My Life on this planet.

An interesting article has been published in New Scientist (April 25 - May 1, 2015) under the title ' Bitter sweet nectar: Why some flowers poison bees '. The article describes how in 401 BC a total of 10,000 Greek warriors were behaving as madman on the way back to home after a war against the king of Persia after having eaten some honey made by local bees. They were lucky as they recovered and could continue going home. However, during later wars, there were armies that were slaughtered by the enemy because the soldiers were unable to fight after having eaten the honey; some local armies even used the honey to intoxicate the soldiers of foreign armies and thus this became one of the first known chemical weapons used during war. Chemicals released in nectar of plants The article describes how some plants leak certain chemicals such as nicotine and caffeine into their flowers and so in their nectar . In general, insects don't like these substances as they taste bitte...

Over the weekend newspapers (e.g. BBC and the Guardian ) published that scientists discovered that elephants seem to be able to understand humans pointing at something and they think elephants themselves can also point to something, using their trunk. It is quite fun to know that my favourite animals as a kid are for ones positively in the news and not only because they are killed. Elephants, since centuries used by humans as transport system and to carry heavy weights. I think it is quite unbelievable scientists spend years studying these animals before understanding they are able to understand human gestures (although the scientists expected something and therefore did this experiment) and thus they find them very intelligent animals, saying even our closest relatives (i.e. the apes) don't understand us pointing to something while domestic animals also understand us although it took thousands of years for those animals to learn (does this mean animals return and learn...

In this article I write about something amazing in life: developmental biology (more specifically about human development although most apply also to other animals and even plants) and how out of two tiny cells an organism arises with billions of cells. I mention also briefly about the effects of our knowledge on society: new applications such as IVF and stem cell research or even gene therapy to cure genetic diseases. Science: embryology The cell: introduction Our bodies consist of two types of cells: reproductive cells or gametes and body cells or somatic cells . Somatic cells (e.g. liver cells, skin cells, nerve cells) are found all over our body except in the reproductive organs where in addition gametes are found: these are egg cells or ova ( ovum = one egg cell) in the ovaries of women and sperm cells or spermatozoa in the testes (balls) of men. Fig. 1. C ell with nucleus and chromosomes that consists of DNA. Eukaryotic cells (including human cel...