Animals

Amazing Facts

1. Scientist at the University of Maryland have determined that the bumps on an alligators facial skin are so sensitive they can detect ripples from a single drop of water!
2. Polar bears can live for almost six months without eating.
3. Cows can smell odors six miles away.
4. Unlike most birds, who build their nests 10 to 20 feet off the ground, crows like to build their nests very high up in the trees -- sometimes as high as 120 feet up. That is why the lookout post on a sailing ship located at the top of the mast is called "the crow's nest".
5. After bananas, a gorilla's favourite food is celery.
6. A pond skater can walk on water because of surface tension. This is an attraction between molecules of water that creates a 'skin' on its surface.
7. Ribbon worms, which are named for their flat, ribbon like body are by far the longest worms in the world. A specimen washed up after a storm in 1864, at St. Andrews, Fife, on the coast of Scotland, was more than 55m long. A couple of strokes longer than an Olympic swimming pool, it is the longest animal ever found.

Interesting Articles

A Rat's Best Friend
It looks enough like a rat to fool real rats, but Atsuo Takanishi's creation is actually a miniature robot. In a recent trial, he and his colleagues at Waseda University in Japan placed rat and rat-bot together in an enclosure and prrogrammed the robot to head straight for a dish of food. Soon the rat began chasing its doppelganger as if it were a real animal and reached the food much faster than it would have on its own. Nect, Takanishi plans to see what happens when rats live with rat-bots for an extended duration. "Will the rats become lazy or selfish if the robots make things too convenient for them?" he wonders. He wants to figure out how to avoid such behavoral changes before humans begin interacting with personal robots. -Fenella Saunders

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