Posted by Pete Berg on Sunday, May 29th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
An interesting anomoly among animals is the path of the laryngeal nerve — a long nerve which connects the brain to the voicebox. While the two organs are only inches apart, and a direct path between the two would make far more sense from a design or engineering perspective, the nerve actually goes down the entire length of the animal’s neck, loops around a blood vessel near the heart, and then runs all the way back up to the larynx (voice box). This odd path can be explained by evolution — as Richard Dawkins demonstrates in this video clip, with a dissection of a giraffe and then a discussion of how this oddity evolved.
Posted by Pete Berg on Friday, March 4th, 2011 at 8:16 am
The researchers conclude that a male, 28-year-old Han Chinese man is the most typical person on the planet. There are 9 million of them. But there’s a lot more interesting stuff in this video than that.
Posted by Pete Berg on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 at 12:34 am
If the Earth were the size of a basketball and the moon a tennis ball, how far apart would they be? Diagrams that are not to scale make us think that they’re closer than they really are.