Tag: biology

Outperforming Humans – Speed

By Anupum Pant

Humans can use tools, communicate, count, make others laugh, socialize and are self aware too. We also have emotions and a pretty good memory. All of the things put into a single creature sure makes the “most advanced” creature we’ve ever known. But if these traits are considered individually, you’ll easily find an animal who beats us at one trait at a time. Today, I wanted to read and write about where humans stand when it comes to speed.

Talk about running speeds and the fastest person ever, Usain Bolt comes to my mind. A bolt indeed. As on date, if I’m not wrong, the world record set by him in the 100m race is 9.58 seconds. To put this human freak show into perspective, the average speed of the Jamaican sprinter in this race comes to about 37 km per hour (23 miles per hour).  And he’s clocked 28 mph somewhere in the race, they say.

In a world full of cars and planes, where distances travelled have become really huge, 28 mph sounds like a speed which does no good in our practical lives. And yet, it takes an Olympic runner to clock that speed. Normally, people run at about, say 10 mph. Damn!
The biological human limit to running speeds is estimated to be about 40 mph.

Quick fact: The fastest human objects ever are Helios 2 (a German probe) clocks about 150,000 mph. Another spacecraft, Juno does about 25 miles in a single second!

Now compare that with a Peregrine Falcon which can make use of the gravity and its perfectly aerodynamic body to travel at a speed of 216 mph (360 kph). But, that’s hardly any work for the animal. It’d the gravity making it fall.

In level flight, the white throated needletail (swift) can fly at speeds more than 100 miles per hour (up to 106). That’s the fastest bird if you do not count gravity assist.

An on land, of course the Cheetah takes the prize with about 70 mph of running speed. But, there’s a catch. If you measure speeds of animals relative to their body sizes, there’s a little blood sucking mite that beats cheetah by a huge margin.

The fastest swimming fish is the sailfish, which can swim and jump for small distances at about 70 mph.

Humans can swim at about 5 miles per hour.

Moving at 35 miles per hour a jack rabbit can travel faster than a human. The patas monkey, the fastest primate, runs at about 35 miles per hour too!

Now these are some animals you probably already know. Soon there’s more to come. In the coming days I wish to do a series on outperforming humans…Maybe I’ll write about endurance next.

Keep reading for more.

Mind Controlling Fungus Turns Insects into Zombies

By Anupum Pant

If you have played the game Last of Us on PS3, you’d know that the game is set in a time 20 years after a fungal-based, brain-altering pandemic has taken over the world and infected nearly 60% of the world’s population. Sounds too fictional. Right? Well, of course the game is fictional, but the brain-altering fungus parasite is not very far from reality.

The real fungus, Cordyceps isn’t really fatal to Human beings. However, there’s always a chance. In a very absurd way they kill insects. In fact their life cycle is totally dependent on insects. And a there are more than 1000 different kinds of these fungi, each one of which specializes on one kind of insect. What these fungi do to insects is something very incredible.

The fungus infects insect brains and turns them into zombies! Something similar to what this wasp does to cockroaches. This is how it works…

When an insect comes in contact with the spores of this parasitic fungus, they start acting in a weird manner. That is because the fungus affects its brain and turns it into a zombie, an insect zombie which takes directions from a fungus. The infected brain tells the insect to climb up. At some point, high up on a tree or plant, the insect dies and the fungus hollows the body and starts growing a shoot out of the insect. It’s bizarre to watch! (see the video below)

The fungus programs the brain to make the insect move up because its life-cycle actually benefits from it. The higher the insect goes, the better its spores can spread and can have a better reach.

The fungus is like a nature’s way of saying to an insect species that your population has reached very high levels.

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The Old Tale of a Boiling Frog

By Anupum Pant

Background

The Frog in a pot is a very popular anecdote and you probably know about it. Still, if you don’t, it is about a frog that rests easy in a pot of water that is warmed slowly. Frogs normally won’t go into boiling water. They’ll jump out and keep themselves away from very hot water. But, if placed in a tub of water at normal temperature that is being heated slowly, according to the anecdote, they don’t react and end up getting cooked in the boiling water.

