You know NOTHING about rat whiskers! You have eyes & hands to explore, but rats have an army of sensors on their face. Whiskers are a rat's superpower. Here's how rats sense what you can't:
Sensors at the tips Each whisker is like an antenna, picking up curves, pressure, and air changes. Rats sense a sly cat plotting an ambush before it pounces.
Hydraulic mechanics? You bet. At the base of each whisker is a blood sinus. When a whisker moves, the fluid pressure instantly triggers brain activity. Genius, right?
Brain barrels In the rat's brain cortex, there are "barrels," neural areas dedicated to each whisker.
Why is this cool? Rats detect stimuli, assess textures, and identify objects without touching them. A quick whisker wave gives them all the info. Superfast: rats process signals in milliseconds. While you're thinking, "What's that?", they already know if it's edible.
Bonus: if scientists tickle the right "barrel" with electricity, they feel like their whisker touched something real. It's like telepathy for sensors.
You know NOTHING about rat whiskers! You have eyes & hands to explore, but rats have an army of sensors on their face. Whiskers are a rat's superpower. Here's how rats sense what you can't:
Sensors at the tips Each whisker is like an antenna, picking up curves, pressure, and air changes. Rats sense a sly cat plotting an ambush before it pounces.
Hydraulic mechanics? You bet. At the base of each whisker is a blood sinus. When a whisker moves, the fluid pressure instantly triggers brain activity. Genius, right?
Brain barrels In the rat's brain cortex, there are "barrels," neural areas dedicated to each whisker.
Why is this cool? Rats detect stimuli, assess textures, and identify objects without touching them. A quick whisker wave gives them all the info. Superfast: rats process signals in milliseconds. While you're thinking, "What's that?", they already know if it's edible.
Bonus: if scientists tickle the right "barrel" with electricity, they feel like their whisker touched something real. It's like telepathy for sensors.
The Singapore stock market has alternated between positive and negative finishes through the last five trading days since the end of the two-day winning streak in which it had added more than a dozen points or 0.4 percent. The Straits Times Index now sits just above the 3,060-point plateau and it's likely to see a narrow trading range on Monday.
What Is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that you can buy, sell and exchange directly, without an intermediary like a bank. Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, originally described the need for “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.” Each and every Bitcoin transaction that’s ever been made exists on a public ledger accessible to everyone, making transactions hard to reverse and difficult to fake. That’s by design: Core to their decentralized nature, Bitcoins aren’t backed by the government or any issuing institution, and there’s nothing to guarantee their value besides the proof baked in the heart of the system. “The reason why it’s worth money is simply because we, as people, decided it has value—same as gold,” says Anton Mozgovoy, co-founder & CEO of digital financial service company Holyheld.
