of red.

When the queen of a clownfish school dies, a male clownfish changes its gender to become female and takes her place.

When you are done changing; your crown and scepter are ready ma’am … ‘er.. Sir… uhm… ah-h-h Wait! Aha! Your Highness!

The acceleration rate of a flea's jump is 20 times that of a space shuttle during launch.

Fleas can jump 130 times higher than their own height. In human terms, that's a 6ft tall person jumping 780 ft in the air.

780 ft.

There are more insects in a single square mile of fertile soil than there are people on the entire earth.

The little Alaskan Wood Frog is capable of reviving itself back to normal life after staying completely frozen for months, during which its heart, brain and other organs stop functioning.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/3209/w05-036.html

Some species of earthworm can have as many as 10 hearts.

Dolphins and whales are mammals that don't drink water.

Chameleons often have tongues longer than their bodies.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f07_1243863717

While only 2% in weight, the human brain requires 15% of the body's heart work, 20% of oxygen and 25% of all glucose.

For every 1000 red blood cells in our body, there is only about one white cell.

You shed and regrow your skin every 28 days, that's about 1000 times in a lifetime.

1000 times per human

The human eye blinks an average of 4,200,000 times each year.

That’s about 1 “blink” for every man, woman & child in

Chicago’s Cook county

The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.

Yeah? Big deal! You try having the same dream 1,460 times a year and see how

cool THAT is!!!

Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.

There are more bacteria and microbes in our body than actual cells

(75 – 100 trillion ) that make up the body.

Armadillos spend about 80% of their lives asleep (which rivals a teenager today).

If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.

Amazon ants (red ants found in the western U.S.) steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. The slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who cannot do anything but fight. They depend completely on their slaves for survival.

Cockroaches can live for nine days without their heads, at which point they die of starvation.

Mosquitoes like the scent of estrogen, hence, women get bitten by mosquitoes more often than men do. 

Chalk is made of trillions of microscopic skeleton fossils of plankton (a tiny sea creature.)

Actual chalk drawing… pond, frog, child with supplies… all

hand drawn with chalk

A typical lightning bolt is two to four inches wide and two miles long.

An average adult body contains around 250g (1/2lb) of salt.

The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9,000 'lead' pencils. Sciensational.com

Eighty-five percent of all life on Earth is Plankton.

Sheldon; et al

Eighty-five percent of all the plants and animals live in the sea.

95% of all the animal species on the earth are insects

95% – 98 % of all animals are invertebrates (without a backbone or spinal column).

The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 10 to 1. Sciensational.com

Frogs eat their skin after they shed it.