Look out for the Tiger Shark!

Thanks to Braden for sending this to me. Gave me a good laugh.

Why'd the chicken cross the road? Cause it saw the light was green

• Color receptor organization in the retina chickens exceeds that of mammals and most other retinas observed in nature.
• But why is that? One explanation:
• Millions of years ago, during the evolution of birds and mammals, our ancestors were primarily nocturnal, adapting night-vision receptors called rods for survival from the threat of larger predators.
• Birds on the other hand, widely believed to be descendants of dinosaurs, were able to survive during the daytime and further develop their light-sensing receptors called cones.
• Humans have retina cones sensitive only to red, blue, and green wavelengths.
• Birds share these and have other receptors to detect violet and ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths, and another specialized receptor believed to detect motion.
• Relevance:
• Could lead to new understandings of inherent problems in human eyes and ideas on how to fix them.

http://www.physorg.com/news185539169.html

Want to get smarter? Then take a nap

• A midday nap could refresh the mind and actually make you smarter.
• A simple experiment showed that young adults who took a nap in the early afternoon after a rigorous study session improved their learning capacity in the early evening during another study sesh compared to those who didn’t nap and got worse at learning.
• "It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact emails, you're not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder," said Matthew Walker, assistant professor of psychology and lead investigator at UC Berkeley.
• Many would argue that napping for such a short period of time doesn’t actually help because you never enter REM sleep.
• However, this study backs the notion that Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which occurs after deep sleep (non-REM) but before the dream state (REM), is vital for memory capacity.
• After all, we spend 50% of the night in this Stage 2 transition stage so it makes perfect sense that it plays a crucial role in a healthy mindset.

http://www.physorg.com/news185948338.html