Owl eyes aren’t spheres, or even near spheres like that of us humans. Their eyes are slightly longer, or you could say tube-shaped. This shape doesn’t allow a good movement of eyes like our shifty eyes. So they see around turning their heads. And since they can turn their heads about 270 degrees, looking around isn’t a problem.
The colour of owl eyes is a vague indicator of at what time of the day they prefer hunting. It’s not a totally accurate indicator, but they do give an idea.
The Eurasian eagle owl and the great horned owl are two of the many owls which have orange coloured eyes. The colour orange means that they are active around dawn and dusk.
The ones with dark brown or black eyes like to hunt at night. It is believed to be an evolutionary trait which helps them to blend well in the dark.
The great gray owl, for instance, has yellow eyes. And that colour is a fairly accurate indicator that the owl prefers hunting during the day.
Slow-mo studios have decided to capture the fastest tongues on the planet. These are chameleon tongues we are talking about. Tongues so fast that they accelerate at about 41Gs. That’s many times more than what a human body can sustain. And much faster than the fastest jets we’ve been able to make. So hold your breath and witness the natures amazing creations. It might be a little gross. Be warned…
Halitosis wasn’t considered an ailment until very recently. Thanks to listerine for that. But now that it is, and is also a serious turn off for everyone who has to be around several feet from you, you should consider taking a deep breath and asking a friend if you really have a smelly mouth. That’s because two things.
1. No one whose considerate enough would ever tell you that your breath smells bad. And even if they do they’ll put it in a very subtle manner – which will make you underestimate how bad it really is.
2. Secondly, you can almost never tell yourself that your breath smells bad because you’ve probably become so acclimatized to it that it doesn’t even smell odd to you any more.
Most times, parting ways with the bad breath problem off halitosis isn’t as hard as you think. You just have to spend more conscious time flossing, bushing and cleaning your tongue. If you’re missing any of these in your daily schedule, if not now, halitosis will strike some time soon. So, take care. Be prepared to hear it and ask a friend.
Bats use echolocation to navigate and to zero-in on their prey. That’s one good technique of sound to catch prey in complete darkness or low-light conditions. But their preys aren’t fools either.
Moths are one of the many kinds of insects that a bat would love to have for dinner. But moths, for millions of years, have engaged in an evolutionary battle with the bat. So, when the bats evolve with one good technique to catch them better, their preys evolve something else to evade it. It’s sort of a million year old arms race – and they’ve come up with what researchers believe, is genius. Although, let’s give it up for humans here. Our arms race has produced nuclear bombs in a few hundred years since it started.
Several species of moths, as researchers from University of Florida and Boise State University found, have an ability to produce loud ultrasonic sounds by scraping scaly parts of their genital with their abdomen. Both males and females can do it. This loud sonic disruption produced from the genitalia of certain kinds of moths is enough to block, or jam the bat’s primary navigation signal.
From what I know, no other insects which can do this have been found, but scientists are somewhat certain that several other potential bat preys must have developed this technique to disrupt the bat’s ultrasound, and must be saving their own lives.
While you are in the USA and you see a really conspicuous snail with two green banded horns growing out of its head that seem to make a periodic motion (as you’ll see in the video below), just try to stay away. That’s because this snail isn’t what it is supposed to be. It’s being controlled by a mind controlling parasite.
A snail is a snail and it isn’t supposed to have those amazing horns on its head, right? You know that now, but birds can’t read this. So when they see a snail like this one, they assume it to be a caterpillar – bird’s favourite food. In fact, they see two of them and swoop down to have a good brunch. Little do they know, they are infecting themselves with an evil creature, and in the process are also helping a parasite achieve its life goal.
Leucochloridium paradoxum or the green banded brood sac is a parasite that lives in the bird poop. Of course, they live in the poop of birds that were infected by it at some point. If you ask me how did the parasite get into a bird in the first place, it’s like asking what came first, the egg or the chicken. May be it went into a caterpillar when it first started. And then a bird ate that caterpillar.
