Trunk:P why do you call it so???

 
It’s not clear who first tagged the elephant’s snout with the name “trunk,” but it seems to have happened sometime in the late 16th century. The first documented instance appears in the 1589 work by Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations: “The Elephant . . . With water fils his troonke right hie and blowes it on the rest.”
As with most etymologies, the precise reason trunk is used to denote an elephant’s proboscis is difficult to distinguish. Arguably the most reasonable theory is that it derives from the fact that just a few decades before “trunk” started getting applied to an elephant’s snout, it was also a word used to describe a pipe or hollow tube, such as a speaking tube or ear-trumpet.  For instance, in the 1546 John Bale work, The Acts of English Voltaries:  “The roode spake these wordes, or else a knaue monke behynde hym in a truncke through the wall”.
Similarly in the 1553 work by Richard Eden, A Treatyse of the Newe India (which was a translation of part of Cosmographia, by Sebastian Muenster), where it describes the tubes used for blow-guns “They… blowe them [arrows] oute of a trunke as we doe pellets of claye.”
This “blow gun / hollow tube” usage particularly fits with the aforementioned first known use of the word to refer to an elephant’s proboscis, “With water fils his troonke right hie and blowes it on the rest.”

This might all have you wondering how the “trunk” of a car got this name. (For the British readers, we’re referring to the boot of a car here.)
For this, we need to go back to the Latin truncus, “main stem or stock of a tree or human body.” This, in turn, gave rise to the Old French “tronc” (“alms box in a church, trunk of a tree, trunk of the human body, wooden block”) around the 12th century and then the English “trunk” around the 15th century.
It is the “main stem of a tree” definition that is important in this one. By the mid-14th century, this gave rise to wood chests or cases being referred to as “trunks,” presumed to be because they were made from wood from tree trunks.
Whatever the case, the first known instance of this definition of the word can be found in a 1462 receipt (Mann. & Househ): “Item, payd ffor a new tronke ffor my lord whych was delyvared to Willyam off Wardrope x. s.”
Fast-forward a little under a half century later and we find an advertisement in the November of 1929 Hearst International Magazine where an automobile is listed as coming standard with “Six wire wheels and a trunk rack”. The rear trunk rack eventually gave way to a built-in storage compartment in the same region of the car that itself was referred to as a “trunk” in North America.
Another interesting one is the use of “trunks” to refer to an article of clothing, such as swimming trunks or “shorts.” This general definition for the word seems to have popped up in the 19th century with the first reference in 1836 in the Pickwick Papers, “The appearance of Mr. Snodgrass in blue satin trunks and cloak, white silk tights and shoes, and Grecian helmet.”
As for specifically “swimming trunks,” we have the first instance appearing in a July of 1883 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette where it states, “Captain Webb attempted his perilous feat of swimming the Niagara Rapids… He wore a pair of silk trunks…”
In this case, it’s generally thought the definition either stems from the “hollow tube” idea, with the trunks having two hollow tubes to stick your legs through (hence “trunks” instead of “trunk”), or is referring to the fact that the shorts contain part of the base of the trunk of the body.

Chocolate( fruit:p) pudding....

Recent headlines that chocolate supplies could fall short of demand by as much as a million tonnes by 2020 have been alarming. Those in despair over the news can take heart, however, as substitutes are available to get you through the rough times, including one that is actually relatively healthy – black sapote.
Native to the coastal regions in and around Central America, black sapote is a fruit, related to the persimmon, and it is today cultivated primarily across the Caribbean, as well as in Mexico, Australia and the Philippines.

On the tree, the fruit sort-of resembles a green tomato when ready for picking. And it is extremely important that you don’t try to pick it too early or eat it right off the tree.  Unripe black sapotes not only don’t taste like chocolate, but are quite gag-worthy.  Further, if it’s picked too early, the fruit won’t ever ripen and will simply rot, which one imagines doesn’t improve the flavor over the non-rotted, unripe version.
Picked at the right time, though, the black sapote will ripen within about 3 to 6 days after harvest. When this happens, the formerly white pulp turns a deep brown and develops a distinctive taste that, together with its papaya-like texture, have caused many to compare it to chocolate pudding (hence the nickname, “chocolate pudding fruit.”)
The pulp can be eaten as is (but not the skin), but given that it tastes a lot like chocolate pudding, it’s also commonly used in various recipes as a substitute for chocolate.
ooops a chocolate pudding fruit...hide it otherwise yours friends will grab it:p
 

Zombies!!:p REMARKABLE!"Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not.”

