During the so-called dark days, a period in my life when life consisted of trudging the treacherous pages of A-Levels text books, I was never really interested with whatever I was studying most of the time. But there were some “aha!” moments that genuinely probed my mind out of it’s semi-asleep state and I didn’t need conscious effort to lift my eyelids to read the next sentence.
I’m sure you had instances as a child where you wonder why something happens but never really bothered to look up for the answer from the almighty Google.
Warning, readers’ discretion is advised for those that are taking or have already taken A-Levels as some of the sentences that lead up might cause post traumatic stress, due to the almost straight up content from the Biology textbook. And yes, I’m that free.
1. Leaves change colour during fall season because the plant withdraws useful substances from the leaves by breaking down pigments in the leaves. Now perhaps this may be regarded as general knowledge and I’m a severe douchebag to not know it but in my defense, there’s no autumn in Malaysia. Since there are yellow leaves are out of sight, naturally they are out of mind too.
2. When you rub your eyes when they are shut, you might see streaks of light because your retinas have receptors for light and the brain interprets another stimulus, such as pressure in this case, as light. I must say upon learning about this, I felt immensely satisfied as I can recall at least a few times my sister and I wondered aloud why we see them light patterns. Fascinating.
3. Colour is an invention of the brain. Okay this doesn’t actually solve any mystery but I somehow find this fact very interesting. It’s pretty cool how the brain invents something constantly without conscious effort.
4. This isn’t exactly a mystery, more of a uhm… revelation. And the revelation is that it’s really not easy to be born normal or have a normal baby. There’s actually countless of things that could go wrong during the formation of a new organism. Mutations, chances of the problematic chromosome being passed on etc. Makes me feel so grateful to be born healthy and kinda afraid to have a child of my own.
5. To be accurate, I first learnt about this in SPM (O-Levels equivalent), A-Levels is merely a revision. It’s the workings and differences between vacciness and antisera. Vaccines make use of a weakened or harmless-version of organism that caused the particular disease to induce immune response from the body to gain immunity. Antiserum contains antibodies that provides resistance immediately. There’s something very awesome about injecting germs(antigens) into your body to fight the disease that was caused by the very same antigen in the first place.
Okay I’m done rummaging my Biology textbook.
Twirling Glyphs 