What is mistletoe? Detailed answer

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What is mistletoe? Detailed answer

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What is mistletoe?

In millions of homes in Europe and in the United States for Christmas, a mistletoe is hung out. According to the existing custom, if a girl is under a mistletoe, then a man can kiss her.

Interestingly, the use of mistletoe on holidays and solemn occasions dates back to antiquity. When the Romans conquered Britain and Gaul (modern France), they met there with a people called the Celts. The Celts were strictly organized under the leadership of the priests, who they called druids.

The Druids taught that the human soul is immortal. Many of their rites were associated with the deification of trees, and, in their opinion, everything that grows on a tree is a gift from heaven. Among the most sacred of these "gifts" was mistletoe. The Druids cut the mistletoe with a golden knife and hung it over the entrance to the dwelling to protect themselves from evil spirits. In their opinion, only happiness could pass under the mistletoe. Here you should look for the beginning of the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe!

Among the Scandinavians, mistletoe was also considered a symbol of good luck. They collected it during the winter holidays, and each family received a twig to hang over the entrance to their house. It was believed that this protects the family from evil spirits. One of the reasons mistletoe has come to be considered sacred is that it does not have roots in the ground. It grows on the branches of other trees. The young mistletoe, just emerging from the seed, sprouts small sprouts that pierce the bark of the branch on which the seed has fallen.

After they make their way through the bark and reach the tree itself, they grow and thus absorb some of the moisture and nutrients that the tree contains. These substances and moisture feed the young mistletoe, which then grows like most other plants. Thus, you see that there is no direct connection between the mistletoe and the soil, and the mistletoe does not need it!

Sometimes mistletoe grows so violently that it kills the tree to which it owes its life. Mistletoe grows on oaks and other trees in many places in Europe and the USA. The berries that grow on it are loved by birds. When they peck at these berries, the sticky seeds stick to their beaks. Trying to remove them, the birds rub their beaks against other trees and thus spread the seeds!

Author: Likum A.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Have diamonds always been considered precious?

As far as can be judged from the sources, the first people engaged in the search for diamonds appeared in India. Diamond mining started there over 2500 years ago!

Diamonds have been highly valued from the very beginning. Until the fifteenth century, they were still so rare that only kings and queens could own them. And only in 1430 did the custom appear to wear diamonds as jewelry. Agnes Sorel, a court lady from France, was the first to do this, and from here the fashion spread throughout Europe.

The result was a frenetic diamond mining in India that lasted over 300 years. In the end, this source dried up, but, fortunately, diamonds were found in another part of the world - in Brazil, in 1725. The jungle and tropical climate made it very difficult to work, but nevertheless, for over 160 years, Brazil was the main source of diamonds in the world.

Currently, the center of diamond mining is South Africa, where large deposits of diamonds were found by accident in 1867. A boy from a poor farming family found a beautiful pebble, which was bought by a cunning neighbor who immediately recognized the precious diamond. When he sold it in turn, prospectors of all ages and nationalities came to the site. Within a year, three large diamond deposits were discovered here, and the city of Kimberley, the center of a huge diamond empire, appeared.

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Surprise encourages exploration 09.04.2015

Philosophers say that knowledge of the world begins with wonder. Does this mean, speaking in a more mundane language, that the effectiveness of learning will be higher if the objects around us begin to behave differently than they should? Indeed, it is, and surprise helps to learn and explore the world, starting from a very early age, when a person has not yet mastered speech.

Psychologists from Johns Hopkins University conducted several experiments with 11-month-old children in which children had to observe the behavior of ordinary toys (balls, cars, etc.). But only in one case, the behavior of objects was consistent with the usual physics, and in the other, objects suddenly began to behave in a completely incomprehensible way. For example, a toy car rolling down a toy hill towards some kind of obstacle did not rest against it, but passed through.

In an article in Science, the authors write that when faced with an unusual situation, children better remembered the properties of the object. That is, a car that just drove down a hill was less lingering in memory than a car that went through a wall. Moreover, the strange behavior of the object encouraged the children to actively explore it: for example, they began to beat the same typewriter on the table, as if testing its strength and hardness. If the object suddenly hung in the air, instead of falling, as it should be, then the child also began to test it, dropping it from a height.

It can be said that the children behaved like scientists, trying to reproduce the strange properties of the object that they had observed before. And even new toys that the child had not yet seen aroused less interest than an incomprehensible situation.

It is known that a person from an early age has a certain minimum of necessary knowledge about the world around him. So, a few years ago, an article was published in the journal WIREs Cognitive Science, which stated that babies can operate with elementary physics. For example, two-month-old babies understand that an unsecured object can fall, and an object that has disappeared from view still continues to exist somewhere; by five months, they have an understanding of the differences between solids and loose or fluid substances; and ten-month-olds are aware of the difference between "less" and "more" (although "less" and "more" are categories more logical-mathematical than physical). It is obvious that such knowledge does not remain in the head as a passive load, but is actively used - what the child sees around him, he checks with the usual rules.

It is also surprising that surprise (sorry for the tautology) encourages even such young children, who are not yet a year old and who have not yet learned to speak, to actively explore the world around them. One can only regret that in many adults this property of the psyche disappears somewhere without a trace.

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