True, and not just for a few minutes. A chicken can stagger around without its noggin because the brain stem, often left partially intact after a beheading, controls most of its reflexes. One robust fellow lived a full eighteen months. Likely he was a real birdbrain, however.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Chickens can live without a head
True, and not just for a few minutes. A chicken can stagger around without its noggin because the brain stem, often left partially intact after a beheading, controls most of its reflexes. One robust fellow lived a full eighteen months. Likely he was a real birdbrain, however.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Yawning is "contagious"

Empirically, this is tough to deny; perhaps you'll yawn while reading this. The real question is whether there's actually something physiological at work here, and the answer is likely yes: even chimpanzees mimic each other's yawns.
Yawning is an involuntary action that causes us to open our mouths wide and breathe in deeply. We know it's involuntary because we do it even before we are born. Research shows that 11-week-old fetuses yawn
So what gives? In an effort to find the answer, the Finnish government recently funded a brain scanning study. The results turned up some hard-to-interpret, possible clues. It also confirmed the obvious: yawn contagion is largely unconscious. Wherever it might affect the brain, it bypasses the known brain circuitry for consciously analyzing and mimicking other people’s actions.
This circuitry is called the “mirror-neuron system,” because it contains a special type of brain cells, or neurons, that become active both when their owner does something, and when he or she senses someone else doing the same thing.
Apart from the physical brain mechanisms of yawn contagiousness, researchers have offered different reasons as to why it exists. Some have proposed that in early humans, yawn contagiousness might have helped people communicate their alertness levels to each other, and thus coordinate their sleep schedules.
This might be part of a more general phenomenon of unconscious signals that serve to synchronize group behavior, the authors of the Neuroimage paper wrote. “Such synchronization could be essential for species survival and works without action understanding, like when a flock of birds rises to the air as soon as the first bird does so—supposably as it notices a predator.”
Does Hair and Nail grow after death??
Hair and fingernails aren't actually growing. Dead is dead. The only things growing after you're dead are worms, bacteria, and flowers. What is happening, however, is that the skin around the hair and fingernails will desiccate (i.e., lose water) and thereby shrink. When the skin shrinks, it retracts, making hair and fingernails look longer, as if they'd grown.
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