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The toughest animal on earth: Tardigrade

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TARDIGRADE  Tardigrades, often called water bears or moss piglets, are near-microscopic animals with long, plump bodies and scrunched-up heads. They have eight legs, and hands with four to eight claws on each. While strangely cute, these tiny animals are almost indestructible and can even survive in outer space. Tardigrade is a phylum, a high-level scientific category of animal. (Humans belong in the Chordate phylum — animals with spinal cords.) There are over 1,000 known species within Tardigrade, according to  Integrated Taxonomic Information System  (ITIS). SIZE These creatures look like the hookah-smoking caterpillar from "Alice in Wonderland." They can range from 0.05 millimeters to 1.2 mm (0.002 to 0.05 inches) long, but they usually don't get any bigger than 1 mm (0.04 inches) long. Habitat Water bears can live just about anywhere. They prefer to live in sediment at the bottom of a lake, on moist pieces of moss or other wet enviro...

YANNY or LAUREL! What is it all about?

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An audiologist has an explanation for why everyone on the internet can’t stop asking:  “ Yanny” or “Laurel” ?  There was a  practical test done where a group of people were told to listen an audio clip. It was observed that many of them herd the word "YANNY" whereas many herd "LAUREL". “This all comes down to the brain,” says Dr. Kevin Franck, director of audiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. “The fact that brains go in one way and some brains go in the other means that we’re all just wired a bit differently based on our experiences.” So the question is why does that happen? What makes it so wierd ? “There’s just enough ambiguity in this fairly low-quality recording that [some] people are hearing it one way and some people are hearing it another,” Brad Story, the associate department head of speech, language, and hearing sciences at Arizona State University, told me. Humans typically pay attention to three different frequencies when they’re ...