Most carnivorous plants eat flying, foraging, or crawling insects. Those that live in or around water capture very small aquatic prey like mosquito larvae and tiny fish. On rare occasions, some tropical carnivorous plants have even been reported to capture frogs, or even rats and birds (although these creatures were probably sick or already near death)!
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it
"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."
My name is Hamsler, im 17. you can call me hammy. i live in new york, but i am dominican. i love science, skateboarding, and weed.
BLUE PORCELAIN CRAB
Not true crabs, Porcelain crabs are small, usually with body widths of less than 15 millimetres (0.6 in). They share the general body plan of a squat lobster, but their bodies are more compact and flattened, an adaptation for living and hiding under rocks.
Porcelain crabs are quite fragile animals, and will often shed their limbs to escape predators, hence their name. The lost appendage can grow back over several moults.
Porcelain crabs have large chelae (claws), which are used for territorial struggles, but not for catching food. The fifth pair of pereiopods are reduced and are used for cleaning.
Neanderthal
Neanderthals looked much like modern humans only shorter, more heavily built and much stronger, particularly in the arms and hands. Their skulls show that they had no chin and their foreheads sloped backwards.
The brain case was lower but longer housing a slightly larger brain than that of modern humans. As almost exclusively carnivorous, both male and female Neanderthals hunted.
Evidence of a huge number of injuries - like those sometimes seen in today’s rodeo riders - suggests that hunting involved dangerously close contact with large prey animals.
male seahorses give birth instead of females
Male seahorses are equipped with a brood pouch on their ventral, or front-facing, side. When mating, the female deposits her eggs into his pouch, and the male fertilizes them internally. He carries the eggs in his pouch until they hatch, then releases fully formed, miniature seahorses into the water.
Photograph by George Grall
More Scientific Studies Indicate That Cell Phones MAY be Harming Bees Scientists may have found the cause of the world’s sudden dwindling population of bees – and cell phones may be to blame. Research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland has shown that the signal from cell phones not only confuses bees, but also may lead to their death. Over 83 experiments have yielded the same results. The impact has already been felt the world over, as the population of bees in the U.S. and the U.K. has decreased by almost half in the last thirty years – which coincides with the popularization and acceptance of cell phones as a personal device. But also, via the Daily Mail: But British bee expert Norman Carreck of Sussex University said: ‘It’s an interesting study but it doesn’t prove that mobile phones are responsible for colony collapse disorder. If you physically knock a hive, or open one up to examine it, it has the same result. ‘And in America many cases of colony collapse disorder have taken place in remote areas far from any mobile phone signals.’
Evolutionary Comparison Finds Shocking History for Vertebrates
Evolutionary biologists from Cornell University have discovered that just about every vertebrate on Earth including humans descended from an ancient ancestor with a sixth sense: the ability to detect electrical fields in water.
About 500 million years ago there was probably a predatory marine fish with good eyesight, powerful jaws and sharp teeth roaming the oceans, sporting a lateral line system for detecting water movements and a well-developed electroreceptive system to sense predators and prey around it. The vast majority of the 65,000 or so living vertebrate species are its descendants.
Gold-mine worm shows animals could be living on Mars
The tiny worms – just 500 micrometres long – were found at depths ranging from 900 metres to 3.6 kilometres, in three gold mines in the Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg. That’s an astonishing find given that multicellular organisms are typically only found near the surface of the Earth’s crust – Onstott’s best guess is in the top 10 metres. The creatures seem to live in water squeezed between the mines’ rocks, can tolerate temperatures reaching 43 °C and feed off bacteria. Carbon dating of compounds dissolved in the water suggests that the worms have been living at these depths for between 3000 and 12,000 years. “To have complex life sustain itself for such a long period completely sealed away from everything else – from sunlight, from surface chemistry – is pretty amazing,” says Caleb Scharf of the Columbia Astrobiology Center in New York City. Onstott says no one thought multicellular organisms would be found living in this so-called fracture water. He points out that microbiologists are still trying to prove and understand how even single-celled organisms can exist at these depths. “The lack of oxygen, temperature and food is a big dissuader,” he says. “We’ve had this preconception that there can only be certain types of organisms in certain environments,” says Scharf. “But it’s not true at all. There are more complex organisms in these bizarre environments.” If complex life forms are able to survive inside cracks deep inside Earth, it raises the possibility that they might have survived undetected in similar environments on Mars. Carl Pilcher, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in Moffett Field, California, points out that Onstott has previously discovered a bacterium living 2.8 kilometres underground, completely isolated from all other ecosystems on Earth The bug gets its energy from the radioactive decay of elements in the surrounding rocks. “The significance was that you could imagine an ecosystem existing in the subsurface of a planet that didn’t have a photosynthetic biosphere, like Mars,” he says.
Assassin bug sneaks up on spiders under the cover of wind, then impales them
“Among the many creepy denizens of Australia, the assassin bug is right at home. With its erratic, long-legged walk, it stalks along spiders’ webs, caressing its prey with its antennae and then stabbing them with its beak. Now, scientists who spy on these spider-eaters report that the bugs have yet another charming behavior in their toolkit: using the breeze as cover when they go in for the kill.”
(via philosophyweedscience)
Pooping pandas may make better biofuels
Pandas eat bamboo almost exclusively, but don’t have a multichambered stomach like cows to help digest all those plants. It’s basically in one end and out the other, and “anything residing there to break down woody material has to be very efficient,” says Candace Williams, a graduate student on Brown’s team.
Williams began by studying how pandas extract nutrition from bamboo, and says it was natural to think of other things to do with the feces she got from YaYa and LeLe at the zoo. So for 14 months she counted members of eight common bacterial groups, such asClostridium, within the poop. Williams discovered 12 species of waste-digesting bacteria, including at least one never before seen in pandas.
Study shows dogs can sniff out lung cancer
This is the sort of ‘animal testing’ we should be doing.
(via fyeahcarlsagan)