The story is used as a metaphor to tell a cautionary point about life. The moral of the frog story goes something like this – Letting small and seemingly harmless wrongs slip, could kill (or be bad for you).  It basically tells you to not be complacent about minor changes that usually seem harmless, but add up to something big/bad.

The video proof?

Scientifically, a bizarre video (not for the faint hearted) on Youtube claims to proves the frog tale. The guy in the video initially tries to put a frog in a pot full of boiling water. Of course it resists, and doesn’t go in. Later, when the frog is put into a pot full of water at normal temperature and is warmed gradually, the frog never tries to leave. It gets cooked in the boiling water. Just like the tale suggests.

Everything looks very convincing about the video experiment. Little details like placing the frog on a piece of insulator so that it doesn’t feel direct heat through the metal base, are also taken care of in the video. Also, the narrator sounds so convincing with all the science facts referring to how cold blooded animals react to temperature. They indeed do! I totally fell for it. Watch it below…

The video cuts in between and the water which was put on flame before starts boiling suddenly after the cut. Or brains tend to skip video cuts. In the boiling water is something that looks like a dead/cooked frog. If you watched it till the end, the video shows you that the dead frog wasn’t a real one. No frogs were harmed in the making of the video. Good.

But, that completely nullifies the point this experiment tries to make. A fake rubber frog being cooked in boiling water doesn’t scientifically prove the tale.

The Science

Unlike us, who maintain a constant body temperature, the frog being a cold blooded animal, its body will react to its surrounding temperature and will try to match it. But real scientific experiments have never been able to prove it. According to a very old experiment that was done in the 1800s, where water was heated at 0.002°C per second, the frog was found dead at the end of 2½ hours. Why do you think would the frog sit still for 2½ hours?

Modern scientists reject the old experiment which seems to prove it. You could place your trust in the words of a Harvard professor, Professor Douglas Melton. He says:

If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don’t sit still for you.

Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma also said, “The legend is entirely incorrect!”

Moral: don’t believe everything you see on the internet.

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The Sixth Sense, Seventh Sense and More…

By Anupum Pant

Do this. Close your eyes and try to touch the tip of your nose with an index finger. If there’s nothing wrong with you, you’ll do it right. Even with no lights on, when you can see nothing at all, you’ll be able to put food exactly in your mouth. What explains this ability. None of the 5 senses are primarily involved here. There are a couple of other senses too which justify the amount of fantastic things our bodies can do.

At school I was taught, “there are five senses” – Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. No one ever mentioned anything more than that. Five was the number, and since it could get you demoted, scared, I never dared to question the traditional textbook science. Turns out, just like I was lied about the tallest mountain, carrots, taste areas and several other things, I just discovered that, for all my life, I had been lied about one more thing. About the number of senses.

Let’s keep aside animal senses today and see what we’ve missed in school that has to do with just human senses. Beyond the five senses we were taught about, there are at least 10 more senses that every healthy human being has. Ten, or at least a handful of them should probably be mentioned somewhere in the school textbooks to give kids the picture of what a sense exactly is. In fact, some put the number of senses humans have to as high as 21.

Kinesthesia: The one sense that I was talking at the start of this article allows you to remain precisely aware of every little muscle and joint movement. As a result, you are able to locate parts of your body without seeing or involving any of the 5 traditional senses. Let’s call it the 6th sense.

Skin Sensors: Our skins are responsible to make us feel the touch. But, the skin is in fact, much more complicated than that. The skin has at least five different kinds of specialized nerve endings. Taken one at a time, these allow you to feel pain, heat (temperature), cold (temperature), itch and pressure. So, you can count each one of them as a different kind of sensor. Consequently adding 4-5 more senses to our list.

Balance: In the presence of good amount of gravity, our bodies are naturally able to tell “Up” from “Down”. In simple words, on the earth, we are able to stand up and balance ourselves. The inner ear makes this possible. That is another sensor. You’d count it as one when you put it in a robot, but not when it is present in the human body?

Just to add, being able to perceive time is another beautifully complex sense.

And there are a couple of others too. That said, clearly, humans don’t just have 5 senses. There are more.

[Wikipedia]

Popping a Pimple Can Actually Cause Death

By Anupum Pant

Never ever try to pop a pimple on your face, especially if it is in the danger triangle of the face (explained below).

