The researchers from Cambridge have shown that you could create human eggs and sperm cells from the stem cells of two adults. From five different donors they used the stem cell lines of embryos and skin cells. And they used the skin cells of ten different donors and were able to successfully create new germ-cells from all of them. They also had another happy discovery during the research. The epigenetic mutations, the cell mistakes that occur with age, that happen in the germ cells are removed.(source)
12 This is hydrophobic sand that doesn’t get wet.
Hydrophobic sand, also known as magic sand, is sand coated with a hydrophobic compound called trimethylsilanol. It causes the sand to clump together and form cylinders to decrease the surface area when in contact with water. The sand was originally developed to trap oil spills at the shores, though the idea was abandoned because it was too expensive at large scale.(source)
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13 The combined length of the DNA in your body is more than twice the diameter of the solar system.
Being a double helical structure DNA takes up quite less space than it would if it were stretched out. The DNA is organized into the long structures of 46 chromosomes. Many coils of these DNA, in fact 3 billion base pairs, are arranged to fit in each cell in as less as 6 microns of space. Stretching the DNA from one cell gives you a length of about 2 meters and stretching all the DNA in your body would be about twice the diameter of the solar system.(source)
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14 Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to take atomic-scale pictures of a molecule before and after a chemical reaction. The images looked EXACTLY like the classic molecular structure diagrams shown in text books.
The pictures were taken using a state-of-the-art atomic force microscope. These were the before and after pictures of a chemical reaction clearly depicting not just the atoms, but also the bonds between them and how their molecular structure changes during a reaction. Also, the structure from the pictures are exactly as the classic molecular structure diagrams which until now scientists could only infer from spectroscopic analysis.(source)
15 This is what a single drop of the viper’s venom can do to blood.
The venom of Russell’s viper has agents that can coagulate blood by activating factor V and factor X that converts prothrombin to thrombin. This solidification is why the venom is very efficient at inducing thrombosis, obstruction of blood supply by blocking the blood vessels, in the victims. Because of its coagulating capability, a diluted form of the venom is used in many hospitals for in vitro blood clotting tests. The venom is also given to horses or sheep in very small quantities to immunize and extract the resulting venom neutralizing antibodies from them to prepare antivenom.(1, 2, 3)
