Animals

Ants Can Fall from Any Height Without Dying

Ant

Terminal Velocity is a phrase used to describe the maximum constant speed that a falling object can reach before it cannot accelerate any further. This happens when the air resistance pushing the object up becomes equal to the force of gravity pulling the object down. The terminal velocity of a human being is 120mph, as such, should you manage to reach this speed while falling and hit the ground you would most likely end up in a bad way.

However, an ant is so light that should you choose to throw one off the top of a skyscraper and it reached its terminal velocity, it would only be travelling at 3.9mph, due to its size and weight the air resistance acting against the ant is so strong that gravity cannot physically pull it down to earth any faster. Due to the slow speed and the ant’s strong exoskeleton which braces it for impact, they do not suffer any damage from falling at any height and the impact would have been the same as if it had fallen a few centimetres.

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History

The Pope was once Elected by Accident

Papa_Benedictus_Duodecimus

The procedure for choosing the new head of the Catholic church has been the same for centuries, the College of Cardinals, which is currently made up of 199 cardinals of the church around the world, hold a meeting at the Vatican called the “Papal Conclave” where they separate themselves from the rest of the world, hold discussions and then vote  individually for who they would like to see as the new Pope. This process repeats itself every day until at least two thirds of the Cardinals vote in the same way, then whoever the majority voted for is named Pope.

In the past it was not uncommon for members of the College of Cardinals to waste their first vote on a throw-away candidate, someone who they considered could never be voted into the position of Pope, they did this to find out who the other cardinals were voting for to try and gauge which way the College was swaying. This wouldn’t be much of a problem today, as the chances of 132 of the cardinals all voting for someone who they didn’t want to be Pope would be fairly slim. However this wasn’t the case in the year 1334, where there were only 16 members of the College of Cardinals.

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Animals

There is a Species of Ant that has a Door for a Head

Door Head Ant

Ants are one of the oldest species of insect on Earth and inhabit almost every landmass today. It is an interesting fact that the total biomass of all the ants on the earth is roughly equal to the biomass of all the humans, how can this be when they are so tiny? Simple, there are around 1.5 million ants on the planet for every human and over 12,000 different species, for every single acre of land in the rainforest there are estimated to be 3.5 million ants.

One of the more interesting species of ant are the Cephalotes ants, more fondly known as the door-headed ants. These ants make their nests in holes in trees formed by wood boring beetles, however there are other ants and insects that also want to live inside these nests or even eat the ants, that’s why they need a door to keep other nosy insects out. The ants don’t use a block of wood like we do, they use their own heads.

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Animals

There is a Species of Jellyfish that is Biologically Immortal

Jellyfish

Jellyfish are very bizarre, they have no eyes, no heart, no brain and are very simple organisms. They are similar to bacteria in that they do not “think” but more react to stimuli in order to escape or feed. In nature, there is one Jellyfish that is weirder than all the rest and that is called  Turritopsis Dohrnii or more commonly dubbed “The Immortal Jellyfish”.

Whilst the Jellyfish itself may be quite a simple organism, its life cycle is not. In the development of a full adult jellyfish, the organism goes through several very distinct and different phases in its life. The Jellyfish life starts, as with ours, with a sperm and an egg, once the egg has been fertilized and has developed, the jellyfish hatch as Planula Larva and swim out on their own. These are tiny oval shaped organisms with small hairs called cilia which help propel them through the water. This stage of life is fairly short-lived and after a few days the Planula Larva drops to the bottom of the ocean floor and attaches itself to the rock and transforms
into what is called a Polyp.

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History

A Chemist Accidentally Discovered Purple When Looking for a Cure for Malaria

porfura

Purple dye originally came from the mucus glands of a snail. The discovery of the dye is often attributed to the mythological Greek God; Heracles, or rather his dog, who was eating snails off the coast of the Levant and returned with a mouth stained a deep purple colour. From a biological point of view the snails use the purple mucus as a defence mechanism to spray predators and make their escape, they also use it to catch their own prey and protect their eggs.

The colour purple was incredibly rare at the time, it is unlikely that those who discovered the snails had ever seen another purple plant, animal or living thing, as such the colour was vastly sought after. However it was a very slow and costly process to create dye from the mucus produced from the snail, it required over 12,000 of the shellfish to extract just 1.5 grams of the dye, enough to colour a handkerchief. Purple quickly became incredibly valuable and even worth more than gold, by 300 BC a pound of purple dye was worth 3 times a bakers annual wage.

