1 – Body Position Affects Your Memory
Can’t remember your anniversary, hubby? Owh no! Try getting down on one knee. Memories are highly embodied in our senses. A scent or sound may evoke a distant episode from one’s childhood. The connections can be obvious (a bicycle bell makes you remember your old paper route) or inscrutable. A recent study helps decipher some of this embodiment. An article in the January 2007 issue of Cognition reports that episodes from your past are remembered faster and better while in a body position similar to the pose struck during the event.
2 – Your Skin Has Four Colors-Really?!
All skin, without coloring, would appear creamy white. Near-surface blood vessels add a blush of red. A yellow pigment also tints the canvas. Lastly, sepia-toned melanin, created in response to ultraviolet rays, appears black in large amounts. These four hues mix in different proportions to create the skin colors of all the peoples of Earth. What a beauty. Vaa vaa..
3 – Big Brains Cause Cramped Mouths
Evolution isn’t perfect. If it were, we might have wings instead of wisdom teeth. Sometimes useless features stick around in a species simply because they’re not doing much harm. But wisdom teeth weren’t always a cash crop for oral surgeons. Long ago, they served as a useful third set of meat-mashing molars. But as our brains grew our jawbone structure changed, leaving us with expensively overcrowded mouths.
4 – Your Stomach Secretes Corrosive Acid
There’s one dangerous liquid no airport security can confiscate from you: It’s in your gut. WOHA! Your stomach cells secrete hydrochloric acid, a very corrosive compound used to treat metals in the industrial world. It can pickle steel, but mucous lining the stomach wall keeps this poisonous liquid safely in the digestive system, breaking down lunch.
5 – Bones Break (Down) to Balance Minerals
In addition to supporting the bag of organs and muscles that is our body, bones help regulate our calcium levels. Bones contain both phosphorus and calcium, the latter of which is needed by muscles and nerves. If the element is in short supply, certain hormones will cause bones to break downeupping calcium levels in the body until the appropriate extracellular concentration is reached.
--To be continue---
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