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that popping a pimple coming out in a certain area of your face could be lethal. If not lethal, it can cause facial paralysis or meningitis. Of course the chances aren’t that high, but it’s 100% true. If you don’t trust me, or you think Wikipedia is not always right, you could go and ask your physician about the “danger triangle of the face“. For real recorded cases of grave problems caused due to popping of pimples, you could check this link. To quote one…

A moderately stout man of 20, scratched the head off a pimple on his lip six days before admission to the hospital and died 36 hours after admission.

Recent example of a serious problem caused due to popping of a single pimple.

The danger area: The danger triangle is sort of a triangle, more of a rectangle on your face which covers the eyes (and eyebrows), the nose and the upper lip. The diagram is not completely accurate. Pimples in this area of the face should be left untouched.

Why? This area of the face covers something called the Cavernous sinus. In simple words, it is a cavity at the base of the brain which drains deoxygenated blood from the brain back to the heart. Unfortunately, the facial veins which circulate blood to the danger part of the face can drain blood directly drain into this cavity, the same cavity which has a direct access to the brain. Also, since there are no check valves, the blood can flow in any direction in these parts.

Now, if pimples are popped, the bacteria from these pimples can flow back and ultimately reach the brain. Imagine noxious pus flowing into your brain. That’d definitely be dangerous. But it is highly unlikely. Still, there is a chance.

Be careful. Don’t use your hands to pop pimples. Leave them alone.

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The Natural Segmented Sleep

By Anupum Pant

Background

The light bulb changed everything. Before it came, when the only practical sources of artificial light were candles & lamps, people did not often use candles to stay awake at night. These sources of artificial light costed a lot more per lumen hour. They were not always used. They were used only when artificial light was totally necessary. Normally, as the sun went down, people preferred sleeping. As bulbs came, they transformed the way we slept. Or, so argued the historian A. Roger Ekirch.

In his detailed published anthropological work – At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past – he mentions that the eight-hour single block of sleep is a recent change in our sleeping schedule. For many many years more than we’ve slept for eight hours in the night, our ancestors had practised a very different kind of sleep schedule which became the natural way of sleeping for humans. It was a segmented sleep.

The schedule went like this…

When the sun went down, there was more or less no artificial source of light. Due to this, our ancestors could do nothing useful. Bored with inactivity, they slept. Then somewhere in the mid-night, they woke up. For an hour or so, they remained awake and went back to sleep again till the morning.

The time for which these people remained awake, was probably the most relaxing and most calm time of their lives. Due to increased levels of pituitary hormone prolactin, people felt a lot at peace during this hour. During this time, people liked involving themselves in some kind of activity. Some preferred reading, others wrote. Some smoked, others visited their friends. And so on… The point is, people found themselves replenished during this time. It was apparently blissful.

This pattern of sleep became a natural way for us humans. Turns out, the eight-hour block of sleep is not the way we always used to sleep!

This sleep pattern has been observed to come back to today’s humans when they were completely deprived of any artificial light. This can be seen in the famous experiments of a psychiatrist, Thomas Wehr.

End

That waking hour of bliss – a fact of life before the industrial revolution came – was probably a period which I feel, needs to come back to cure the modern world’s rising anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse.

Some scientists believe that if you give your bodies a chance, they’d go back to a segmented sleep pattern. This is also bolstered by Wehr’s experiments. While others prescribe you sleeping pills if you tell them you wake up at night for an hour or so.

Just for the record, I’m writing this at 2:30 AM. I just woke up, and I’m off to sleep again.

[Read more]

[Mastering Biphasic sleep] A detailed blogpost on the experience by Jayson Feltner…

Hallucinogenic Honey From The Himalayan Bees

By Anupum Pant

With over 3.5 Million Gurungs living in Nepal, the Gurung people are found all over the country and beyond. However, near the peaks of Himalayas, beyond which no human settlements are found, lives a secretive Gurung tribe called the honey hunters, in the secret villages that are surrounded by thick forests.

