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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Evolution in Disney


Mickey Mouse has evolved. This was noticed and brough to the world by Stephen J. Gould in his book, "The Panda's Thumb", deserving a whole chapter.
As you can see, in this case, Mickey Mouse is not portraited as an individual, but as a population, or species of consecutive Mickeys. The Mickeys started to suffer small changes and, since they were successful (the character became more dear to the public) they kept those traits, by a special kind of natural selection.
And what traits are those that make Mickey each time more a favourite of people? The traits of a child! The chubby, big eyed, big headed, rounder mouse has been becoming everytime more like the being we instinctively tend to love and protect: our kids.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Hurray for the bees!!


Honey is one of the oldest food sources we know. This fascinating fluid is created by honey bees from the nectar of flowers. Let’s see what sciensational stuff we have for honey and the great honey bees.

Honey does not spoil.
Honeybees have remained unchanged in form or structure for 20 million years.


This is perhaps one of the greatest properties of honey. You could place it anywhere for thousands of years and it will not spoil. In fact, edible honey was found in ancient Egyptian Pharaoh King Tut’s tomb!
Honey contains large amounts of fructose and glucose. Naturally this makes it an ideal sweetener – much sweeter – almost 20 to 60 per cent more – than sugar itself!
You would think that such a sweet thing would be so bad for your health. Not so at all! Honey does not have any fats or cholesterol. It does not contain any sodium either. You could actually live off a just-honey diet because it is considered to be the only kind of food that has all necessary substances to sustain a normal human life, though it would be quite boring to have nothing but honey, eh?
A honey bee could visit around 2000 flowers in a day, flying around 25 kilometers per hour! That’s not all. It would take about 2 million flowers for these little creatures to visit to make just half a kilogram of honey! Not only that, just one single honey bee colony can produce between 30 to 40 kilograms of honey in a year.