What Does It Take To Teach A Bee To Use Tools? A Little Time, A Good Teacher And An Enticing Incentive.

Frogs Anura

Image Source: Polygondata from BodyParts3D made by DBCLS. Neurocranium (red) and facial bones (blue). Wikimedia Commons.

The facial skeleton/viscerocranium (blue) is made up of 14 bones.

Nasal (2)

Lacrimal (2)

Palatine (2)

Inferior Nasal Concha (2)

Zygomatic (2)

Vomer

Maxilla (2)

Mandible

The braincase/neurocranium (red) is made up of 8 bones,.

Frontal

Sphenoid

Parietal (2)

Ethmoid

Temporal (2)

Occipital

Note:

Cranium = all the bones of the head excluding the mandible.

Skull = all the bones of the head including the mandible.

Luminol is a chemical that can be used to show trace amounts of blood by creating a light producing chemical reaction when mixed with hemoglobin.

Luminol powder is mixed into a liquid containing hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals. This mixture will then be sprayed over the area that is being examined.

The reaction of the Luminol spray mixing with the iron in blood will then produce a blue glow that can be seen in a dark room.

Other substances that can accidentally have the same reaction with Luminol are: bleach, urine, faeces & horseradish.

Unfortunately Luminol can destroy other crime scene evidence so it is usually used after other options have been explored.

Since I get asked a lot about where to learn more about the human brain and behaviour, I’ve made a masterpost of books, websites, videos and online courses to introduce yourself to that piece of matter that sits between your ears.

Books

The Brain Book  by Rita Carter

The Pyschology Book (a good starter book)  by DK

Thinking, Fast and Slow  by Daniel Kahneman

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking  by Susan Cain

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  by Oliver Sacks

The Brain: The Story of You  by David Eagleman

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science  by Norman Doidge

This Is Your Brain on Music  by Daniel Levitin

The Autistic Brain by Richard Panek and Temple Grandin (highly reccomended)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  by Yuval Noah Harari (not really brain-related, but it is single handedly the best book I have ever read)

Websites

@tobeagenius (shameless self-promotion)

How Stuff Works

Psych2Go

BrainFacts

Neuroscience for Kids (aimed at kids, but it has some good info)

New Scientist

National Geographic

Live Science

Videos & Youtube Channels

Mind Matters series by TedEd

Crash Course Psychology

SciShow Brain

Psych2Go TV

asapSCIENCE

Brain Craft

Its Okay To Be Smart

Online Courses

The Addicted Brain

Visual Perception and The Brain

Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

Pyschology Of Popularity

Harvard Fundamentals Of Neuroscience

reasons why i claim to learn latin:

it’s a beautiful language

its historical importance

the literature is brilliant and best enjoyed in its original language

reasons why i actually learn latin:

so when people ask me to say something in latin i can tell them a meme and claim it means something beautiful

so if i ever get a chance to go back in time, i can talk about dumb shit with people like cicero and mark antony

so i can communicate with my brethren, the demons from hell

man it’s so wild to me that the greeks literally thought that a large number of women’s ailments were caused by their wombs (which they believed to be a weird animalistic thing living in women’s bodies) just picking up and migrating all over the place (fun fact, the word hysteria comes from this nonsense), and while that’s horribly misogynistic and terrible i can’t say i wouldn’t milk that shit for all it’s worth if i lived in ancient greece

like, gotta go harvest the crops? sorry dude, womb’s all up in my arms, can’t do anything about it

want me to weave something? love to but the ol womb’s at it again, you know how it is

got caught making out with the neighbor’s wife? haha man that womb of mine sure is a riot

Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital.

Fun Fact: The obsidian blade used during the rituals are sharper than today’s surgical steel.

The image below shows a reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs. Templo Mayor is the pyramid seen center-back, with two temples on top. One temple was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.

Image Source: Rosemania. Reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs - the centre of modern Mexico City. (National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico City). Wikimedia Commons.

The enormous rack of skulls called, Tzompantli, was built in front of the Templo Mayor pyramid. The Mexica people performed human sacrifices to feed the gods. The Aztecs made up the majority of the Mexica people. To them, the skulls would guarantee the sustained continuation of humanity.

There are numerous depictions of tzompantli in Aztec codices. Here is one taken from the 16th Century Aztec manuscript, Codex Duran.  Image source: Public Domain.

The Spanish conquistadors marched into Tenochtitlan in 1519. The Spanish saw the skulls and the practice of human sacrifice as barbaric. In 1521 the Templo Mayor was torn down, and the tzompantli paved over. The ruins are underneath of what is known today as Mexico City. Archaeologists are currently studying the skulls to learn about rituals and the postmortem handling of those that were sacrificed.

A note on Nuclear Fission

When an atom fissions, it releases a teeny tiny amount of energy ( The decay of one atom of uranium-235 releases about 200MeV or about 3*10-11J.). But atoms are quite small. An atom does not make a big explosion when it splits.

To get a big explosion, you need to split lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them—many, many trillions of them.

Each one releases only a teeny amount of energy, but when you add up the teeny amount of energy from trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms, then you get a big explosion. (The explosion of 1kg of TNT releases 4MJ).