My Science School

Humans are the only animals on earth with chins. The chin could be a "spandrel" or evolutionary by-product. It may be the result of the human face shrinking over time as our posture straightened and our faces shortened, or a remnant from a period of longer jaws.

The chin isn’t just the lower part of your face: It’s a specific term for that little piece of bone extending from the jaw. While it may seem odd, humans are in fact the only animals that have one. Even chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest genetic cousins, lack chins. Instead of poking forward, their lower jaws slope down and back from their front teeth. Even other ancient hominids, like the Neanderthals, didn’t have chins —their faces simply ended in a flat plane.     

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Since 1901, the Nobel prizes have been awarded to men, women and organisations for work that has led to great advances for mankind, in line with the wishes of inventor Alfred The winners of this years prizes are being announced daily from October 3 to October 10. Here are some interesting facts about the prizes and their creator

A misunderstanding?

On April 12, 1888, Alfred Nobel's elder brother Ludvig died in Cannes, France. But newspaper Le Figaro mixed up the brothers and announced Alfred's death on its front page under a rather inflammatory headline: "A man who can hardly be called a benefactor of humanity died yesterday in Cannes. He is Nobel, inventor of dynamite". Many credit this slight as the inspiration for Nobel's creation of the prizes, pointing to the wording in his will that the awards should go to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".

"But we can only imagine" that this is what happened because the incident is not mentioned in his correspondence, his biographer Ingrid Carlberg said. As for the visitors who came to offer their condolences at the inventor's Parisian mansion, they were surprised to be greeted by a very much alive Alfred, as reported by Le Figaro the following day.

A fortune for a Nobel

The Nobel Prizes come with a tidy prize sum, currently set at 10 million kronor ($895,000) per discipline, along with an 18-carat gold medal.

Auction surprise

The 2021 Peace Prize laureate, Dmitry Muratov, turned his gold disc into a fortune to benefit Ukrainian children displaced by the war. In June, his 196-gram medal including 150 grams of gold-sold at auction for a whopping $103.5 million to an anonymous philanthropist. That smashed the previous record for a Nobel medal 21-fold.

Posthumous awards

Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that the prize may not be given posthumously. But a person may be awarded if she or he dies between the time of the announcement in October and the formal prize ceremony in December. Before the change, only two people had won a Nobel posthumously. One was Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish secretary general of the United Nations who died in a plane crash in 1961 but was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later the same year. And in 1931, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded posthumously to another Swede. Erik Axel Karlfeldt. In 2011, the medicine prize committee selected Ralph Steinman of Canada, unaware that he had passed away just three days before the prize announcement. Nevertheless, the foundation decided to give him the award.

New prizes

With 120 years under their belt and a name associated throughout the world with excellence, the Nobel prizes are considered the creme de la creme of awards. But some critics consider them to be archaic, often honouring discoveries made decades ago and not taking into account newer scientific fields. The Right Livelihood Award was therefore created in 1980 by a German-Swedish philanthropist after the Nobel Foundation refused to create two new prizes for the environment and international development. Finland created the one-million-euro Millennium Technology Prize in 2002 to recognise the role technology plays in solving global challenges, while the $1 million Kavli Prizes in Norway have since 2008 honoured discoveries in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. But the richest prize of them all is the most recent one, the Breakthrough Prize created in 2010 by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Dubbed the "Oscars for Science, they come with a cheque for $3 million. more than three times the winnings of a Nobel Prize AFP.

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A Titanic expedition team has released a high-quality video footage revealing vivid details of the famous wreck.

The latest footage is the world's first and only 8K video of the doomed livary passenger liner that was once thought to be “unsinkable" This will allow marine archaeologists to study more into its rate of decay.

The "unsinkable" ship

RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Titanic was on its maiden voyage from Southampton, the U.K. to New York City, the US.

During the intervening night of April 14-15 in 1912, the unsinkable ship sunk into the North Atlantic ocean. It took about two hours and 40 minutes for the ship to sink.

Among the 2,224 passengers and crew on board, more than 1,500 died. The wreck lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

After numerous expeditions, the Titanic was located in 1985 by a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of Ifremer and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Over the years there have been several attempts to raise the Titanic to the surface but failed due to its fragile condition. It is now protected by a UNESCO convention.

Latest footage

The first-of-its-kind footage by the Titanic 2022 expedition team, shared by OceanGate Expeditions, has revealed an amazing level of details of the ship.

The high resolution has brought forth several new minute information such as the name of the anchor maker - Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd. - on the portside anchor, renowned bow, anchor chain of which each link weighs about 91 kilograms, number one cargo hold, and solid bronze capstans.

In one of the clips, one of the single-ended boilers, which fell to the ocean's floor when the Titanic broke into two, can also be seen.

In the video, one can also view the decay from where some of the Titanic's rails collapsed and fell away from the ship.

DID YOU KNOW?

"Saved from the Titanic”, the first movie made on the Titanic, was directed by Dorothy Gibson, an American actor and one of the survivors of the incident. It premiered in the U.S. just 31 days after the incident. Gibson was one of the 28 people who boarded the first lifeboat when the ship began sinking.

On returning to New York City, she co-wrote the script of the American silent motion picture and played a fictionalised version of herself. In the movie, she even wore the same clothes that she had on the night of the disaster. The filming took place in a Fort Lee, New Jersey studio.

The movie was released internationally and received reviews. However, some criticised the commercialisation of the disaster just a few days after the incident. It is now a lost film as the last prints were destroyed in the Éclair studio fire in March 1914. Only a few stills and promotional photos survived.

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Peacocks can fly, despite their long trains (tail feathers) which make up 60% of their body. The average peacock spends only 2% of its time in flight. Flight serves primarily as a defence mechanism; peacocks launch themselves vertically into the air to escape into the canopies of trees to evade predators and to nest safely during the evenings. If a predator grabs the train, the long feathers pull out easily, so that the peacock can fly away. This national bird of India is protected under the Wildlife Protection Act 1972.

When you look at the long tail flowing behind a flying peacock, you might be perplexed as to how they manage to lift themselves off the ground. Technically, their actual tail has only about 20 feathers. However the “train” that is made up of the elongated feathers that drape over the tail can have more than 200 feathers and is about 5-6 feet long!

Surely this mass of 200 extra long feathers trailing behind them must hinder their flight ability. However, scientists believe it actually has no significant effects. In a study carried out by Dr. Askew of the University of Leads, peacock tails were clipped to confirm its effect on their flight.

Surprisingly, peacocks with clipped tails still struggled to take off from the ground, and their flight was similar to when they had full tails. This has lead researchers to believe that the gigantic plumage has little effect on a peacocks ability to fly.

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