Ask The Science Experts

In the late sixteenth century, two Dutch eyeglass makers discovered that objects appear magnified when viewed through multiple convex lenses in a tube. For this simple discovery, Hans Janssen and his son Zaccharias are considered by some to have invented the microscope around 1590. About this same time, another eyeglass maker from Holland, Hans Lippershey came up with the same idea and is also considered by some to be one of the inventors.

“The coining of the name “microscope” has been credited to Giovanni Faber, who gave that name to Galileo Galilei’s compound microscope in 1625. [wikipedia]

Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) is really considered to be the “father of microscopy” when he worked as an apprentice in a dry goods store where magnifying glasses were used to count the threads in cloth. He taught himself new methods for grinding and polishing lenses of great curvature which gave magnifications up to 270 times, the greatest known in that day. These led to the building of his microscopes and the biological discoveries for which he is famous. He was the first to see and describe bacteria, yeast plants, the teeming life in a drop of water, and the circulation of blood corpuscles in capillaries. During a long life he used his lenses to make pioneer studies on an extraordinary variety of things, both living and non living, and reported his findings in over a hundred letters to the Royal Society of England and the French Academy. [source about.com]

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The Dasypus novemcinctus, or nine-banded armadillo female almost always gives birth to four young of the same sex. The offspring are actually quadruplets that come from one fertilized egg splitting into four parts.

The general wikipedia description follows: the Nine-banded Long-nosed Armadillo or just Nine-banded Armadillo, (also known as the poor man’s pig or poverty pig), is a species of armadillo from North, Central and South America. It is the most widespread member of the group. Its ancestors evolved in South America, but were able to invade North America during the Great American Interchange after the Isthmus of Panama formed 3 million years ago.

The Nine-banded Long-nosed Armadillo is a solitary, mainly nocturnal animal, found in many kinds of habitats, from mature and secondary rainforests to grassland and dry scrub. It is an insectivorous animal, feeding chiefly on ants, termites and other small invertebrates. This species is the only known animal that is able to inflate its own intestine in order to float across a river. It can also hold its breath for up to 6 minutes in order to walk across the bottom of narrow rivers. Additionally, the nine-banded armadillo always produces four identical offspring. The armadillo can jump three to four feet (90-120 cm) straight in the air if sufficiently frightened, making it a particular danger on roads.

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The dodo bird, or Raphus cucullatus, became completely extinct around 1800. While thousands of these birds were slaughtered for meat, it it generally believed that their demise was primarily due to pigs and monkeys eating their eggs.

The birds were native to the Mascarene Islands in the Central Indian Ocean. They became extince on Mauritius around 1680 and on Reunion Island about 1750. They remained on Rodriguez until 1800.

Source: The Handy Science Answer Book. Posted by admin for the science best selling toys of 2008.

As the average person’s stomach will hold less than two quarts, it only stays in this stage of the digestive process for three to five hours. The stomach slowly releases this semi-digested food to the intestines where it completes the digestive process. Roughly 15-17 hours after you take the first bite, the food is excreted as feces.

Some foods may pass quicker than this, depending on one’s specific reaction to a specific food. And some foods may stay in your system longer. Other variables affecting digestion time is one’s level of physical activity and even drugs taken subsequently (caffeine, nicotine, prescription drugs, etc.).

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You might think the animal with the longest gestation period would be one of the larger mammals, but in fact it is the Alpine black salamander. It is a viviparous amphibian which lives in the high altitude Swiss Alps. At altitudes above 4,600 feet, it’s gestation period can be up to 38 months. It bears two fully metamorphosed young.

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Another interesting question to first consider is: is a zebra a light animal with dark stripes, or a dark animal with light stripes? It’s generally believed that a zebra is a dark animal with light stripes. Most scientists believe that the zebra evolved from a horse-like animal with no stripes.

One theory of where the stripes came from is simply natural selection. Over millions of years, a few zebra foals were born with lighter colored stripes in a process called “accidental variation.” These foals had a marked advantage over their darker colored siblings and thus went on to reproduce in greater numbers, creating more striped offspring.

But how exactly did having stripes create an advantage? Think of an ordinary dark colored horse standing on a hillside. Its silhouette would make it stand out from the background, and would tell a hungry lion exactly where his next meal might come from. Now imagine a striped animal. It’s silhouette would be a bit more mottled and generally different. This likely gave it a camouflaged advantage and probably spared a few animals from hungry lions.

A couple of good sources of information on zebra biology are: Developmental Biology, and the Wikipedia article on zebras.

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While insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, we don’t have a very accurate count on the number of species. There are over one million named species, but many scientists estimate the number of unnamed species to be as high as 30 million. Even considering only the million or so insects that we have formally classified, this number still represents over half of all known living organisms. When we consider the total possible number of insects (maybe more than 30 million), these would represent up to 90% of all known animals. Note: Wikipedia cites the most current estimates of unnamed insects to be between 6-10 million.

Some of the numbers of insects by species are:

• Beetles, 360,000
• Butterflies and Moths: 170,000
• Flies: 120,000
• Bees, wasps and ants: 110,000
• True bugs: 82,000
• Grasshoppers: 20,000
• Dragonflies: 2,000

With so many out there, and the fact that they live practically everywhere, it’s no wonder that insect collecting is such a popular hobby. Here’s a fun article if you’re looking to introduce children to insect collecting. And if you’re interested in starting an ant habitat, there are a couple on this list of 2008 best selling toys.