In these high forests live a certain kind of bee, the world’s largest honey bee – The Giant Bee of Himalayas (up to 3 cm length) – are found in huge nests built on the overhanging rocks of cliff faces. These nests can reach up to 5 feet in diameter and each of these nests can contain about 60 kg of honey! But that is not even the most interesting part about them yet…

The honey made by these bees is a product that comes from the nectar of kinds of poisonous flowers. That is probably what makes this honey – Red Honey – medicinal, intoxicating and hallucinogenic. Since it is difficult to harvest and has special properties, this kind of honey is expensive and sells for about 4 times the price of normal honey in the foreign market. So, the honey hunters take absurd risks to get the honey from overhanging nests up in the cliffs.

Also, besides the mad hallucinogenic honey, another awesome thing I did not know was that bees create a Mexican wave to warn the attackers approaching their nest. Seen at 14:40 of the documentary below.

I stumbled upon this amazingly beautiful 25-minute documentary by Raphael Treza which takes you through the ways of this tribe and their mad honey hunting ritual.

Also, you can’t miss this detailed Photo-documentary which beautifully captures, in still images, the Gurung tribe’s ways. [Here]

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Human Foot Pwns Any Shoe We’ve Ever Made

By Anupum Pant

Background

No doubt we have come far enough to be able to cram in Billions of transistors on a few mm² of real estate. Hell, we’ve even been able to construct single atom transistors. Technology sure has come far, but within a just few decades of evolution of technology, are we really sure that we’ve done better than the work done by nature through Millions of years of evolution in the field of bio-mechanics? I’m not too sure we have. Rather I believe, nature already is far ahead of us. That is probably the reason, we are not even close to properly understanding how animate matter really works. We have a long way to go. And here is why I say that…

Although this was back in the year 2010, it is still relevant.

Skeletal Biology Lab at Harvard

Professor Daniel E. Lieberman from the Skeletal biology lab of Harvard asked a simple question, “how and why did ancient humans run comfortably without modern running shoes?”
This question encouraged him to start a research in his Skeletal biology lab – The result of which made the professor to ditch his shoes (read on to know why). Now, he is the “barefoot professor”.

In a 2 Million year span through which humans have been running, it’s been only a couple of decades since they’ve started using shoes to run. Before that, for Millions of years, people used to run barefoot. In the process that has lasted about 2 Million years, the professor believes that the human foot was able to evolve into a very advanced bio-mechanical device. Turns out, you don’t need shoes to run, you just need feet. The foot easily beats any modern running shoe. Here’s how…

The Research

In their research, they observed and studied several cases of people running with and without shoes. With the help of modern technology (again) they were able to map out the kind forces that are experienced by the foot in both cases. Moreover, they found a stark difference in how people run with shoes, and how they do it without shoes.

Running with a shoe: When people run with shoes, they tend to rely on the soft cushion at the heel of the shoe, and most of the time they land on the heel. This abrupt landing creates huge impact forces and hurts your foot. In the long run, it causes problems. Nature clearly didn’t design the foot to run with shoes! As the video screenshot shows… (the running style is of course shown without the shoe).

running with a shoe

Running without a shoe: Now, that doesn’t happen when you run without a shoe. Since you don’t have a cushion to rely on, you tend to land on the front part of the foot (with almost a parallel footing, a little tilted towards the front). This part isn’t solid like the heel. It has been crafted very carefully by the nature to absorb the impact forces (or in other words to delay the time for which forces are experienced, like a shock absorber). That means, there are no peak impact forces. The curve, as you can see is a beautifully smooth curve, without peaks.

running without a shoe

In the following video, Madhusudhan Venkadesan explains this using a simple pen analogy (at 3:52).

via [ScienceDump]
Know more at the website [RunningBarefoot]

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A Book That Filters 4 Years of Drinkable Water

By Anupum Pant

I’ve written a lot about water in the past. No wonder drinking water is such a precious commodity. Still, not many have access to clean water. About a 7th of the whole world’s population don’t have clean water to drink. Every year about 3.4 Million people die out of water borne diseases.

A group of people who go by the name WaterisLife are putting in everything to change that. By working with a group of scientists from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia, they have been able to come up with a novel idea that could change this. They call it the drinkable book. 

Drinkable book is a book full of cards that have been coated with silver nanoparticles. These cards bear the ability to filter dirty water and reduce the count of bacteria in it by about 99.9%. It can kill the bacteria that causes diseases like cholera, typhoid and E. coli., producing drinkable water that is as pure as tap water used in the US. Each page of this book can filter about 30 days of drinkable water. In fact, each page contains the instructions to filter water properly too. The whole book can provide 4 years of potable water. Definitely a boon to the developing countries.

