Animals
Amazing
Facts
- 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!
- Polar
bears can live for almost six months without eating.
- Cows
can smell odors six miles away.
- 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".
- After
bananas, a gorilla's favourite food is celery.
- 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.
- 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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