Our language and literature are so full of metaphors that we rarely notice them–but our BRAIN does. For instance, when a character’s personality is described as "rough" or "smooth," we can relate to what this means because we’ve felt surfaces like this in the past. It turns out that the parietal operculum, the part of the brain that senses texture through touch, is activated whenever we read or hear a sensual metaphor.
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A system of planets has been discovered in the constellation Cygnus orbiting a double star. It was not thought that this was possible, and planetary scientists are saying that it will lead to a complete revision of our understanding of how planets are formed. It means that they may be even more numerous than we thought, making life all but inevitable elsewhere in the universe.
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An enormous magma dome is growing under the Greek Island of Santorini, while pressures are building inside Japan’s Mt. Fuji. And things aren’t so quiet right here in the US either!
A new survey suggests that the chamber of molten rock beneath Santorini’s volcano expanded 30-40 MILLION cubic feet between January 2011 and April 2012. Santorini had its last major eruption 3,600 years ago, burying the islands of Santorini under tons of pumice. The amount of molten rock that has arrived beneath Santorini in the past year is the equivalent of about 10-20 years growth of the volcano.
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We catch diseases from animals (and they catch them from us), but this also means we sometimes share the same physical ailments.
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