Did a Teacher Ever Scold You for Yawning in Class?

By Anupum Pant

Background

I always found school interesting. I wasn’t one of those kids who felt bored and sleepy during the class. And yet, during the classes, I yawned often. I remember being sent out of the class a couple of times because I had yawned. This happened again, and again at college. However, lecturers never cared to send me out in college. And then there were no more classes.

Then, when I started working, at a meeting one day, a friend yawned in a board room where the head of the company was present. The head saw this happen. Being a fresher, the guy got scolded very badly by the head. I felt sad for him. I knew, he wasn’t really sleepy when he yawned; clearly he wasn’t bored too. There could have been a different reason for it. The head should have known this.

Yawning is universally considered as a sign of sleepiness or boredom. I however, am pretty sure that a yawn doesn’t necessarily comes when someone is bored or sleepy. I do have a theory to back my belief that I discuss below. Also, yawning has a lot to do with empathy too. But that is not what I’m discussing today. To educate yourself about the empathy side of it, you could watch the following video.

No one knows for sure why we yawn. In addition to that there might be several different reasons that could explain why we yawn. Like a couple of reasons that explain why we sleep (may be there are more). Most definitely, it isn’t a single reason.

A study shows that yawning could be the body’s way of cooling down the brain and it makes perfect sense to me!

The Study

Scientists from the Princeton University say that people yawn more during the winters. That is because during the winter the air outside is colder and the body knows that. So, it makes us yawn to take in the cold air to cool the brain by exchanging heat.

There’s also this other explanation which breaks down the process of yawning into two parts – 1. stretching of your jaw muscles and 2. air entering your mouth after you do that.

When you stretch the jaw muscles in the first step, blood flow increases in your face, brain and sinus area. Now the cool air enters and cools down the blood vessels in the nasal cavity and sinus area. These blood vessels in turn cool the blood and circulate cooler blood to your brain, to cool it down.

Teacher’s theory

Now, it’s a well-known human rhythm that bodies get heated up just before we fall asleep. As a result, we yawn more. So, teachers were not completely wrong. However, sleep is not the direct reason. The reason we yawn is because the brain gets heated up, and it may as well get heated up due to other reasons; not always due to sleepiness or tiredness. Plus the yawn tries to correct the heated-sleepy-brain by circulating cooler blood.

The body does this to cool down the over-heated brain – which obviously gets heated due to extra information processing – like a computer processor. Why would the brain heat up when I’m not actively processing information better. So, yawning doesn’t mean I’m bored, or I’m not actively listening to the teacher when they’re speaking. Teachers need to know this.

Even if yawning is a sign of boredom to some extent. A yawn actually helps you cool down and helps you to process information better. So, teachers should be happy when you yawn in their class. You are trying to be a better listener than people who aren’t yawning in the class!

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Sundays Are The Worst – Sunday Neurosis

By Anupum Pant

Are Mondays really that bad?

It’s fair to assume that readers read through my website when they find “free time”. And assuming it is their free time, I can also assume that they are usually happy during those times. So, is it safe to assume that Sundays are days when I can expect most people to read these articles? Is Sunday the best?

Logically, the most amount of free and happy time a working person could have, should be on Sundays. However, AweSci experiences the least amount of traffic on Sundays (and Saturdays).

People think that Mondays are sad because on Mondays they need to go and toil at the workplace after a nice long break. According to most surveys, Mondays and Tuesdays are the most “blue days” of the week. And still, traffic on this website gushes during these weekdays. So, how do people find enough free time to go through a website that publishes long texts filled with trivia, on tedious Mondays? Is Monday really the worst day of the week? Deriving happiness from visitor metrics, it certainly isn’t a bad day for me. What do you think?

Sunday Neurosis

Sundays are actually worse. In a huge survey that included 34,000  people, well-educated people reported that they had lower life satisfaction values on weekends. On the other hand, people who were less qualified reported that there wasn’t a much difference in their life satisfaction level when compared with a weekday.

