Samsung UltraTouch and cute animals
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Archive for the ‘Animals & Pets’ Category
Crazy Raspberry Ants Eat Electronics
It sounds like the plot of a farfetched science fiction movie. Unfortunately for the residents of Texas, it is very much a reality: billions of tiny reddish-brown ants have arrived onshore from a cargo ship and are hell-bent on eating anything electronic.
Computers, burglar alarm systems, gas and electricity meters, iPods, telephone exchanges – all are considered food by the flea-sized ants, for reasons that have left scientists baffled. [...]
Crazy is the the right word. The ants are known as “crazy rasberry ants”: crazy because they seem to move in a random scrum as opposed to marching in regimented lines, and rasberry after a pioneering exterminator, Tom Rasberry, who first identified them as a problem.
The ants – also known as paratrenicha species near pubens – have so far spread to five counties in the Houston area. Scientists are not sure from where they originate but they seem to be related to a type of ant from the Caribbean. “At this point it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ants because they are so widely dispersed,” said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist. He added that the only upside to the invasion was that the crazy rasberry ants ate fire ants, which sting humans during the long, hot Texas summers.
Worse, the ants refuse to die when sprayed with over-the-counter poison. Even killing the queen of a colony doesn’t do any good, because each colony has multiple queens.
[via neatorama.com]
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Thousands of toads
Thousands of toads were spotted at a bridge in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, China, on May 9. According to local expert, the toads were enduring a mass migration because of the depleting oxygen resource in a nearby river.
From the pic it seems like the chance of survival for the toads are not looking good on the road too…
[via yeinjee.com]
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World’s most dangerous bird
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the Cassowaries are the world’s most dangerous birds, capable of dealing fatal blows. They are very unpredictable, aggressive creatures, especially if wounded or cornered. The Cassowary lives in the rain forests of Australia and New Guinea and are actually pretty shy animals if undisturbed, but if you get to close and it thinks you’re a threat you could receive a bone-breaking kick or get sliced by its dagger-like sharp claws. During WWII, soldiers stationed in New Guinea were warned to stay away from these birds, but some of them still became victims.
[via odditycentral.com]
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Buttered cat paradox
The buttered cat paradox is a joke paradox based on the tongue-in-cheek combination of two adages:
* Cats always land on their feet.
* Buttered toast always lands buttered side down.
The paradox arises when one considers what would happen if one attached a piece of buttered toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat, then dropped the cat from a large height.
Some people jokingly maintain that the experiment will produce an anti-gravity effect. They propose that as the cat falls towards the ground, it will slow down and start to rotate, eventually reaching a steady state of hovering a short distance from the ground while rotating at high speed as both the buttered side of the toast and the cat’s feet attempt to land on the ground.[1] This, however, would require the energy that keeps them rotating to come from the gravitational energy expended in the system’s fall; otherwise it would violate the Law of Conservation of Energy.
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