cells

There's a type of mustard plant, called "Holboell's rockcress" which naturally grows a dainty, light blue flower atop its narrow stem. Sometimes you'll see a Holboell's rockcress sporting a bright yellow cluster of leaves that looks suspiciously like a buttercup.

The ancient Egytians used copper to sterilize wounds and clean their drinking water. They even wrote about it in one of the oldest known medical texts, the Smith Papyrus, which is over four thousand years old.

The eyes on the wings of a butterfly can look kind of strange, but they're not looking at you, they're just a deflecting mechanism. Like a lot of butterfly species, the African satyrid butterfly's eyespots make predators more likely to attack its wings rather than the more vital parts of its body.

Science has done some amazing things, but nobody really knows if it could ever extend our life span, or eliminate aging entirely. Recently, a team of researchers from California found a way to reverse aging in several kinds of human cells.

In 2020 an interdisciplinary team of American researchers published a study on how butterflies keep their wings cool. Using a specialized infrared camera, they found that the living parts of the wings, around the wing veins, were best at radiating heat.

Outside of Greek mythology, hydras actually exist in the real world, although you can't see them without a microscope, otherwise it just looks like a slide of dirty water.

In the last few decades, scientists have begun to understand the importance of bacteria that live in and on our bodies. The accepted estimate has been around 10 times as many bacteria as human cells.