So the reason larvae of this parasite live in bird poop is because their ultimate goal in life is to go live in the warm interiors of a bird and feed off of it for the rest of its life. And inject babies in bird poop to keep their race alive. Yes, at least they have their meaning of life figured out.
But that doesn’t explain how bird poop goes back into a bird. So, you have to dig deeper. And when you do that, the “double horned snail” comes into the picture.
Snails love eating bird poop. Don’t ask me why. They do. So when they eat it, the green banded broodsac gets into the snail, gets bigger, moves towards its eyes and starts protruding out by swelling the eyes. Once it has done that it goes on to develop green bands like a caterpillar and starts moving in a periodic fashion like a caterpillar would appear to do. That fools the birds into thinking it’s a caterpillar.
But the evil parasite doesn’t stop there. It goes on to hack into the snail’s brain and rides it like go-cart to the top of a tree canopy, or somewhere noticeable like that. So the birds would notice it and eat it. And if they do, the larva moves into the birds interior and another parasite accomplishes its life goal.
If you’ve been following awesci for some time now, you must remember the leidenfrost effect. The effect is clearly demonstrated by dropping some water on a really hot pan. The layer of water in contact with the hot pan vaporises and gets trapped there as an air cushion. The drop of water then is free to move around on the air cushion and it dances on the pan.
When you boil water in a vessel, something similar happens. Although a similar air cushion tries to form at the hot inner surface of the vessel (where the water is in contact), these bubbles become bigger, more buoyant and move to the surface. However, for whatever little time they remain in there, and meanwhile new ones keep forming, they create an insulating gap of air. So, the heating of water is much less efficient. How great it would have been if these bubbles never formed.
Well, scientists have accomplished that. And they propose doing it by creating extremely tiny hair like features on the inner surface of the vessel which prevent those insulating bubbles from forming and in turn decrease the time in which the water boils. In fact, by this method of surface modification, they have managed to boil water about three times faster.
The most amazing thing about these tiny hair like features they create on the surface is that they are made using a special kind of virus called the tobacco mosaic virus. Using the hooks on this virus, it is made to stick to the surface and is then coated with a thin film of nickel. And there you have your new modified surface which makes boiling water much more efficient.
The miscellanies of the world are amusing. Phil Torres, an etymologist who loves spending most of his time in the Amazon rain forest, recently came across a weird insect, or more specifically a group of insects, which move and stop together. Why they do it and how they do it is still unknown. But people do have some plausible theories to explain the whys.
The group of insects called barklice have been seen to do this. First Phill saw them moving in haphazard directions, and then they stopped, and started moving again. Each one of these seemed to be moving in a random direction a couple of inches from each other. How this coordination was taking place, he had no idea. It was probably due to the silky web they were moving on, which was able to carry the information. But then, later he came across a video where they weren’t moving on a web.
Some say that they do this to look like a single big organism to the predator. While others say that they do this to stop and listen for a while and detect predators, because moving makes a lot of excess undesirable noise.
This is what they do the almost-perfect coordinated movement…
Grafting can do wonders. This new commercial product proves it. The upper part of the plant that Thompson and Morgan now sells for a mere 10 GBP can produce quality tomatoes, while at the roots of it you’ll find the best potatoes. Yes, all of it in a single plant called the tomtato plant. This is achieved using a fairly simple technique that can produce as many as forty different fruits from a single tree. It can be achieved at home with enough practice. For now, you could just spend a bit to get this marvellous plant home.
You have a second brain and it is in your gut. It’s called the enteric nervous system, or the second brain. It is something that of course is not capable of having concious thoughts, but has a great influence in your life. Along with trillions of bacteria living in there, the second brain influences you as a person, much more than you may have thought…
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you must know that really creepy creatures live on your skin. As we’ve seen, we’re more bacteria than we are ourselves, probably also a stupidity virus somewhere in there, there are also other macroscopic creatures which live ON you. You don’t have to know these exist, because it may ruin the rest of your life for you. You can never get rid of them. So leave if you think you should.
