Intense

By your lovely McBrown

FLOATERS

Floaters are actually shadows cast by objects suspended in the clear, gel-like substance that makes up the majority of the eye’s interior.. This substance is called vitreous and helps to maintain the eye’s round shape.

DYSLEXIA

Dyslexia, also referred to as “specitic reading disability,” predominantly affects a person’s ability to read and write Dyslexics have difficulty connecting visual symbols (i.e., letters) with their corresponding sounds.

THE LUDDITES

The term Luddite is used to refer to a person who is opposed to new technology. The word derives from the name Ned Ludd, a man who may or may not have actually existed.

HISTORY OF FIRE FIGHTING

Fire fighting became a competitive business, as companies fought to be the first to arrive at a scene to access the water pipes. After a series of fires destroyed parts of London, fire-fighting companies were forced to reconsider their intentions.

THE CT SCANNER

The computed tomography scanner, better known as the CT scanner, was originally designed to provide cross-sectional images of the brain. Tho word tomography comes from the Greek word tomos, meaning “section,” and graphia, meaning “picture.”

19TH CENTURY PAPERBACK

From the 1830s to 1850s, penny bloods featured tales of gore that often depicted the upper class as corrupt. One of the most beloved characters from the penny blood serials was Sweeney Todd.

ODONATA

Odonata is the order of insects that includes dragonflies and damselflies. To the human eye, their shining colors and delicate-looking wings make them beautiful creatures to behold.

CHOCOLATE

The scientific name for the cacao plant is Theobroma, which means “food of the gods.” Native to the Amazon and Orinoco River basins, it requires a humid climate and regular rainfall.

THE GULF STREAM AND GLOBAL WARMING

This life-giving Gulf Stream is warm, salty water, which travels along the surface of the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean, along the east coast of the United States, and then veers to ward Europe.

THE INTELLIGENCE OF CORVIDS

There is a growing body of evidence that many corvids, a group of bird species that includes crows, jays, rooks, ravens, and magpies, are also tool makers, and that they show many other signs of possessing high intelligence.

CANDLE MAKING IN COLONIAL AMERICA

Paraffin, originally produced by plants that lived 100 to 700 million years ago to protect their leaves, is inert and remains suspended in the decayed vegetable matter that eventually becomes crude oil.

CAFFEINE

Caffeine is probably the most widely used drug in the world. Humans have been consuming caffeine for hundreds of years, primarily in the form of coffee, tea and cocoa.

COSMIC BLACKHOLES

It was 228 years before anyone was able to offer a refinement of Newton’s law that accounted for the shape of Mercury’s orbit. In 1915, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published.

ANIMAL CAMOUFLAGE

The theory of natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin almost 150 years ago, hypothesizes that organisms with traits that give them a survival advantage tend to live longer and produce more offsprings.

CATASTROPHE THEORIES

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the popular theory among Earth scientists was that a number of major catastrophes had taken place over a relatively short period of time to give Earth its shape.