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Showing posts from July, 2015

Did you know? - Plants can actually feel pain

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Ouch…It hurts! Very common exclamation for most of us. But what if you could hear a plant saying this? Well, you won’t believe that but plants suffer everyday.  Simply we are not able to hear them. Yesterday I was minding my own business when, all of a sudden, I started hearing a noise out of the window. There were two gardeners cutting the grass. In my opinion there’s nothing better than catching a whiff of freshly cut grass. For us it could be quite pleasant. But for the grass that smell is pure horror. The smell we associate with freshly cut grass is actually a chemical distress call used by plants to beg nearby critters to save them from attack. If you could be able to hear these call, it would be a horrifying scream.  After all, when there’s a threat, whether it's a lawnmower or a hungry caterpillar, plants can't run away. They must fight where they stand. And that is exactly what they do. In  order to protect themselves, plants employ a gust of molecular r

Bad Luck Files - Breaking a Mirror

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Mirror mirror on the wall…a disaster if you fall. I’ll never believe you if you say you’ve never thought about the years of misfortune after breaking a shining mirror. 7 years of misfortune to be precise. But have you ever wondered how this superstition has spread in our modern world? Answering this question is not a big deal. At the beginning of time, even if mirrors didn’t exist, the superstition probably evolved from the fact that first humans saw their reflections in the water, believed that the image they were seeing was a stranger ,and probably an enemy. When people acquired a little bit of consciousness, the representation changed. They started believing the reflection was their actual soul and ruffling the surface would mean injuries and danger to both body and soul. Also a lot of ancient myths told mirrors had magical powers, including the power to foreseen the future and were thought to be devices of the Gods. Breaking the mirror meant ending the powers of the object. M

ChEmIcAmAzInG - Glowing in the dark

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It's so magical... A night at the disco. Flashing colors all around. A little glowing bracelet around your wrist. The music is so loud you don’t care about everything. But maybe a little question makes its way into your mind… How does this stuff glow? Well, here I am to tell you why. All the glowing in the dark products contain a chemical structures called phosphors. This name is given to any substance that emits light after being energized in some way. Thousands of chemicals can be classified as phosphors. The great variety of chemicals with this property permits lots of degrees of brightness, color, and length of time they glow after being energized. A phosphorescent eagle There are three main types of ways these phosphors can absorb energy and then releasing it: Phosphorescence, Chemiluminescence and Radioluminescence. Phosphorescent structures , most common for glow in the dark items, are things like the glow in the dark stars many people put on their ce