Making zombies of ants, Swiss cheese of snails and Sherpas of sheep and cows, the lancet liver fluke proves that you don’t need to be big to be powerful.

Growing up to 10 mm by 2.5 mm (0.5 x 0.1 inches), Dicrocoelium dendriticum is a parasitic flatworm (also known as a trematode) that begins life as eggs living in the poop of (generally) cows or sheep. Shortly after being deposited, the eggs are ingested by a snail (such as Zebrina spp. or Cionella spp.) where they hatch into larva (miracidia). In this form they burrow through the snail’s gut and rest in its connective tissue where they develop into a second larval stage (sporocysts). Now they move to the digestive gland where they bear female sporocysts, that themselves produce yet another larval stage (cercariae). These last travel to the snail’s respiration chamber from which the snail finally rids itself of the parasite when it exits as a slime ball.
SMALL STORY  OF THE BASIC LIFE CYCLE OF LANCET LIVER FLUKE

As appetizing as that sounds, it’s no wonder that an ant (such as Formica fusca) will soon wander by and eat it. Once in the ant’s intestine, the cercariae are released from the ball and most migrate to the ant’s main body cavity (hemocoel) where they transform into a fourth larval stage (metacercariae).
However, one evil genius metacercaria does not join its siblings in the ant’s hemocoel, but rather travels to a cluster of nerve cells (sub-esophageal ganglion), where it “takes control of the ant’s actions by manipulating these nerves.” When night falls, the metacercaria then directs the ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass, where it stays until the morning; the ant will repeat this nightly ritual (at the behest of its puppet master) until it is eaten by a grazing animal.

The fluke has now reached the body where it will finally mature (called the primary or definitive host). It makes its way from the animal’s small intestine to its bile duct, where it reproduces and makes eggs, the latter of which are pooped by the animal into the field to start the cycle all over again.
D. dendriticum is found throughout the world and although it primarily infects sheep, cows, snails and ants, it has been known to inhabit pigs, goats, alpacas and llamas. In fact, while rare, human infections are not unknown, with the flukes infesting human bile ducts. Usually those infected suffer from only mild symptoms include bloating and diarrhea, although some suffer from enlargement of the lining of the bile ducts (biliary epithelium) that, along with a growth of fibrous tissue, can cause the liver to swell (hepatomegaly) and cirrhosis. Note that human infection is extremely rare, as you might imagine given the way one would have to acquire the parasite.  For instance, one documented case happened only after a man drank water that had infected ants in it.
Regardless, you have to hand it to the lancet liver fluke that, during the course of its life, commonly forces three different animals to do its bidding, and completely bends the ant to its will. As another tiny powerhouse once said, “Judge me by my size, do you? And well you should not.”

LEAD is bad for humans!

Given that humans have been using lead in various product for over 8,000 years (with the first known mining of it in Anatolia around 6500 BCE), you might be surprised to learn that we have known that lead is dangerous and shouldn’t be trifled with since at least 150 BC, when its effects on the human body were noted by famed Greek physician Nicander of Colophon. Nicander even went so far as to describe the metal as “deadly”, writing extensively on the crippling effects it has on the human body in his work, Alexipharmaca.
Further, Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides noted in the first century AD: “Lead makes the mind give way”.
To quote the Occupation Safety and Health Research Institute: “Lead poisoning is one of the earliest identified and most known occupational disease. Its acute effects have been recognized from antiquity.”

