Did you ever wonder about some of the things that are around us? There are a lot of things we can’t explain. Take plants for example, usually humans and animals eat a lot of plants, but there are plants which are carnivorous and you have to wonder how they got that way. This has bothered scientists for quite some time. Researchers at the University of Buffalo claim to have the answer on how these plants evolved. They investigated the pitcher plant. This is a plant which looks like a flower, has slippery insides and a gooey liquid in the center and this liquid traps insects and breaks down their bodies turning them into nutrients for the plant. One of the first things that scientists noticed was all the carnivorous plants use the same enzyme to digest their prey. It turns out the plants became carnivorous, because of the poor nutrient areas they were in and needed to eat these insects to get enough nutrients.

Why is it humans require sleep? We have been told we require sleep to refresh our bodies, but a new finding has been made by scientists who say the reason we require sleep is to forget some of the things we learned during the day. Some scientists have proposed that during the day we learned so much we grew many new connections between neurons. The connections are called synapses. Scientists claim we grow so many, things might get fuzzy we are trying to remember. They found neurons can prune out some of these synapses in the laboratory which made them feel we probably do this naturally when we are asleep. The scientist designed a memory test for mice. They put the mice in a room where they would get mild electrical shocks if they went over a particular section of the floor. They then injected the mice with a substance which can prune out new synapses. They found the mice who had been injected were much more likely to forget about the shock they would get if they walked over that part of the floor.

Why is it there is so much more to some of the archaeological sites than we suspect? If we take Stonehenge as an example, we are used to seeing stones arranged in a circle with other stones placed on top of them, but this perception has turned out to be not entirely true. It seems Stonehenge is in an area where many ancient structures were created. Recently a four year collaboration between a British team and the Ludwick Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria have joined forces and produced the first underground survey of the area surrounding Stonehenge for more than four square miles. They found an astonishing fifteen previously unknown Neolithic monuments of different kinds. Apparently the area under and around Stonehenge was considered sacred in ancient times and because of this became the area in which to build monuments.

When we talk about automobiles it has always been true the lighter the car, the bigger the engine and the better the transmission all lead to a faster gasoline powered car. So why are some electric cars so incredibly fast? Take the Tesla Model S for example. It is an electric sedan and yet this car is the third fastest accelerating production car in the world, beating out such cars as the Lamborghini Aventador and the Bugatti Veyron, both of which have an incredibly high price tag. One of the reasons the Tesla Model S is so fast is a bigger battery was added to it and in electric cars electricity is power. Gasoline cars have many different parts that all have to work in concert, some push, some spin and many do other things. Electric motors have a huge advantage since they don’t have all those tiny moving parts. The electronics in an electric motor are instantaneous and there is no delay in power. Torque is the power transmitted to the wheels and with an electric motor it is transmitted anywhere from 0 to 4000 revolutions per minute, but in a gasoline engine the engine can achieve peak torque in either very low or very high revolutions per minute, giving the electric engine a huge advantage.

Why is it we all get older? Scientists have been working on this problem for years and some believe we can at least slow down the aging process. This is one area where there is a lot of controversy. Some scientists believe our genes determine how long we will live and if we could change our genes we might be able to live longer. Others believe our DNA gets damaged the longer we live and the more damage occurs the more it  adds up and when our body can no longer take all the damage we die. Then there are those scientists who believe it is a combination of both things which are making us age. This doesn’t mean we might not find another factor as time goes by.

One of the things which people have wondered about for thousands of years is why the sun keeps burning. As we moved closer to this century people discovered the fact the sun was a star and had some type of nuclear power. Over the years there was some disagreement on what is powering the sun, but almost everybody agrees the sun is powered by hydrogen and is a giant nuclear reactor. It is believed the sun has used about half of its fuel, but that took almost five billion years so it probably has about another five billion years to go if something doesn’t interfere with it. Most scientists believe the sun is using nuclear fusion which is combining hydrogen into helium. It is believed when the sun runs out of hydrogen, helium and other heavy metals there will be no fuel left. There is a small minority of scientists who believe we are misunderstanding the process, because they claim if it worked this way we would have run out of fuel by now.

There are a lot of things we don’t understand and wonder about. Some of us wonder more than others about things. This doesn’t change the fact there are a lot of mysteries out there and a lot of things we don’t understand.