Animal Quiz & Trivia
Sunday, May 11th, 20081. In South Africa they race me instead of horses or dogs. I like to swallow shiny things - in fact, one of my species was found to have swallowed 53 diamonds! I am used to heard sheep in South Africa. What animal am I?
2. There are prehistoric animals that […]
It’s a Gas!
Monday, May 5th, 2008
Pooting, Tooting, Farting, Breaking Wind, Cutting the Cheese, whatever you want to call it, the average person produces about half a liter of intestinal gas per day which is expelled in the form of flatulence about 14 times daily.
The following web links get into the science behind this smelly but vital bodily function:
Kidzworld: The Science of […]
Deceptive Practices
Thursday, April 24th, 2008The following are just a few examples of how animals use mimicry as a survival strategy.
Mimicry of Other Species
Why bother evolving your own venom when you can capitalize on the reputation of another species to protect you?
A Sinaloan milk snake (right) closely mimics the color pattern of the venomous coral snake on the left. The strategy […]
A Bad Day at the Lab
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
A Bad Day at the Lab
A poem by Science Junkies
Today will live in infamy!
I messed up in the lab you see
I unlocked just one monkey cage
Then had to run and check a gauge
When I returned I was quite shocked
Ten monkey cages were unlocked!
Two monkeys swung from ceiling fans
High-fiving with their feet and hands
Three more had […]
Super-size Me!
Saturday, April 19th, 2008All creatures are designed in a scale that allows their particular muscle and skeletal structure to properly support their mass. If you had the ability to supersize living things as has been the plot of many a science fiction movie, some unexpected consequences would arise.
If a scientist could really super-size a 5 foot tall, 100 pound woman to 10 […]
Animal Oddities
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Once again, truth proves stranger than fiction.
Does anyone remember the Simpsons episode where Bart catches the 3-eyed fish in the pond polluted by waste from the nuclear power plant? Well, nature has produced some specimens far weirder than that!
Mike, The famous headless chicken
One-eyed and noseless kitten
Two-headed turtle
Three-headed toad
Four-legged duckling
Five-legged dog
Six-legged cow
Seven-legged lamb
Eight-legged frog
The animal world is strange […]
Why surfing was a bad idea in the Pliocene
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Great white sharks can get very big. The largest on record was caught off the coast of Cuba in 1945. It was a female measuring 21 feet and weighing a whopping 7300 pounds! In comparison, the mythical white shark from the movie Jaws, was a 25 footer. There are anecdotal accounts of great whites as large as 31 feet, although there is […]
Really Big Bugs
Monday, March 31st, 2008There was a time in Earth’s prehistoric past when insects grew to enormous sizes. Fossil records reveal that there were once dragonflies with the wingspan of a hawk and millipedes that were perhaps 6 feet long.
Scientists have long theorized why modern insects should have elvolved to such dramatically smaller sizes. The answer appears to be linked to the nature […]
Getting “Campy”
Sunday, March 30th, 2008In addition to being a science junkie, my 10 year-old son is also a military junkie. He is a huge fan of the History Channel and especially of the show Mail Call and it’s host, R. Lee Ermey - hardly a warm and fuzzy kind of guy, but I guess that’s not the image the […]
Just Shocking!
Saturday, March 29th, 2008I recently wrote a post called Science and the Urban Legend in which I debunked (among other things) the false belief that eel skin wallets demagnetize credit cards because of the residual electricity left over from the eels they are made from. As with many of the topics I discuss on Science Junkies, answering one question […]
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