The inability to identify familiar people by their faces is called prosopagnosia. The term ‘prosopagnosia’ is derived from two Greek words prosopon meaning ‘face’ and agnosia meaning ‘not knowing’. This condition occurs when the brain is unable to assign a set of facial features to an identity. The person might, however, be able to identify objects….
Your friend wrinkles her face with disgust while tasting some food, and seeing her, you too feel the same disgust. Such feeling often occurs to us when we can immediately and instinctively understand other people’s experiences and feel as if we too are going through the same. This phenomenon occurs due to the presence of…
The deadly Ebola virus was first reported in Zaire in 1978. It spreads through the blood and causes haemorrhage in all organs. Internal bleeding results in shock and death. There are no drugs or vaccines against this disease. Fatality rates of the Ebola virus disease have varied from 20 to 90 per cent in the…
During fertilization of the egg by the sperm, the DNA of the sperm is injected into the egg. Both the sperm and the egg have a single set of chromosomes each, but the fertilized egg receives the DNA from the sperm and comes to possess both the sets of chromosomes. This fertilized egg cell stays…
Progeria is derived from the Greek words pro meaning before and geria meaning old age. It is technically called the Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. It is a disease that causes a person to age faster than the norm. People with progeria do not survive beyond their teens. One in eight million people has this disease.
Our skin is made of many layers of cells. The outer layer is flaky and the inner layers have structure giving and nourishing elements. The outer skin gets dry or damaged with time and so it gets shed. An average person sheds about 30,000 cells every minute and about 18 kilograms of skin in his…
