What Color Eyes Would Your Children Have?

           What Color Eyes Would Your Children Have? is an interactive eye color calculator which allows visitors to explore and learn about genetic inheritance. Using this online exhibit visitors can see the probabilities of their children's eye color or that of their parent's children. In addition, adjustments for populations that have predominantly brown or green eyes can be made.
          Working closely with The Tech Museum of Innovation, Ideum designed and developed this interactive application as part of the Understanding Genetics online exhibition. The program was developed using Macromedia Flash.

The Starchild Skull

The Starchild skull is an abnormal human skull allegedly found in Mexico. It is primarily notable due to claims by paranormal researchers that it is the product of extraterrestrial-human breeding. DNA recovered from the skull establishes it as human.

Introduction

        In the 1930's, in a small rural village 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico, at the back of a mine tunnel, two mysterious remains were found: a complete human skeleton and a smaller, malformed skeleton
         In late February of 1999, Lloyd Pye was first shown the Starchild skull by its owners. Nameless then, it was a highly anomalous skull. He initially felt it would prove to be a rare genetic deformity of some kind. This skull’s symmetry was astonishing, even more so than the average human. In fact, all of its bones—most of which had human counterparts—were beautifully shaped. But shaped like what? Solving many questions that this unusual skull presented became his challenge. 

Skull Discovery

Sixty to seventy years ago an American girl of Mexican heritage in her late teens (15 to 18) was taken by her parents to visit relatives living in a small rural village 100 miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. The girl was forbidden to enter any of the area's numerous caves and mine tunnels, but like most teenagers, she went exploring. At the back of a mine tunnel she found a complete human skeleton lying on the ground's surface. Beside it, sticking up out of the ground, was a malformed skeletal hand entwined in one of the human skeleton's upper arms. The girl proceeded to scrape the dirt off a shallow grave to reveal a buried skeleton smaller than the human one and also malformed. She did not specify the type or degree of any of the "malformations."

Why Some Longtime Couples Look Alike

             Among the raft of books, articles, jokes, rom­antic comedies, self-help guides and other writings discussing marriage, some familiar ideas often crop up. Few appear more often than the idea that many old couples look alike. You've probably seen it before - two elderly people walking hand in hand down the street or sitting at a café, resembling each other so strongly that they could be siblings.

• Forget about opposites attracting. We like people who look like us, because they tend to have personalities similar to our own. And, a new study suggests, the longer we are with someone, the more similarities in appearance grow.

• Researchers set out to investigate why couples often tend to resemble one another. They asked 11 male and 11 female participants to judge the age, attractiveness and personality traits of 160 real-life married couples. Photographs of husbands and wives were viewed separately, so the participants didn't know who was married to whom.

The test participants rated men and woman who were actual couples as looking alike and having similar personalities. Also, the longer the couples had been together, the greater the perceived similarities.
The researchers speculate that the sharing of experiences might affect how couples look.