10 Poisonus Foods We Love to Eat

Everyday we chow down on food produced from plants that carry deadly poisons. Most of the time we don’t need to be concerned with this as the mass production of fruit and vegetables ensures that we are usually safe, but from time to time people accidentally kill themselves by unwittingly eating the wrong part of a plant. In order to ensure that this never happens to you, I have put together a list of the most commonly seen poisons that we come in to contact with in our kitchens.

 

Flexible Silicon Solar Cells Use 99% Less Material

Researchers have found a way to make flexible silicon solar cells using only 1 percent of the material used in conventional solar cells.
The new material, reported on Sunday in Nature Materials, uses conventional silicon configured into micron-sized wires (a micron is one-millionth of a meter) instead of brittle wafers and encases them in a flexible polymer that can be rolled or bent.
Solar cells, which convert solar energy into electricity, are in high demand because of higher oil prices and concerns over climate change.

Backpack Hydroelectric Plant Gives You 500 Watts on the Move

A human-portable hydroelectric generator that weighs about 30 pounds and generates 500 watts of power may soon be a new option for off-grid power. Developed by Bourne Energy of Mailbu, California, the Backpack Power Plant can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than 4 feet.
The company showed off its more-rugged, militarized version of the Backpack Power Plant at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco last week. Bourne Energy CEO Chris Catlin estimates the system will cost $3,000 after it goes into production.

Human body contains enough sulphur to kill all fleas on one dog

Each lymphocyte circulating in the lymph of the human blood travels through all blood and lymph vessels of the body from 10 to 20 times during a day. A lymphocyte covers the distance of 100 and more kilometers during its life cycle.

Each leg of a spider has a certain area made of thinnest hairs. Each of those hairs is made of tens of thousands of thinner bristles that interact with the surface on the molecular level with the help of Van der Waals forces. The power of these intermolecular forces is very weak, and they can hardly be noticed against the background of other forces. However, the adhesive power of hundreds of thousands of bristles is rather large. About 600,000 hairs allow a spider to sit on the ceiling and bear the weight which exceeds the weight of a spider 170 times.

The osmotic pressure inside bacteria may reach four kilograms per a square centimeter, which is fives times as much as the atmospheric pressure.

A snowflake contains about 10x18 water molecules.

A shark is capable of sensing one gram of blood dissolved in 600,000 liters of water at the distance of 500 meters.

Each square inch of the human body contains 32 million bacteria.

About 50,000 of your body cells will die and will be replaced with new cells while you are reading this sentence.

One square inch of human skin contains: 4 yards of nerve fibers, 1300 nerve cells, 100 sweat glands, 3 million cells, and 3 yards of blood vessels.

The average human body contains enough: sulphur to kill all fleas on an average dog; carbon to make 900 pencils; potassium to fire a toy cannon; Fat to make 7 bars of soap; phosphorus to make 2,200 matchheads; and enough water to fill a ten-gallon tank.

The tooth is the only part of the human body that does not regenerate.

Only one man would be enough to repopulate the whole plane in six months because a man’s testicles produce 10 million new sperm cells every day.

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Cancer to remain incurable even in 100 years

The World Health Organization published the forecast of most common reasons of mortality in 2030. The picture of the possible future was based on the data of present-date causes of death supplemented with certain expectations. There are three most common reasons of mortality nowadays in the world: oncological diseases, ischemic heart disease and stroke.

The WHO believes that the three most common killers will keep and even improve their leading positions during the next coming decades. Strangely enough, cancer will be killing more people despite the development of modern medicine: the people, who would die of other diseases before, would live up to cancerous diseases. Heart attacks and strokes will cause many deaths among elderly people due to scientific achievements in medicine too.

The number of deaths in car accidents will be growing in the future. The technical development of the human civilization has always been ahead of the evolution of culture.

The global death rate may also increase in the event people decide to refuse from vaccinations. There were such outbursts before, for example in 1873-1874 in Stockholm, when many declined vaccination for religious reasons and fell victims to smallpox. The epidemic of smallpox in the Swedish capital ended only as a result of massive vaccination. Outbursts of whooping cough in Britain during the 1970s, measles in Holland, Ireland, Nigeria and the USA during the 2000s occurred for the same reason.

Acute respiratory infections, TB, malaria and child labor death rates will decrease. The forecast of the World Health Organization includes the countries of the golden billion and the third world states, where the above-mentioned death rate is especially high. The decrease of the overall death rate in Africa and South-East Asia will depend on the state of the world economy. If mankind goes through a decade of the economic recession, similar to the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the humanitarian missions in developing states will not be able to expand their activities.

AIDS as a cause of death will be getting more frequent before 2015. The AIDS-related death rate will start to decrease afterwards. Specialists probably pin their hopes on the invention of the anti-AIDS vaccine. No one knows if the vaccine is ever going to become possible due to frequent mutations and changes of the nature of the virus. However, the death rate is possible to decline. Even modern therapy guarantees a considerable level of survival for HIV-positive individuals.

Some other scientists, for example, Bryan Sykes of Oxford University, wrote in his book, “Adam’s Curse”, that men would disappear in the course of the human evolution. The scientist believes that the Y-chromosome, which is responsible for the male sex, will eventually disappear due to numerous defects. Men may become extinct in about 125,000 years, Sykes believes.

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