So what exactly does lead poisoning do to the body? Well, depending on how much of the substance gets into your body (and it doesn’t take much, particularly for children), it can cause everything from constipation to permanent reduction in your IQ and mental capacity. It also can potentially fundamentally change a given person’s personality, causing them to be irritable and suffer from erratic mood-swings and fatigue without warning; cause a reduction in sperm count and infertility; stunted growth (in children); miscarriages; and a whole slew of other terrifying symptoms.
So that’s what it can do, but how? Why is lead so dangerous to the human body while we can safely ingest many other types of metals, like iron, without worry (and, in fact, need some of them to survive)? While research is ongoing into the full effects and mechanisms involved in lead poisoning, what we do know is that a lot of the damage is due to the fact that important things like zinc, calcium, and iron in the body can ultimately get replaced by lead in many key biochemical reactions, if lead is present.  Unlike these other metals, though, while lead is happy to bind and interact with various critical enzymes, the result isn’t the normal reaction you need.
For example, with calcium, as noted in this paper on the Mechanisms of Lead Neurotoxicity, lead has a nasty habit of being able to mimic, or in some cases straight up inhibit the actions of calcium in natural biological reactions that take place within the human body, inhibiting neurological function, among other things.
Lead also can damage DNA, as well as your cell membranes, the latter of which, combined with the fact that it also interferes with heme synthesis, can result in anemia among a host of other problems. It can interfere with the ability for your body to synthesize vitamin D, which comes with yet another host of its own problems if you don’t have enough. It also causes a few different problems with your immune system; interferes with metabolism of bones and teeth; can cause abnormal calcium build up within cells… the list goes on and on and on.

If that wasn’t bad enough, lead can easily find its way into almost any part of your body once introduced, whether by breathing it in, ingesting it, or (very rarely) via skin absorption.
From this, you might find it completely unsurprising that, unlike many other poisons, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lead is so toxic to humans that, “No safe blood lead level has been identified.”
So, in short, lead is bad for you because, though lead has no useful function in your body, it’s happy to jump on in and give it its best college try, interacting up a storm with various enzymes, failing the whole way at producing the reactions that are needed for normal body function. But what it lacks in end result, it makes up for in staying power. You see, the half-life of lead in the body is quite long- weeks in your blood, months in your soft tissues, and years in your bones; and by years we mean up to two to three decades. Who needs proper enzymatic function anyway?..................:p...

BLACK BOARD CHALKS NOT CHALKS!

 


Ubiquitous in many classrooms since the 19th century, chalk and chalkboards are familiar to most of us. White, powdery and prone to sticking to those surfaces where it is put (and just as easy to wipe away), chalk and its accompanying board are excellent instructional aids. Notably, however, most chalk today isn’t technically chalk at all, but gypsum.
Chalk and gypsum have both been mined since ancient times. Chalk (calcium carbonate) has been found in cave paintings that date back to 40,000 BC, while gypsum (calcium sulfate) has been used as a mortar for construction since the dawn of civilization, and is even found in the Egyptian pyramids.

Similar and yet distinct, chalk is a base (an alkali that neutralizes acids) that is composed of calcium and oxygen combined with carbon (CaCO3), while gypsum is a salt (the product of a base and acid reacting and both becoming neutralized), made up of calcium and oxygen combined with sulfur.
Both are believed to be formed in similar fashion. Chalk is a limestone deposit created as plankton (tiny marine organisms) concentrate calcium in their bodies while living, then leach the calcium out after they die and settle onto ocean floors; over millennia, large deposits are formed, and as the seas recede, chalks deposits remain.
Gypsum’s origins are similar, but in addition to being comprised of the calcium produced by the deaths of millions of plankton, gypsum also contains some of the salt that was left behind as the ocean evaporated.
Traditionally chalk has been used for drawing and writing, and by the end of the 18th century, with advances in slate quarrying (slate was originally used for writing tablets and blackboards), writing slates covered with chalk letters, symbols, numbers and figures were commonplace. Gypsum on the other hand, had been used primarily in construction, such as for the aforementioned mortar, as well as in the manufacture of windows.
Nonetheless, both are susceptible to a process that produces sticks of themselves that, when pressed against certain services, leave washable marks.
After quarrying, each is crushed, ground, washed and sifted. With gypsum, it must also be dehydrated in a process that involves high temperatures to reduce its water content from nearly 21% to about 5-6%; to make classroom chalk, the material is mixed, again, with water (and colored pigments, if desired), and to produce more exotic pastels, such as used for art drawings, pigments as well as clays or oils are also added. For the former, the chalk is baked, while with the latter, it is air-dried.

