For the past few millennia, the dewy rainforests of Australia’s Cape Melville have remained totally isolated from human interference. That is, until a team of scientists from James Cook University took humanity’s first steps into a land untouched by time. What they found there was almost beyond belief.
Contrary to what you may have seen in such movies as Pixar’s otherwise extremely entertaining Finding Nemo, whales don’t spray water out of their blowholes. Further, the whale’s trachea doesn’t connect to the esophagus of the whale; so when Dory and Marlin went down the whale’s throat, in real life, they’d have simply been eaten.
The natural world might be awe-inspiring, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t share similarities with the technological world that we inhabit. In fact, as biologists have come to look at creatures in closer detail, they’ve discovered that some of them have been using basics of engineering—that we now take for granted—all along. Here are five of our favorite creatures that have evolved into biological machines.
The Ten Best Cars For Dog Owners
Posted in: Today's ChiliWhen choosing a car, you have to take into consideration who might be inside with you as a passenger. If your passenger is also man’s best friend, our readers think one of these ten cars might do the trick.
Slow motion and Matrix-style bullet time was invented for this and this only: dogs. As in playing with dogs and recording them in bullet time with 52 GoPro cameras set up to freeze time. The video itself is already fun (if you have a heart) but the behind the scenes footage is almost just as interesting (if you like cameras).
Volvo’s new trucks are so easy to drive, a hamster could do it! No, really. Volvo Trucks built a makeshift hamster wheel onto the tiller of one of its rigs, and using nothing but the orange-y allure of a carrot, a hamster steered a 15-ton truck all the way up a quarry, with sheer cliffs off each side. Holy crap.
Whether or not you think that certain endangered animals are worth all the fuss— *cough*pandas
Granted, the name “Street View” doesn’t really apply like it used to, but who’s going to argue with a feature like this? Google announced today that it’s added imagery from zoos all over the world to the Maps feature, meaning that you can check out lions, tigers and red pandas in their unnatural habits and avoid the long lines at the monkey house. Google’s got links to the zoo shots in the source link below, including locations in Singapore, Germany, Spain, the UK and China — sadly there are no dog lions, however, so far as we can tell.
Source: Google Latlong
The internet consists of two major ingredients: Porn, and adorable animals. Everything else is pretty much a churning sea of virulence and racism. But what if we told you that those animal pics actually ain’t so pretty? As it turns out, there’s a chance many of them could be faked—and in some pretty cruel ways at that.
When a drive through America’s heartland showcases mile after mile of cow-filled field, it’s easy to overlook the most sobering of all possibilities. These wonderful delicious animals could all get wiped out one day, leaving the world burgerless and milk free. Don’t worry. The USDA is on the case.