There may be a hundred ways to explain why Sundays are bad for the well-educated masses, but I prefer to explain it with a term coined decades ago by an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl. The term was “Sunday Neurosis“. According to him:

Sunday Neurosis refers to a form of anxiety resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over.

According to him, Sundays are the days when educated people find enough time to introspect about how empty and meaningless their lives are. Such complex thought patterns aren’t commonly seen among the less educated masses.

As a result, on Sundays, these people tend to get involved in short-term compensatory behaviours like avoiding mentally taxing activities, bingeing on food and drink, overworking, and overspending etc. Which of course could land them into big trouble in the long-term – like depression.

You, the people who come here to read science are most definitely well qualified people. So, please don’t trouble yourself on Sundays. On Sundays well-educated working individuals should remind themselves that being anxious about things is going to take them nowhere. Worrying is for Mondays.

So the next time whoever tells you, Mondays are the worst, ask them to read this. And tell them, they think Mondays are the worst because they probably aren’t very well-educated.

[Read more]

Spicy Food for a Happy Stress Free Life

By Anupum Pant

Today I’d like to start with something called Morphine. There is great chance that you already know about Morphine, may be through House MD, or other things. If you do, you could skip if you want to. But reading through a couple of lines never hurt anybody.

Morphine: is one of the most effective drugs used in medicine to relieve severe pain. It acts directly on the central nervous system, relieves anxiety and produces euphoria – intense happiness. That is the reason, it is also widely used illegally as a recreational drug. Wait! It is highly addictive too. But what makes me talk about morphine today?

Endorphins: And then there are Endorphins. Endorphins, short for Endogenous Morphine, is a morphine like substance made by the body – Where endogenous means that it originates inside the body. The amount of it released in the body is completely dependant on how you live your life and the kind of food you eat.

Like morphine, Endorphins have some function in the body too. In simple words, they relieve pain and stress. For instance, in a body builder’s body, these are the natural chemicals which keep them going in the gym, by mitigating pain sensation. And of course, since it is nothing but Morphine occurring naturally in the body, it creates Euphoria, or a state of intense happiness.

Runner’s High: People who are engaged in strenuous activities often have high amounts of Endorphins being released inside their body. As a result, they develop something called a runner’s high – An addiction to exercise and other strenuous activities. May be this is how workaholics are born. I’m guessing, endorphins is the chemical that gives the Tarahumara people the ability to run for 400 miles. And may be Marathon Monks of Japan also have unlocked a technique to produce high amounts of Endorphins in them (meditation!).

Whatever it is, healthy amounts of Endorphins released in the body make you happy, and a greater amount than that only takes you to a super human level. Of course, using morphine without prescription is not legal. But, there’s no law that can stop you from creating it in your own body. After all, it can completely change you as a person.

How to: Now, there are a couple of natural ways you could train your body to make more of it for you. Some of them are – strenuous exercise, a lot of sleep, eating chocolate and meditation (marathon monks!). But, among these techniques, in my view, adopting excessively spicy food is the most accessible and healthy way to go about it. Heck, just eat chillies and be happier. So simple. If you think that is hard, well, the human body can easily be trained…

Among scientists, it is a well-known fact that eating chilli peppers can lead to enhanced secretion of endorphins. It is also noteworthy that spicier the chilli, more endorphins are released. And to find the spiciest chillies, you can probably watch the video below…

So, go, rev it up to 16 Million Scoville Scale unit and lead a happier and stress free life. Use science and get addicted to happiness.

Note: Do whatever, but do not over do it. You don’t want to try the deadly cinnamon challenge to be happy.

Pando – An Organism That Weighs 6 Million KG

By Anupum Pant

Blue whales weigh about 150 tons each. That is a 150,000 kg animal we are talking about! Incredible! It is the largest animal to have ever lived on earth. Yes, bigger than any of the dinosaurs. Just for the perspective, the heart of a blue whale can weigh about 600 kg and is almost the size of a Volkswagen Beetle car. A human can fit in its arteries. But, if you thought no other organism can be heavier than a blue whale, you are in for a surprise.

The heaviest organism we’ve ever found, lives in the Fishlake national forest, Utah. In fact, the organism itself is the forest. This forest is a Vatican-city-sized forest which looks like it has several identical trees in a normal forest. Only what looks like identical trees in a normal forest, is actually a single huge tree.