If you take a helicopter ride over a pine forest in a region spanning the Rocky Mountains toward Canada’s Boreal Forest, you’d probably see thousands of fallen trees and several other trees turning brown. There’s an epidemic that has been the woe of these forests. A tiny creature, that’s destroying millions of acres of pine forests and is disrupting the carbon balance of massive regions. The mountain pine beetle is the tiny creature I’m talking about.
A mountain pine beetle is a tiny dark insect sporting a hard exoskeleton and is the size of a rice grain approximately. And yet, its size doesn’t limit it in the amount of destruction it causes. It’s like a cancer. The beetle infestation on a pine tree spreads like a wild fire. Once spread, the only thing that can be done is to cut the trees and burn them to stop the infestation from spreading.
In a very simple manner, these beetles feed on the phloem tissue and kill the tree by girdling it – a very effective way of killing a huge tree with a few small cuts. Or they introduce fungi into the bark,
Cock-a-doodle-do is what has been a symbol for the break of dawn since a long long time now. If you live in the countryside, that’s what you’d hear in the morning, a rooster crying out loud. Been there long enough and yet we hadn’t known for long if roosters do it when the see the sunlight or if they are hard-wired in their genes to crow like that.
Takashi Yoshimura of Nagoya University and his team decided to conduct a study on this, to uncover how a rooster really works. Because it has been noted that even a bright light from a car could trigger a rooster to do it. So what was it?
So they kept a well fed rooster indoors, in dim lights. That means, it could see the sun come out. And even then, the constant dim lights of the room failed to fail the rooster. Despite being kept away from the sun, the rooster cried out at the break of dawn. Turns out roosters are genetically hard-wired to crow when it’s dawn time.
It’s a behaviour that’s tuned to something called the circadian rhythm – physical, mental and behavioural change in an organism that follows a 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness. We humans, other animals and plants have these internal clocks that operate based on when the sun comes and goes. For instance, you get tired at night, sleep and wake up in the morning. That’s your circadian clock talking. Roosters have it too, and their voice is wired to this rhythm, not the external stimuli of light.
Pyrosomes are very interesting creatures, or better, a collection of thousands of these tiny creatures. These are worm like creatures found in the shallow depths of oceans, shaped like cylinders or butterfly nets. What appears like a huge worm, which can range from a few centimetres to the size of a sperm whale, are in reality a massive colony of tiny little creatures called zooids. All of them tied together in kind of a tunic.
These zooids have openings on both side of the cylinder, outside and inside. This acts like a huge filtration system, which takes in water from the outside and sends jets from the inside. And it’s been recently found that when brushed by an object, these zooids light up in different colours to coordinate a series of water jets, in order to drift away in a specific direction. So it’s being said that they may coordinate their jet-like propulsion system by flashing lights at each other
Watch the baby mantis leap before it has any wings on it, at 1000 frames per second. It’s majestic. Just like its camouflage.
This is from a study published in the journal Current Biology and comes from the department of zoology at Cambridge University in England. It’s going to help us make better robots…
Have you ever sneezed when you were asleep? Or have you seen someone do it? I haven’t. So, is it really possible for a person to sneeze while they are asleep?
Well, as expected, the answer is no. That’s why you never see people sneezing in their sleep.
Sneezing is a reflex action, that happens when some particulate matter or irritant gets inside your nose. It’s nature’s way to keep unwanted stuff out. But when you sleep, your body produces something called G.A.B.A, or gamma-Aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter which suppresses reflex.
But that’s scary, right? What if stuff goes in while you are asleep. Well, the body has a way to deal with that too. So, if you are sleeping and you are no longer prone to sneezing if anything enters your nose, there’s still a point at which too much irritation is deemed too much by your body. At this point, you wake up first and you then sneeze. Wow!