It’s not clear why gypsum has replaced chalk for writing on blackboards (which today are mostly green, but that’s another story). While historically chalk has been remarkably dusty, modern manufacturing methods, including baking the chalk and coating it with products like shellac, have reduced the problem for both materials.
The most likely reason is that gypsum is abundant, easily mined and processed in enormous quantities. The mineral is mined in more than 90 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Spain and the United States. In the U.S., 19 states (notably California, Iowa, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas) have surface-mining operations, and the U.S. alone produces more than 30 million tons of the stuff each year.
Sometimes called “the rock nobody knows,” gypsum can easily be turned into a fine powder (by dehydrating it), while it also has the remarkable quality of being “the only natural substance that can be restored to its original rock-like state by the addition of water alone.”
Since it can be reconstituted, it can be fashioned into any of a myriad of shapes and modified for various uses. Common applications include plaster of Paris, creating clay molds from which a variety of plastic products are formed (such as plastic cups and plates), the manufacture of glass, as an ingredient in cement and in drywall (this last has been a boon to humanity as gypsum is naturally fire resistant).
Non-toxic, gypsum also pops up in fertilizers and soil conditioners, hair products, to make plasters of teeth, to grow mushrooms, brew beer and bind tofu (which also has the added benefit of making bean curd an excellent calcium source).

The origin of DNA testing.DNA finger printing helped to solve mystry cases???

DNA testing...is the most important study in today's world. So how did this DNA finger printing came into existence. Lets see how these finger printing technology helped to solve cases.

Eureka Moment
On September 10, 1984, geneticist Alec Jeffreys, 34, was working in his lab at the University of Leicester, in central England. More precisely, he was in the lab’s darkroom, studying an X-ray that had been soaking in a developing tank over the weekend. The X-ray was the result of a process through which recently discovered DNA sequence anomalies appeared on a sheet of film as rows of black lines interspersed with blank spaces- almost like bar codes. The particular X-ray he was looking at showed DNA “bar codes” from three people: one of his technicians and her mother and father.
Jeffreys had no idea what to expect from the X-ray- he was just inventing the process, hoping to see evidence of change to specific regions of DNA between the parents and their daughter.  But after looking at the blurry mess of dark and light spaces for a few moments, he suddenly realized that, completely by accident, he had discovered a way to tell if people were related. “It was an absolute Eureka moment,” he told a reporter in a 2009 interview with The Guardian newspaper. “It was a blinding flash. In five golden minutes, my research career went whizzing off in a completely new direction.”
After the Eureka
What Jeffreys saw in that blurry X-ray: 1) each of the three family members had their own unique “bar code,” 2) all three of the family members’ bar codes related to one another (which makes perfect sense, as each of us gets our DNA as a combination of our parents’ DNA), and 3) the relationships were plainly visible. Jeffreys quickly realized that his findings would have implications regarding paternity.  With such technology you could prove with scientific certainty whether someone was- or wasn’t- someone else’s child. Or even whether they were closely related. The technology could also be of use in criminal cases where the perpetrators left blood or other biological evidence behind.
Jeffreys had apparently discovered something extraordinary- but what to do with it? Surely it would take decades for it to have any applications in the real world, he thought. So he simply kept working on what he dubbed his “DNA fingerprint” process, trying to improve it. Meanwhile, he wrote a scientific paper titled “Individual-Specific Fingerprints of Human DNA,” which was published in the scientific journal Nature in July 1985.
Two weeks later, he got a phone call.

Test Case: Paternity test.
The call came from a London lawyer who told Jeffreys she’d read a newspaper article about his “DNA fingerprinting” and wondered if it could be used in an immigration case she was handling. A British-Ghanaian woman’s 13-year-old son had gone to stay with her estranged husband in Ghana for some time, and when he returned, British authorities didn’t believe it was him. They thought the family was trying to sneak someone else- possibly a cousin- into the country on the son’s passport, and they wanted to deport the boy. Could Jeffreys prove that the child was the woman’s son?