The absolutely humongous tree is known to have come out of a single seed about 80,000 years back. With time, it went on to spread its roots and has cloned itself by popping out about 47,000 other extant clones.

Since it is a single huge tree, it indeed acts like a single huge tree. When one of the shoots (tree) is in need of nutrients, the interconnected root system makes sure that the tree gets what it needs. Also, these trees transition from winter to spring simultaneously, just like a single huge tree would.

MinuteEarth explains it better in the video below:

An Extremely Rare and Bizarre Disorder – Alien Hand Syndrome

By Anupum Pant

Like lakes, bizarre and rare disorders also fascinate me. Of course I would never want to experience one of these, but it’s good to know about them. Besides the horrible, body-turning-into-stone disorder, Alien hand syndrome is one of the most bizarre disorders I’ve heard of.

If someone has the Alien hand syndrome, they’d have a hand that would move around and do stuff on its own without the person even being aware about it. And I’m not talking about those involuntary muscular movements you have once in a while. In this, the hand moves as if it can think for itself. It moves as if it’s being moved by “someone else”. Some times, it becomes necessary to use the other hand to stop it!

Imagine your left hand grabbing an object and you just can’t let it go.

It happens when the two hemispheres of the brain get separated either surgically or by accident or disease. In that case, the left and right hemispheres are unable to move information between them.

It isn’t just rare and bizarre, it’s extremely scary too. Imagine if your left hand waking up at night to murder its own host. At night, it’d like sleeping with a stranger. In fact, it’d be like living with a creepy stranger all the time. Who would want that!

Like the following video puts it, it seems as if there is another intelligence at work here, the one which is not known to the patient.

[Wikipedia page]

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The Sweet Tale of the Mysterious Tree Lobster

By Anupum Pant

I do realize how big our world is and the sheer number of species that live in it. Also the fact that about 86% of the species are still unknown has me in awe all the time.

Yet, after having read about so many kinds of animals that live on our planet, after having documented them on this blog, I always feel that I’ve known and written it all. The very moment I start losing hope that I would never find an interesting animal ever again, something incredible comes across. Always!

Today, that happened again when I was reading an NPR blog. This time, there’s more than the species itself. The place where it lives is pretty awesome too. The most amazing part – This six-legged giant lives only there. That means, nowhere else on Earth will you find it! First, let’s see where it lives…

This is where it lives:

balls pyramid

I know, it looks like a CG mountain done for a fantasy movie. Trust me, it’s real. It’s called the Ball’s Pyramid (named after a European named Ball who first saw it in 1788) and was formed 7 million years ago due to a volcanic eruption. It is an awkwardly tall (1,844 feet) and an extremely narrow rock sitting in the centre of the sea. To the East of Australia, the red place marker in the following picture shows where the rock is located.

balls pyramid location

 What lives there? And how was it found?

There is an island – Lord Howe island – close to the rock. In the island lived huge “tree lobsters” (actually they were huge stick insects with a hard exoskeleton – Dryococelus australis). In the year 1918, a ship crashed on the island and brought with it some rats. The rats loved these tree lobsters and finished them off within 2 years. After 1920, these tree lobsters were thought to be extinct.

tree lobster

Of course there were stories of these insects living on a rock near the island. But no human wanted to climb the narrow rock to hunt insects at night.

Only in the year 2001 when 2 researchers David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile decided to climb up the rock to find out if these stories were real, they found something incredible. Poop of a large insect. When the came back at night to investigate, the shiny black huge tree lobsters were found! These insects had probably never been extinct.

For more than 80 years, 24 of them had been living on this rock, in a bush and no one knew how they got there. Probably they clinged on to birds or something. Also, according to the researchers, these creatures have never been seen anywhere else.

Where are they now

I’m not sure about where they are now. According to the 2012 NPR article which I read, a pair of these creatures – Adam and Eve – were brought into Australia. Eggs got laid and little Tree lobsters came into the world. Thankfully, the species was saved from going extinct. But it isn’t known if they’ll be sent back to their home island because the great-great-great grandsons of those rats must still be there waiting to finish these insects off again.

This is how the first ones hatched in the zoo…

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