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Deep in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, there are no cities or roads. The only way to get in is by boat or with a special kind of airplane that can land on the water. The foliage is so thick that you can barely see the sky when you’re underneath the trees. And the few people that live there live very different lives from people in the United States, or even people in the rest of Brazil. They can go for months or even years without ever seeing people from outside the jungle. Because they live so far from civilization, they don’t need to have jobs or money. They get what they need to eat by picking it off trees, catching it in the water, or hunting it with bows and arrows. When they need to sleep, they go to huts made of palm leaves with dirt floors and use thin tree branches as a bed.

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Did you know that our body type is determined by the genes passed onto us by our parents? These genes determine our physical traits – how we look and lots of other stuff about us. Usually your body will look like one or both of your parent’s bodies because you inherited a certain body type.

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Why are some people so much more unselfish than other people? So much more likely to help, give to charity or do things that seem to benefit society and not themselves?

Why do some kids always make their beds in the morning?

Researchers have been struggling with this kind of question for some time. The best answer so far has been that doing good gives emotional satisfaction or pleasure to the person doing good.

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What is a yawn and why do people yawn? Yawning has fascinated people for hundreds of years, and many superstitions and myths have been created over the years.

Today we know that a yawn is a reflex of inhalation and exhalation that draws more oxygen into the bloodstream. A reflex is a built-in physical reaction that people often do not have control over. A yawn is often associated with a person being tired, but this is not always the cause for a yawn. People yawn for many reasons including stress, boredom, emotion and over-work.
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Can you imagine a world of tiny humans? What if everyone were only three feet tall? The world would be a lot different. We would need tiny cars, tiny markets, smaller streets and smaller houses. A basketball player might not be any taller than 4 feet. What would that basketball court look like?

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What words do you think of when you hear “ice cream”? Does the word delicious come to mind? Perhaps cold, yummy, refreshing or sweet treat are your adjectives of choice to describe ice cream. What about headache or brain freeze? These don’t sound like pleasant descriptions of ice cream, but they are exactly what some people think of when they hear the words ice cream.

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It’s that time of year again-when the weather turns cold and we like to snuggle in front of a fireplace with a hot cup of cocoa. But, have you ever noticed that when it is cold outside sometimes the hairs on your arms stand up and you get little bumps all over. But then when you go inside the little bumps dissappear. These little bumps are called goose bumps, but do you know what is actually happening with your body when you get these bumps?

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Have you ever been playing outside with your friends when all of a sudden your nose begins to tingle and your throat begins to itch and then all of a sudden….. aaahhhhchooo! You sneeze a few more times but you feel generally OK so you continue to play with your friends. Then, a few hours later, your throat begins to feel a little scratchy and you eyes become watery and before you know it…you have a cold. You then go home and crawl into bed and prepare yourself for the three to four days of misery that you know so well.

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Have you ever had the hiccups and wondered what caused them? They are actually a really weird sound and are hard to control. Hiccups are caused by a sudden jerk in your diaphragm that causes you to breathe in air very quickly.

The diaphragm is the muscle in your chest that is located just below your lungs. When you breathe in, the air travels in your mouth and nose, through your windpipe and into your lungs. When your diaphragm jerks and you suck in air very quickly, the quick air flow causes the flap at the top of your windpipe to snap shut. This quick inflow of air and the snapping shut of the flap on your windpipe is the sound of hiccups.

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It is the weekend and you are sitting in a dark movie theatre with popcorn in one hand and a box of chocolate covered raisons in the other. You sit there for over an hour staring at the image that is projected on the large screen in front of you.

But did you know that for part of this movie you are actually sitting in a dark theatre with no image on the screen? There is a projector that is located in the back of the theatre that projects the movie that you see onto the screen. There is also a very powerful light bulb in the projector that shines on the film as it passes through the projector. When the light passes through the film the image on the film is projected onto the screen.

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What is happening in our brains when we are sleeping? Have you ever woken up and remembered strange thoughts and images that occurred during the night? You know that you actually never left your bed, however, you remember a whole activity filled with different people and places. Sometimes the things that you do and the things that you see in your dreams do not even exist in real life!

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It’s that time of year again-when the weather turns cold and we like to snuggle in front of a fireplace with a hot cup of cocoa. But, have you ever noticed that when it is cold outside sometimes the hairs on your arms stand up and you get little bumps all over. But then when you go inside the little bumps dissappear. These little bumps are called goose bumps…but do you know what is actually happening with your body when you get these bumps?

When you’re cold, your arrector muscles pull your hair up, and your blood vessels and ducts to your sweat glands get small to conserve heat. Millions of years ago, humans probably had more hair on their bodies then they do now, so their hair standing on end acted as insulation. We don’t have enough hair on our bodies to keep us warm anymore, but the little muscles at the end of each hair are still there and still work.