Why does your mouth feel cold after eating a mint?

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https://theconversation.com/why-menthol-chills-your-mouth-when-its-not-actually-cold-33115 Try putting an ice-cube in your mouth. The insides of your mouth and tongue instantly turn numb. Hold it in still and you will feel pain. Now try sucking on peppermint. The mint itself is at room temperature, but your mouth instantly feels cold and numb. How did it do that? The answer is […]

Our Bodies’ Best Buddies: What is the human microbiome and we need to know about it

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Our Bodies’ Best Buddies Elisabeth M Bik, Stanford University Note: this article was written for the September 2014 issue of the San Francisco Medical Society magazine.  Antony van Leeuwenhoek probably could not believe his eyes. It was 1683, and the Dutch scientist had put some tooth scrapings from his own mouth under the primitive microscope that he had […]

A Brief History of the Universe

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The Science Geek

This post covers a brief history of the Universe from the Big Bang until the the present day. This, as I am sure you’ll agree, is a pretty big topic so I can only give a outline of some of the key events and when we believed they happened. This post is the second in my series about cosmology, which is the study of the origin and evolution of the Universe as a whole. To view my previous post click here.

Before I start talking about the history of the Universe I first need to give a brief overview of atoms, which are the building blocks of all matter – with a notable exception which I will explain below.

What are atoms ? 

An atom consists of a nucleus, which has a positive electric charge, surrounded by negatively charged electrons. Atoms are very small, typically around 0.0001 microns in diameter (a micron is a…

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