The prefrontal lobotomy was invented by Portuguese surgeon Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (1874-1955) for patients with incurable mental disturbances. Moniz, who also served as the foreign minister of Portugal from 1918 to 1919, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1949.
Astronomers once believed that a planet called Vulcan existed between the planet Mercury and the sun. Its existence, first proposed by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier in 1845, was hypothesized to explain a discrepancy in Mercury’s orbit. Vulcan was even reported to have been observed once, but the observation was never confirmed. Einstein’s general…
Charles Darwin did not come up with the phrase survival of the fittest. The British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase in Principles of Biology (1864-1867) as a way of describing Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Yes. There are three gluteus muscles, the large, fleshy muscles of the buttocks that connect the hipbone (the pelvic girdle) and the thighbone (the femur). The gluteus maximus is the muscle at the surface of the buttocks, below which is the gluteus medius. The gluteus minimus is below that.
A human embryo has its first heartbeat at the age of three weeks, when the heart of the embryo looks like a tube. As it begins to beat, it starts the blood circulating through the few blood vessels that have formed around it.
A common ingredient in many laundry detergents, optical bleaches (“fabric brighteners”) act by reflecting blue light. The blue light combines with the yellow discoloration in a fabric to produce white light that makes the fabric seem brighter.