thepirata.com » Science

Fish With Human-Like Teeth

ehemplo — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:03:53 +0000

This freaky fish was caught in Lubbock, Texas back in 2006.

Fisherman Scott Curry reeled in the 20-pound fish on Buffalo Springs Lake and immediately noticed the catch had human-like teeth. It has since baffled wildlife officials in the area.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuNc5PyrxJY

[via clickorlando]

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Fly Like An Imperial Eagle

ehemplo — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:22:31 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZrdlud-btU

Jose Luis Ortiz attached a video cam to his Imperial Eagle pet to document it’s “Birds Eye View”. This provides a “euphoric” kind of state on what it is like to soar like an eagle. Absolutely beautiful…

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Student Wins $10K For Building Homeless Shelter From Trash

ehemplo — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:25:11 +0000

12-year-old AMSA student Max Wallack is the Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Trash To Treasure competition sponsored by Intel.

The people at the WGBH show “Design Squad” selected Wallack’s idea from more than 1,000 entries for their Trash to Treasure contest. As the grand prize winner, he will receive $10,000 from the Intel Foundation and a Dell laptop powered by Intel computer.

Wallack, a ninth-grader at Advanced Math and Science Academy in Marlborough submitted his project the “Home Dome“, which is primarily a shelter for the homeless made from plastic, wire and packing peanuts.

About his invention:

The Home Dome is a makeshift dwelling in the shape of a Mongolian yurt. Made of packing peanuts stuffed into plastic grocery bags, it gives a new use to bulky and difficult-to-dispose of packing peanuts. The Home Dome includes a built-in bed that anchors the structure to the ground using the weight of the person inside.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJAaMQuEFl8

SOURCE

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Nanoparticles Make Surface Too Slippery For Bacteria To Hold

munky — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:32:17 +0000

The researchers adopted polishing technology used in the semiconductor industry (chemical mechanical planarization) to polish the surface of human teeth down to nanoscale roughness. Roughness left on the tooth after the polishing is just a few nanometers, which is one-billionth of a meter or about 100,000 times smaller than a grain of sand.

Bye bye tooth decay!

Source

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How To Make Water Bounce On A Surface

ehemplo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:28:33 +0000

Holy shit, you can actually bounce a water in a superhydrophobic (whatever) surface!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvrqFvNTIY

Ok, I googled it. Superhydrophobic are materials that have surfaces that are extremely difficult to wet. So, the water will somehow resist this kind material.

Using a high-speed camera GE scientists captured the details of the water dancing on superhydrophobic surfaces in GE Global Research’s Nanotechnology lab.

Here is their statement:

Hello everyone, I have some exciting videos that I want to share with you! Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, we can finally capture the details of the water dancing on these amazing superhydrophobic surfaces. We discovered that even when the surfaces had the same contact angle for stationary water droplets, their ability to resist the wetting of impacting droplets could be totally different. In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface.

Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off… that’s what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface! You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.

Amazing stuff!

SOURCE

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Excavating A Giant (538 Square Feet) Ant Colony

munky — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:25:40 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQERRbU23bU

The structure covers 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. In it’s construction, the colony moved 40 tons of soil. Billions of ant loads of soil were brought to the surface. Each load weighed four times as much as the worker ant, and in human terms, was carried over 1/2 mile to the surface.

In the video, the scientists pour ten tons of liquid concrete into the ant colony, wait several weeks for it to set then excavate it.

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16 Unusual Facts About the Human Body

ehemplo — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:14:25 +0000

1. Don’t stick out your tongue if you want to hide your identity. Similar to fingerprints, everyone also has a unique tongue print!

2. Your pet isn’t the only one in the house with a shedding problem. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour. That works out to about 1.5 pounds each year, so the average person will lose around 105 pounds of skin by age 70.

3. An adult has fewer bones than a baby. We start off life with 350 bones, but because bones fuse together during growth, we end up with only 206 as adults.

4. Did you know that you get a new stomach lining every three to four days? If you didn’t, the strong acids your stomach uses to digest food would also digest your stomach.

