Thursday 28 December 2006

Pulled Tongues

Pulled Tongues


I took this picture down at my house compound. I actually took tens of this photo to try and pick the best from them. I used the zoom technique. Basically, zooming while the picture is taken. Asking one of the resident what is the name of the flower did not return any answer. The title was given due to the curly tips of the petals and with the zoom technique, it made it look stretched.



The tongue is the large bundle of skeletal muscles on the floor of the mouth that manipulates food for chewing and swallowing, (deglutition). It is the primary organ of taste. Much of the surface of the tongue is covered in taste buds. The tongue with its wide variety of possible movements assists in forming the sounds of speech. It is sensitive and kept moist by saliva, richly supplied with nerves and blood vessels to help it be moved.

The act of tongue rolling describes one's ability to roll the tongue into a "hollow tube". The ability to roll the tongue has been generally believed to depend on genetic inheritance. Tongue rolling was believed to be a dominant trait with simple Mendelian inheritance, and is still commonly taught in high school and introductory biology courses. It provided a simple experiment to demonstrate inheritance.

There is little laboratory evidence, though, for the common belief that tongue rolling is heritable and dominant. A 1975 twin study found that identical twins (who share all of their genes) were no more likely than fraternal twins (who share an average of half) to both have the same phenotype for tongue rolling.

  • Tung was also the original Webster spelling of tongue
  • Stephen Taylor holds the world record for the world's longest tongue. It measures 9.5 centimeters from the tip to the center of his closed top lip. Annika Irmler holds the record for longest female tongue, at 7 centimeters.
(courtesy of wikipedia.com)

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