Jeffreys agreed to give it a try. He took blood samples from the mother, three of her other children, and the boy in question, and made DNA bar codes for each of them. His conclusion: The boy was definitely the woman’s son. The lawyer presented the evidence to the British Home Office, and even though DNA testing had never been used in a case before, they were convinced. The boy was legally accepted as the woman’s son and allowed to stay in the country. Not only that, British immigration officials said they would allow DNA testing to decide any future cases that had paternity questions. The British Home Office had, perhaps without realizing it, made the brand-new, still not widely understood use of DNA testing a legally legitimate procedure.
 AFTERMATH:
News of these events made global headlines. Within a year, DNA fingerprinting- now known as DNA profiling- was being used in the United States, and in just a few more years it was considered a standard part of forensics almost everywhere in the world. And not just to find out whodunnit- but also to determine who-didn’t-dunnit.
Jeffreys is still a professor at the University of Leicester, although he is now known as Sir Alec Jeffreys. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 for “Services to Science and Technology.” He has received numerous other awards for what turned out to be one of the most momentous scientific discoveries of modern times. And it brought him some well-deserved fame: “Literally every two or three days I get an e-mail,” he said in 2009, “mainly from the States, from school kids saying, ‘I’ve got to do a project on a famous scientist, so I’ve chosen you,’ and I love that. I always respond.”

SOME INTERESTING FACTS:

• It May seem elementary to CSI fans, but after his discovery on that fateful Monday morning in 1984, Jeffreys had no idea if the DNA in a bloodstain would be usable in his process. So he did the only thing a good scientist could: “I spent the next two days cutting myself and leaving blood marks around the laboratory. Then we tested those bloodstains.” (It worked, of course.)
• Jeffreys’s original X-rays- the ones mentioned at the start of the story, with the bar codes of the three family members- actually held 11 such codes. The other eight were made from the DNA of animals, including a mouse, a cow, and baboon. And in case you were wondering, DNA testing works the same for animals as it does for humans.
• 

Microbesss!

 The nature of symbiotic associations in our human body

Normal microbiota of Conjuctiva:
1.Staphylococcus
2. Haemophilus species
3.Staphylococcus aureus
4.Streptococci
Normal microbiota of outer ear:
1.Staphylococcus
2.Diptheroids
3.Pseudomonas species
4.Enterobacteiaceae
Normal microbiota of Stomach:
1.Streptococcus
2.Staphylococcus
3.Lactobacillus
4.Peptostreptococcus
Normal microbiota of Skin :
1.Coagulase-negative streptococci
2.Diptheroids(including propionibacterium aces)
3.Staphylococcus aureus
4.Streptococci
5.Bacillus
6.Malasseria furfur
7.Candida species
8.Myobacterium species
Normal microbiota of Urethra:
1.Coagulase-negative streptococci
2.Diptheroids
3.Streptococci
4.Mycobacterium species
5.Bacteroides species and fuso bacterium
6.Peptostreptococcus species
Normal microbiota of Nose:
1.Lactobacillus 
2.Viridans streptococci
3.Staphylococcus aureus
4.Neisserio species
5. Haemophilus species
6.Streptococcus pneumoniae
Normal microbiota of  small intestine:
1.Lactobacillus sp.
2.Clostridium sp.
3.Bacteriods sp.
4.Mycobacterium sp.
5.Enterobacteriacae
Normal microbiota of mouth and oropharynx:
1.Viridians streptococci
2.Veinella sp.
3.Fusobacterium sp.
4.Treponema sp.
5.Porphyromonas sp and prerotella sp.
6.Neisseria sp and Branhamella catarrhalls
7.Streptococcus pneumoniae
8.Beta-hemolytic streptococcus.
9.Candida sp.
10.Haemophilus sp.
11.Diptheroids
12.Actinomyces sp
13.Eikenella corrodens
14.Staphylococcus aureus
Normal microbiota of large intestine:
1. Bacteriods sp.
2.Fusobacterium sp.
3. Clostridium sp.
4.Peptostreptococcus
5.E.coli
6.Klebsiella sp.
7.Lactobacillus
8.Enterococci
9.Streptococci
10.Pseudomonas sp.
11.Acinetobactor sp.
12.Staphylococcus aureus
13.Mycobacterium sp
14.Actinomyces sp