We hear a lot about pheromones these days. Scent sellers have been touting their powers of sexual attraction and libido amplification for years, but the science behind these claims is sketchy at best. Although pheromone production and detection by humans remains controversial, pheromones are used throughout the insect and vertebrate worlds, among crustaceans and even in plants, in exciting and often surprising ways.
Tag Archives: nature
Why does your nose run when you eat spicy food?
According to the Simpsons, the Merciless Pepper of Quetzalacatenango is grown by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum deep in the jungle primeval. Homer resorted to coating his mouth with candle wax to beat the heat of this so-called Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. In this article, I’ll try to give you some better options while I answer the piquant question…
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink
How can we live on a planet overflowing with 326 million trillion gallons of water and still face shortages? Even if only about .05 percent of it is drinkable, shouldn’t there be some way to purify the rest? Actually, people all over the world convert seawater to potable water, but the process tends to be prohibitively expensive at large scales. Even so, with looming droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for a solution grows more essential every day.
When searching for early galaxies, it pays to look twice
Using NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, an international team of astronomers have found nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the early universe–the building blocks of today’s larger, older galaxies. Composed of millions of brilliant blue stars, each infantile galaxy is one-hundredth to one-thousandth as large as our Milky Way galaxy. They formed about 12.5 billion years ago – just 1 billion years after the “Big Bang.”
Such galaxies are consistent with the conventional model of galactic formation, which holds that larger galaxies are formed when younger, smaller, less-massive galaxies merge. The sighting thus offers some much-needed support for the “hierarchical model,” which has become ever more contentious in recent years.