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History Misc Musings

The Javelin Record Was Broken by Spinning it Like a Discus

javelin-usa

In 1956 a Spaniard named Felix Erausquin introduced his own technique for throwing the javelin where he would spin around on the spot and release the javelin, similar to a discus throw, this was dubbed the “Spanish Style” of javelin throwing and enabled the throwers to achieve incredible distances before it was banned almost immediately by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) for being an incredibly dangerous method of throwing.

The furthest that a javelin has ever been thrown in an official Olympic event is 104  meters which was thrown by Uwe Hohn in the 1984 Olympics, however under the spinning technique Erausquin managed to throw the javelin 112 meters, smashing this record by 8 meters! However the throw was disqualified by the IAAF and not acknowledged. At the time of the throw the world record was 83 meters with Erausquin’s throw being vastly superior.

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Animals Planet Earth

Some Plants Use Wasps as Their Own Personal Bodyguards

venus-fly-trap

We don’t often allocate intelligence to plant life, and the majority believe that they just sit in one spot and get on with growing and they have no methods to defend themselves against anything that might want to eat them. However this isn’t true, many different plants have various methods of self-defence and interesting techniques to stop being devoured, with some of them being rather clever.

Many plants have direct defences to combat insects and animals that might want to eat them, for example some plants, such as roses, grow thorns or prickles. These thorns are very sharp and act as the “teeth” of the plant to ward off predators. A hungry herbivore won’t want to eat them if they are going to get hurt in the process!

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History

Daylight Savings Time Was First Introduced by the Germans in the Great War

DST IMAGE

Before 1840, all the towns in Britain had their own separate time zones, these were set by their town sun dials where the time would be told as the sun moved across the sky and created a shadow. As a result of this method of telling the time, all the towns were on slightly different times, for example Bristol was 10 minutes out from London due to how much further west it was.

With the introduction of the rail-road system in the 20th Century, it became much quicker and easier to travel from town to town, what previously took days and even weeks of travel time was now reduced to mere hours, this caused disruption and inconvenience due to the difference in time. This accumulated in the introduction of a universal time in the country, this was called Railroad Time. The time was set by the observatory at Greenwich and was implemented as the universal time across all towns in the British isles.  This was met with backlash though, as some towns were keen to keep their own time zones.

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Animals History

The Tower of London Was Home to a Polar Bear

polar bear

The first record of wild animals at the Tower of London was in 1210 during the reign of King John. The monarch would receive the animals as gifts from other powerful rulers at the time, often to impress others or to show the wealth and strength of the ruler. The exotic animals were sent to London from all over the world and kept in the Tower of London as a symbol of power as well as for the curiosity and entertainment of the court.

King Henry III was particularly credited with establishing the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London. In 1235 he was given 3 lions as a wedding gift by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, he was also presented with a polar bear from King Haakon of Norway in 1251, the bear was given a particularly long leash to enable him to swim and catch fish in the Thames river. One of the more unusual animals was a large male African Elephant which was presented to King Henry III from King Louis IX of France in 1255, being the first of its kind to reach the shores of Britain, this large and unusual creature was said to cause quite a stir and the people of London flocked to catch a glimpse of the giant grey beast.

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Misc Musings

Why are British Electrical Plugs the Best in the World?

plug annotated

There are many different plug designs throughout the world, the British plug might appear to be quite bulky compared to its European and American sleek, twin pronged brothers. However there are many reasons why the British plug is one of the best inventions in the world.

First of all its important to understand what each of the 3 prongs on the plug do, the large one at the top is the earth pin which is used to ground electricity should anything go wrong, it sends electricity back away from you instead of through you and through your heart. The other two pins are live and neutral these two are the ones that must connect to the contacts in a socket to cause an electrical circuit.

You may have noticed that the ground pin is slightly longer than the other two pins, this is for a very important reason. If you look at a socket in your house and look where the live and neutral pins would have to be inserted you might notice something, there are plastic shutters covering the metal contacts that you won’t be able to open, no matter how hard you try. In order to open these shutters you must first insert the earth pin, this causes the shutters to open and the live and neutral pins to make contact with the metal inside to complete the circuit. This makes it extremely difficult for a child with a fork to electrocute themselves by accident as they have to simultaneously open the shutter and insert the fork at the same time.

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