A bat’s tongue, as she says in the video, is a phenomenally strange work of nature. It’s just a long tongue, there’s no tube inside of it. And still, it manages to somehow put it inside a long jar full of honey and slurp in the honey water. How does it do it? Well, scientists do not seem to have understood it yet, but it looks like there is some sort of capillary action going on here, due to the special grooves on the tongue of this bat.
Your brain has no pain receptors. The only nine pain sensitive areas around the brain like cranium, muscles, nerves, arteries and veins, subcutaneous tissues, eyes, ears, sinuses and mucous membranes. That means when you have an headache, it comes from one of these nine areas, and not the brain. It has no specific reason and can originate from anything like fatigue and sleep deprivation, stress, the effects of medications and recreational drugs, viral infections and common colds, head injury, rapid ingestion of a very cold food or beverage, dental or sinus issues, and many more.
The velvet ant is know by that name because of the dense hair they have on their bodies. Some of them have black and white hair, those are popularly known as panda ants. They have extremely powerful stings and are also called as cow killer ants.
Although so much about them seems like that of ants, these actually aren’t ants at all. With an unusually tough exoskeleton, these are actually a specie of wasps known as Mutillidae. The females of this variety have no wings and that’s the reason they look like ants.
Your toothbrush is full of microorganisms. But that doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, right? Because not all, in fact most of them are not dangerous.
Here’s the twist. There are so many bacteria in your toothbrush, about 10 million, which makes it highly likely that E. coli might be present among them. Especially if you keep your brush in the bathroom which has a toilet, it has more bacteria than there would have been if you had kept it out of your bathroom. Thankfully, mine always stays outside the bathroom.
When you flush, microorganisms turn into aerosol and get sprayed to everything that is in 5 to 6 feet. So, if you have your toothbrush in about 5-6 feet from the toilet, well you must consider putting it somewhere else. You don’t want to increase your chances of picking up E. coli this way.
If you’ve been reading awesci for some time, you probably know how fascinated I am about these creatures. I’ve sung songs, not quite literally, in their praise time and again and again. Here’s a nice video refresher containing more of it, something I couldn’t resist sharing.
Some lizards like Iguanas and bearded dragons have an eye in the back of their heads. This is almost like a third eye and is called the parietal eye. However, despite being called an eye, it actually isn’t an eye in the traditional sense because unlike a normal eye, this doesn’t let the lizard see images.
The eye, although still mostly a mystery, has two main purposes. It is basically a photosensory organ, or a biological photodetector which is used by iguanas to detect light and dark. Probably, just that.
The eye helps them sense if it is dark or bright for thermoregulation. Also, since it is in the back of their heads, it can help them detect a predator coming towards them from the back by detecting dark shadows.
Igg girl reports that her iguana seems to duck when she takes it in the car and they enter a tunnel. A defensive mechanism. Also, it’s not unheard of pet iguanas getting scared when you swoop down on them to pick them up.
Celia was the last Pyrenean ibex – one of the four subspecies of the Spanish ibex or Iberian wild goat, a species that is endemic to the Iberian Peninsula. She died from a fallen tree on January 6th 2000. A year before she died, in National Ordesa Park in Huesca, Spain, scientists had thought forward and captured tissues from her ear, for a potential cloning in the future.
Although it was known that a cloned Ibex would have a shortened lifespan due to the aged DNA and shortened telomeres, they did not know that this one would live for only 7 minutes. Also, had it even survived, there wouldn’t have been a pure Pyrenean ibex male which could have made the sub-species un-extinct for a longer time.
After having received a green flag from the Spanish government, Advanced Cell Technology, Inc in collaboration with other scientific partners went ahead to try to use nuclear transfer cloning technology to clone the ibex. 285 embryos were reconstructed and transferred to several domestic goat surrogate mothers. Most of the attempts failed. However, one succeeded and one new pyrenean ibex was born in the year 2003. The world’s only!
Sadly, it survived for only 7 minutes because of a defect in its lungs. This was the first attempt to revive an extinct subspecies and it was successful, to some extent.
Katrina, the 5th hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. It destroyed everything in its way, except hundreds of those oak trees which bore the full brunt of it. What made these trees survive such a massive storm has revealed to us that these trees are like whole living blueprints of how to survive hurricanes – inspiring hurricane resistant houses.
The trunks can flex in the wind, their branches flex and their leaves spiral into a Fibonacci sequence in the wind so as to bear the minimum damage. The whole family of oaks nearby have an underground connection which makes their foundation really networked and solid.
We sure have a lot to learn from nature.
People voluntarily donate their own bodies and the bodies of their family members to science all the time, in a hope of ultimate service, by hoping to be of good use for the advancement of science even after death. However, when releases are signed, people usually are told that the bodies would be given away for medical or educational uses. In reality, the papers don’t say much if the body will carefully get dissected in a medical institution, or will go somewhere else.
It has been reported that automakers often used to, even until very recently (2011), with the help of universities (who have access to bodies) have been making their cars safer by conducting crash test on real human bodies.
These gruesome tests logically make sense because the artificial dummies which have to be made for such impact tests have to rely on data that’s captured using real bodies. So, real bodies are basically used for calibration.
Cadavers are used for several other such kinds of research too…
More about it at [Wired]
If it sounds too unbelievable, there was a story on NBC too…
Stories of seemingly harmless little creatures killing other larger, or animals apparently higher in the food chain, have been heard time and again. Like the bird-killing tiger fish is one thing that comes to my mind when I hear something like this. This time we have a squirrel which purportedly kills deer in the woods. Or probably not…
We are talking about the vampire squirrels A.K.A fluffy-tailed tufted ground squirrels of Borneo. The distinctive features of this squirrel is its tail, which I’ll talk about soon. Let’s first see what the local hunters have to say about them.
