What causes malaria? It is caused by a parasite of the Plasmodium group and it is spread through the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito. The parasite is said to be from a group because there are five different parasites. They are called Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium Malariae, Plasmodium ovale, and Plasmodium knowlesi. The […]
#977 What causes malaria? Read More »
Can insects fly in the rain? They pretty much all can, but many of them choose not to. Some do fly during the rain. It depends on their size, the temperature, and their ability to resist water. Interestingly, larger insects have more need to hide than smaller insects do. When the day is warm, insects
#976 Can insects fly in the rain? Read More »
Were gunslingers real? There were people in the Wild West who were employed to shoot people, or who did it for other reasons, but they weren’t called gunslingers. That term didn’t come into existence until 1920. The image we have of gunslingers is pretty much entirely a myth that we can thank the Spaghetti Westerns
#975 Were gunslingers real? Read More »
What happened to the Donner Party? They got stuck on the Sierra Nevada mountain pass while migrating to California and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. The events that they are famous for happened in the winter of 1846 to 1847, but they started to migrate in the spring of 1846. The Donner party
#974 What happened to the Donner Party? Read More »
Which came first, the orange fruit of the color orange? The fruit came first. Oranges were first called oranges in the 13th century. The word orange was first used as a color in 1502. Oranges are not just one fruit. There are over 400 different types of orange around the world, and they all have
#973 Which came first, the orange fruit or the color orange? Read More »
What is the biggest plant in the world? The Posidonia australis in Shark Bay, Australia. It is 200 square kilometers, which is 23 square kilometers larger than the city of Washington DC. It is not just the largest plant in the world, it is the largest organism as well. Researchers sampled it in many different
#972 What is the biggest plant in the world? Read More »
What do tonsils do? The tonsils contain a lot of white blood cells and they are one of the body’s first lines of defense against infection. Firstly, do you know where your tonsils are? For the whole of my life, I thought the thing hanging down at the back of my throat, just behind the
#971 What do tonsils do? Read More »
What causes dyslexia? It is caused by a difference in the brain parts that process reading, but nobody knows exactly what causes that difference. As an aside, there is a common joke that the word for people who cannot read or spell very easily, dyslexia, is one of the hardest words to read or spell.
#970 What causes dyslexia? Read More »
Why do prices always go up? They go up because the value of our money decreases. If you go online, you can find inflation calculators for most currencies. For some countries, those currencies no longer exist. If you look at any country that has a currency with a history, even if that is only a
#969 Why do prices always go up? Read More »
Did dinosaurs really have feathers? A lot did, but, then again, there were a lot that didn’t. And they were more a kind of fluff than the feathers that we see on birds today. The idea that dinosaurs might have had feathers was first put forward in 1876. A British biologist called Thomas Huxley realized
#968 Did dinosaurs really have feathers? Read More »
