Lisa Lindahl, Hinda Miller and Polly Smith were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for creating the modern sports bra. Their prototype was made by sewing two jockstraps togethers.
The Mary Poppins song “A Spoonful of Sugar (Helps the Medicine Go Down)” was inspired by the polio vaccine; the songwriter was inspired when his son received a dose via sugar cube.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute and colleagues from several other institutions have offered the first proof showing that flying birds can sleep with either one half of their brains active, or with both hemispheres shut down at the same time. Remarkably, these birds can retain their navigational ability while in REM sleep. In other words, they can literally fly with their eyes closed.
This technique of sleeping is called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS), which allows one half of the brain to enter into deep sleep while the eye corresponding to this half is closed and the other eye remains open. Unihemispheric sleep allows an animal to get some rest, while also allowing it to maintain awareness of its surroundings. In fact, dolphins also use this technique to avoid drowning while they rest.