While the squirrel is not seen a lot, has been photographed only some times and have not been studied extensively, they do have frightening tales tied with their names. Locals who live near the jungles around Borneo tell the terrifying tales of these squirrels.
They say that these relatively tiny rodents have been seen lurking on low hanging branches waiting for their prey. Just when an unsuspecting Muntjac (a small variety of deer) comes grazing, they jump onto them and attack them at their jugular veins. Thereby killing the relatively larger animal and then they feast on their internal organs. Gosh! No wonder they are called Vampire squirrels.
But then these are just stories for now. I excitedly hope they are true though.
The most distinctive parts of their bodies as it can clearly be seen in the image above are their tails. These squirrels now officially have the fluffiest tails of all the animals known to man. On an average, their tails are 30% larger than their whole bodies. That is like having a ~1.5 times sized tail. It is, as researchers say, an “anti-predator mechanism.”
Big packs of Baboon family kidnap young puppies. These puppies then end up growing with the family and ultimately become the part of their group. These pet dogs move with the family wherever it goes, sleep, feed and play with them.
Having pets like these has a mutual benefit in the sense that the dogs protect the family from other feral dogs and in return get food, grooming and a nice family.
Unlike us, whales never clean their ears. And when they die, all of the ear wax they collect through out the span of their lives can be extracted from the skull. This is usually a column of wax which is icky to look at, consists of fibers and is pretty rigid. It might look like a roughed up candle to an untrained eye. Also, these ear wax columns can be as much as 1 to 4 feet in height. But all of that is not even the most interesting thing about whale’s earwax.
Whale’s blubber is interesting for scientists because it carries a lot of information about what kind of toxins/chemicals a whale was exposed to in the ocean. This tells them about the kind of toxins that are being put into the sea. However it doesn’t give them any information about when the whale was exposed to these toxins. The earwax helps here.
The columns of earwax of a whale have rings when you cut them, just like the rings of a tree. And just like the rings of a tree, they carry the information related to the time. Each ring usually corresponds to 6 months of a whale’s life and by studying the composition of these rings scientists can tell what kind of chemicals the whale was exposed to, and when…
Encephalization quotient (EQ) is something that measures the relative brain sizes of animals. Humans of course are at the top with an EQ of ~7.4. That means they have brains much larger than what you’d expect to have in an animal of that size. This quotient, by some, is considered to be a rough estimation of how intelligent that animal is. Larger it is, the more intelligent – or that is what is hypothesized.
After humans, in this list, are dolphins. Some bottle-nose dolphins have been observed to have a EQ of even more than 5. Which is topped only by humans. Even intelligent primates have it in the range of 1.5-3. Some days ago we saw how dolphins justify their high EQ.
Another story which caught my attention was about this dolphin named Kelly who lives in the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi.
Kelly lives in a pool that gets rubbish thrown by the people who come to see her. So, she was trained by her trainer to collect all the pieces of garbage it could find. These pieces of collected garbage would then act as coupons and could later be exchanged for a fish. Good dinner right there.
Kelly started doing this very soon. An incredible thing for a dolphin to learn in the first place. But what is more amazing is that Kelly found a big piece of paper one day, went down to the bottom of the pool and hid the piece of paper under a rock. One by one she tore pieces off the paper got it up, and exchanged it for a fish, every time. One paper, many fish. That’s one unbelievable trick for a dolphin to figure out on her own! It actually trained the human.
Now, remember that Kelly got many more fish if she could find gulls and exchange them.
So this is what happened. One other time, she took the fish from her trainer and hid the fish under a rock and when there were no trainers around, she used the fish to woo a gull, caught it and exchanged it for many more fishes. Isn’t that what even our human kids fail at doing? Delayed gratification – see marshmallow test.
Once this started working good for Kelly, she taught her calves and other dolphin kids in the pool to do the same and trick the trainers into rain fish upon them.
via [TheGuardian]
Several hundreds of million years ago, humans and koalas started their own evolutionary journeys. But even after millions of years of independent evolution, even when both the species have almost nothing in common, there’s one thing Koalas have that have been troubling forensic experts for years (or potentially troubling).
Koalas have fingerprints that are eerily similar to human fingerprints. They are so similar that a koala could easily fool a forensic expert if it ever came down from a tree to a crime scene before they came in for collecting evidence.
Certainly other closer cousins have fingerprints like that of humans too. Chimps and Gorillas do, but then they are far too close to humans, genetically. That’s not very hard to believe. However, Koalas, who split pats several million years ago and evolved completely independently having them is something that stuns evolutionary biologists till date.
via [io9]
Despite how far we’ve come in our endeavors, what a little spider can achieve has never been achieved by humans. A spider is capable of turning the proteins poured out in liquid form, from its own body, into a solid silk which is the world’s strongest material for its weight. Yes, stronger than a steel wire of the same thickness. That’s not all. These fibers are also incredibly elastic. That is to say they can stretch to great amounts and come back to the same length without losing the elasticity.
The spider webs are also unbelievably the perfect things to form your gauze pad out of. They have a remarkable healing property.
If you are in midst of a forest, and get cut by a machete and there’s profuse bleeding, what do you do? You find a cobweb. Funny as it may sound, putting a bunch of cobweb on your wound will make the blood coagulate much faster. Thanks to those thousands of strands of nanowires which act as nucleation lines.
Besides that, since the cobwebs are proteins basically, they are good places for fungi and bacteria to grow. So, the spider knows that and has evolved to keep these bacterial and fungi growths away from its web. Cobwebs are in fact antiseptic and antifungal too. As long as the web is clean, it will not cause any kind of infection if you put it on an open wound.
This was a popular method to tend to open wounds among Ancient Greeks and Roman in the battleground.
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