It's True - The Bristol Stool chart was produced in 1997 by Heaton and Lewis, two Bristol researchers, to help to rank stool types for research and clinical purposes. It's a seven point scale ranging from number 1 - small hard lumps like nuts (rabbit poos) - through number two (appropriate enough), which is a lumpy sausage, and up to number 7 - runnier than water. According to the scale, the most comfortable to pass is a "type 4" stool, described as "like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft".

It's True - Most people have between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on their heads (before they go bald), which is an average of 150 hairs per square centimetre.

 

 

 

 

 

I've never heard of that happen before. The reason that's bizarre is because when an egg forms, the chicken makes the egg and puts the shell around it as it descends along the oviduct of the chicken. So for that to have happened, it suggests that an egg must have formed, or misformed, and then got engulfed by another egg that was forming once it had already partially formed. It's a bit like cases where ladies have given birth to babies and they've found the remains of a dead twin inside the body of the surviving baby.

 

I think it's acetylene. People who go pot holing or are miners have miners lamps that use acetylene. That is made by using calcium carbide, which is calcium with a couple of carbons stuck onto it. When you drip water onto it, it reacts to make acetylene - two carbon atoms stuck to two hydrogen atoms - and it burns very brightly. I think that's probably what you're talking about.

 

I think language is a good index here, because to know a language you have to know thousands of words. The average person who speaks well probably knows about twenty to thirty thousand words. There was a study done recently by researchers at University College London and what they did was to look at people who were bilingual and used a brain scanner to look at the thickness of the rind, or cortex, of the brain. They then measured it in people who were monolingual and people who spoke more than one language. What they found were these obvious structural differences. The people who were bilingual had a thicker language area in the brain. So the evidence is that if you can remember more things, you train your brain and develop connections. It's those connections that probably underpin the ability to store more information and recall more information.

 

Those flies are called Drosophila or fruit flies. They're the favourite friend of geneticists because they're very easy to do experiments on. Many animals use their antennae to detect chemicals given off by the thing they want to eat. Drosophila are in the environment pretty much all the time. They lay eggs, the eggs hatch, and in the warm environment of your house they can then fly around and home in on your fruit bowl. The other things that attract them are red and white wine. The volatile agents smell a bit like fruit because wine is made from fruit.

 

This is all down to an optical illusion. The brain has no frame of reference when the moon is high up in the sky, whereas when it's on the horizon, the brain is comparing it to other things in the same frame of reference: there are trees, there are buildings, as well as the moon. Therefore the brain is fooled into thinking that the moon is a lot bigger than it really is.

 

People are reacting to a substance made by a gene called FelD1. It's produced in cat saliva, so that when a cat licks itself and its paws and grooms itself with a wet paw, this FelD1 product or protein then goes onto the fur and when it sheds that protein with its fur, it goes into your nose and makes people sneeze. There's a company over in California and they've bred a type of cat that doesn't have that particular part of that gene and they say, although it hasn't been proven scientifically yet, that it's actually non-allergenic.

 

I'm not sure that they do actually. I have some experience of this when I twisted my knee playing football. Someone told me that if I taped magnets around my knee then it would help it heal up. The problem was that when I walked up to the window, my knee stuck to the radiator beneath it and that didn't help my knee get any better at all! There was a study written up in the British Medical Journal a few years ago in which people looked at this question. They said that people did seem to do better with these bracelets and things, but there's no scientific reason of justifiable reason for why people should get better. What they suspected was that the trail was a bit biased. How you do this kind of trial? You give people with achy knees either a magnetic bracelet or a non-magnetic bracelet. Now it's pretty easy for people to work out whether they've got the magnetised version or the non-magnetised version. If people are given one and they think that it's a placebo, then they're probably going to claim that it works less well than if someone has a bracelet that is obviously magnetic because it sticks to stuff.

 

There are two types of sweat glands: eccrine and apocrine. Eccrine sweat glands are found all over the body and are particularly abundant on the palms of our hands, the soles of our feet and on our forehead. They mostly secrete water with high concentrations of salts. Apocrine glands are mainly concentrated in our armpits and around our genitals, and rather than just secreting water and salt, they also secrete lots of fat and protein. This makes the sweat thicker, more yellow, and produces the stains we find on our nice white shirts. Our armpits are a seething mass of bacteria and those bacteria are growing on the sweat we produce. The bacteria break down the fats and proteins to make rather niffy compounds, which is why your armpits can smell especially bad even though you've been sweating all over. Another possible cause of the yellowing is that when bacteria go about their metabolism, some of the things they produce are quite acidic. Many dyes in clothes are fixed by various acid or alkali processes. I'm thinking that perhaps some of the acid that's produced in the armpit is sufficient to affect some of those dyes.