5. Your nose is not as sensitive as a dog’s, but it can remember 50,000 different scents.

6. The small intestine is about four times as long as the average adult is tall. If it weren’t looped back and forth upon itself, its length of 18 to 23 feet wouldn’t fit into the abdominal cavity, making things rather messy.

7. This will really make your skin crawl: Every square inch of skin on the human body has about 32 million bacteria on it, but fortunately, the vast majority of them are harmless.

8. The source of smelly feet, like smelly armpits, is sweat. And people sweat buckets from their feet. A pair of feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.

9. The air from a human sneeze can travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour or more — another good reason to cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze — or duck when you hear one coming your way.

10. Blood has a long road to travel: Laid end to end, there are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. And the hard-working heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through those vessels every day.

11. You may not want to swim in your spit, but if you saved it all up, you could. In a lifetime, the average person produces about 25,000 quarts of saliva — enough to fill two swimming pools!

12. By 60 years of age, 60-percent of men and 40-percent of women will snore. But the sound of a snore can seem deafening. While snores average around 60 decibels, the noise level of normal speech, they can reach more than 80 decibels. Eighty decibels is as loud as the sound of a pneumatic drill breaking up concrete. Noise levels over 85 decibels are considered hazardous to the human ear.

13. Blondes may or may not have more fun, but they definitely have more hair. Hair color helps determine how dense the hair on your head is, and blondes (only natural ones, of course), top the list. The average human head has 100,000 hair follicles, each of which is capable of producing 20 individual hairs during a person’s lifetime. Blondes average 146,000 follicles. People with black hair tend to have about 110,000 follicles, while those with brown hair are right on target with 100,000 follicles. Redheads have the least dense hair, averaging about 86,000 follicles.

14. If you’re clipping your fingernails more often than your toenails, that’s only natural. The nails that get the most exposure and are used most frequently grow the fastest. Fingernails grow fastest on the hand that you write with and on the longest fingers. On average, nails grow about one-tenth of an inch each month.

15. No wonder babies have such a hard time holding up their heads: The human head is one-quarter of our total length at birth but only one-eighth of our total length by the time we reach adulthood.

16. If you say that you’re dying to get a good night’s sleep, you could mean that literally. You can go without eating for weeks without succumbing, but eleven days is tops for going without sleep. After eleven days, you’ll be asleep — forever!

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The Most Painful Insect Bite On Earth

ehemplo — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:12:52 +0000

Ever wonder what insect causes the most painful bite on earth?

Well, It's from this fella below:

This insect is called the Bullet Ant.

Its sting is said to be the most painful on earth.

It's called the bullet ant because the sensation of its sting has been likened with that of being shot by a bullet.

This bad boys dwells in the rain forests of Atlantic coastal lowland from Nicaragua southward to the Amazon basin.

The bullet ants populates on trees and if it falls on you, it has the habit to shriek before biting you in the ass. Seriously.

One of the first descriptions ever of a bullet ant’s sting on a human was made in the 1920's by Belgian natural historian Joseph Charles Bequaert (1886-1982). Such a sting is extremely painful and often compared with the pain caused by a bullet shot – hence the name bullet ant. For those who have not been shot but rather stung by a wasp, the pain caused by the sting of a bullet ant is 30 times worse…

Uhhm, did I mention it shrieks??!!

[image via nebarnix]

Now the best part:

Some indigenous people living in Nicaragua actually use the bullet ants as their initiation rites to manhood.

How?

The ants are first knocked out by drowning them in natural chloroform, and then hundreds of them are woven into sleeves made out of leaves, stinger facing inward. When the ants come to, boys slip the sleeve down onto their arm. The goal of this initiation rite is to keep the sleeve on for a full ten minutes without showing any signs of pain. When finished, the boys' (now men) arms are temporarily paralyzed because of the venom, and they may shake uncontrollably for days.

And they have to do it 20 fucking times! Ahhhhh!!

Talk about machine gun type of pain!

Need proof?

For your pleasure, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ6rFKhyn0

SOURCE

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