Category Kids Queries

Roll onto your arm in your sleep and you’ll likely wake up to find it numb and lifeless, as if it wants to sleep in. Then comes the sensation of pins and needles. Contrary to what you might think, limbs don’t go limp simply because you cut off their blood supply when you lie on them wrong. Instead, you’re pressing on nerves and cutting off the limb’s communication with the brain. Roll off and the nerves go through a sort of ‘’reboot,’’ sending pulses to the brain that you perceive as that tingly feeling. The lazy limb comes back online in short order.

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Your tongue bristles with tiny bumps called taste buds: chemical receptors that interpret flavors and transmit that information to your noggin. Our sense of smell also greatly enhances the flavour of our food.

Taste buds have very sensitive microscopic hairs called microvilli. Those tiny hairs send messages to the brain about how something tastes, so you know if it’s sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. The average person has about 10,000 taste buds and they’re replaced every 2 weeks or so. But as a person ages, some of those taste cells don’t get replaced. An older person may only have 5,000 working taste buds. That’s why certain foods may taste stronger to you than they do to adults. Smoking also can reduce the number of taste buds a person has.

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Scientists have determined that the human tongue is attuned to several flavors: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, savory (think soy sauce), and possibly fat. Telling the difference between these tastes was crucial to our prehistoric survival. Bitter flavors, for instance, may have signaled a poisonous plant. Sour tastes indicated a spoiled supper. Sweet, savory, and fatty flavors were tired to foods with a lot of energy.

The ability to taste is so crucial to the act of eating that when we can’t taste our food we just don’t have the desire to eat as much as we usually do. Weight loss is common for people who can’t taste or smell their food for whatever reason. For some of us this may be desirable, but for others it can lead to impaired immunity, poor nutritional status and the worsening of some diseases.

The ability to taste and smell our food is vitally important for our health and well being. For some people who may have a diminished sense of taste, using a flavor enhancer such as monosodium glutamate can help counteract the problem.

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Fingernails grow slowly – roughly a hair’s width a day – but that growth adds up over the long term. Let your grow wild and you might eventually beat the Guinness World Record set by Melvin Boothe, whose untamed claws reached a combined length of more than 32 feet (nearly 10 m).

Several factors affect the rapidity of nail growth. Fingernails, for example, grow faster during daytime than at night. In addition, fingernails grow at a greater clip in the summer, for the young, and slower for older people and in the winter. The middle, ring and index fingernails grow the fastest, while the thumb and little finger lag behind. 

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It should come as no surprise that gorillas, chimpanzees, and other higher primates closely related to humans have fingerprints. But if you look closely at a koala’s paws, you’ll see tiny swirling ridges on the skin of its fingers and toes. They’re fingerprints, and every koala has unique set. That means animal detectives would have no problem tracking down koala crooks!

The remarkable thing about koala prints is that they seem to have evolved independently. On the evolutionary tree of life, primates and modern koalas’ marsupial ancestors branched apart 70 million years ago. Scientists think the koala’s fingertip features developed much more recently in its evolutionary history, because most of its close relatives (such as wombats and kangaroos) lack them.

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Believe it or not, that armor plating at the tips of your fingers is made of the same stuff as your hair and skin, a protein called keratin. It’s also in the hooves and horns of animals.

Keratin forms the cells of your hair and skin, too. It also forms cells that are a key part of many glands and that line internal organs. Nails start growing under your skin. As new cells grow, they push old ones through your skin. The part you can see consists of dead cells. That’s why it doesn’t hurt to cut your nails. Fingernails grow about 3.5 millimeters each month. Those are the averages for healthy adults. Whether you’re getting proper nutrition and how well you take care of your nails can affect the growth rate.

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