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Long has the platypus been referred to as a “freak” or a “joke by God.” But darn it, these critters are awesome, interesting and unique. If anything, they’re really super animals and everyone else is just jealous. After all, they take a little bit of all kinds of good animals and make one excellent and one-of-a-kind family of animals.
Photo Via Urville Djasim [Flickr]
The Platypus Is Not A Fake
Many of you have likely never seen a platypus in your local zoo. In fact, because most zoos only like to take animal species that are 1)native, 2)endangered or 3)can be successfully bred in captivity, few zoos actually have these weird critters. Platypuses are only native to a small area of the world, are completely not endangered and only a few platypus babies have been born under human-induced conditions. Given its sparse appearance in zoos and its truly bizarre appearance and features, it’s not entirely uncommon to hear people jokingly refer to the platypus as an imaginary creature.
Now just imagine you’re living back in 1798, when Europeans first discovered the creature. The first things they sent to the UK to prove its existence were merely a pelt and a sketch of the animal. Is it any surprised that most British scientists believed the creature was fake? Scottish zoologist Robert Knox was so certain that the dead animal was a fake that he actually took scissors to its skin to look for stitches.
It’s Named For Its Flat Feet and Bird Snout
This is one critter that is very adequately named. Most of us know the platypus by its common name, which is Greek for “flat foot.” This title was the original name of the creature, but couldn’t be used for its genus name because it turned out that the ambrosia beetle already had the title in its Latin name.
In 1800, physiologist Johann Blumenbach described the platypus as Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, meaning “paradoxical bird snout.” His name later developed into the official title for the animal, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, or “duck-like.” This is why you so often hear the term “duck-billed platypus,” even though there is only one species of the animal.
Plural Problems
You may have noticed this article has so far only mentioned the animal in its singular form. That’s no accident, pluralizing the creature has proven to be quite a problem not for just laymen, but even to scientists. There is still no universally accepted plural to the word. Most people believe the plural form should be “platypi,” but the real Greek plural would be “platypodes.” Scientists stay away from both of those terms and prefer to use “platypuses” or just “platypus” no matter how many in question.
If you ever get in a heated debate with someone about the subject, just remember –you’ll probably be right no matter what you say.
Watch Out, They’re Poisonous
Yes, on top of being one of only five mammals to lay eggs, the platypus also had to distinguish itself by being one of the few mammals to be venomous as well.
While both male and females are born with spurs on their rear ankle, the female’s will fall off within her first year. The males will begin to produce a venom mix in a kidney shaped-area behind their spur. This venom contains three proteins that are only found in the platypus and is powerful enough to kill small animals, including dogs. The venom is not lethal to humans, but may cause severe pain that lasts for weeks.
Because the males are the only ones with venom and the poison production rises during breeding season, it is believed that the main function of the venom is to help the animals assert dominance over one another.
Platypus Women Are All Funky
The males have poisonous barbs. That doesn’t make the female any less strange than the males. The platypus females are lacking teats of any kind and though they have two ovaries, only the left one is functional. In order to feed their young without any nipples, the female platypus secretes its milk through pores in its skin that are collected in grooves on her abdomen, where the babies lap it up.
How their chromosomes choose the animals sex in the first place is also strange. Whereas most mammals have only two sex chromosomes, platypuses have ten! While they are mammals in most ways, these chromosomes seem much closer to the sex chromosomes of birds. Scientists still don’t know how their sex determination system works.
Image Via ccdoh1 [Flickr]
It’s Electric!
Ok, that’s a little misleading. The platypus isn’t electric, but it does hunt using electric fields generated by the muscular contractions of its prey. These animals and echinadas are known as monotremes and are the only mammals known to hunt by electric current.
The platypus has electroreceptors in the skin of its bill that can be used to help it search for fish while underwater. When they are hunting, they close their eyes, ears and nose completely and dig in the bottom of a stream with their bill. They then load up their cheeks with food until they get back to the surface. Unlike many other semi-aquatic mammals, platypuses cannot hold their breath very long –only about 30 seconds or so.
They’re Quite Popular in the Media
The general public didn’t really know much about platypuses until 1939, when National Geographic published an article about the challenge facing scientists who were trying to raise the animal in captivity.
Since then, many people have fallen in love with the creature and its become a popular mascot for a variety of different things, including Mac OS X, the Brisbane Expo ’88 and the 2000 Sydney Olympics. It also is featured on the back side of the Australian twenty cent coin. Green Day and Mr. Bungle have songs about the animal and it is also a popular characters on children’s TV shows including Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
After several failed attempts to spread the Word of God through various grand schemes, Leonard Knight finally settled on building Salvation Mountain in the middle of the desert from discarded trash, sand and adobe. He painted it with inspirational quotes from the bible to help protect it from the weather.
Leonard decided to leave California but wanted to spend one extra week in the area to make a small memorial with a half bag of concrete he had lying around. Weeks begat months begat years and after tons of junk, sand, concrete and paint were assembled, Leonard had the 50-foot high creation he was after! Until it collapsed on itself.
Undaunted, Leonard rebuilt the mountain, this time using native adobe clay and straw. He applied paint liberally to keep the elements from washing away his work. Over the years, Leonard has applied well over 100,000 gallons of paint to his mountain of clay and debris as (he hopes) a lasting tribute to God.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
When it’s not their time to go, it’s not their time to go – regardless of what some people did, they just wouldn’t die. Jumping out of a 5th story apartment, getting hit by lightnings not once, not twice but seven times, or sticking a head inside a particle accelerator didn’t kill them.
Here’s three amazing stories of survival, of people who cheated certain deaths in the course of their lives. Take, for instance, Roy Sullivan, the guy who’s been hit by lightning 7 times:
They say that lightning never strikes the same place twice. Tell that to Roy Sullivan, who was struck a total of Seven Times In his life.
He was struck in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976 and 1977. Supposedly, he developed a case of paranoia after the third time and became convinced a higher power was out to get him. Mind you, considering the odds of being struck by lightning ONCE in 80 years are 576,000 to one, and the odds of being struck by lightning seven times are 10^25 to one, can you blame him?
Strangely it was not the lightning that killed him. He killed himself over unrequited love.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
Results from a 20 year study on monkeys and their diets show that eating fewer calories can help you live longer. Animals with a restricted diet of 30% were shown to outlive those that were given the freedom to eat what when and how much they wanted. The monkeys also had improved chances of avoiding age related diseases, cancer, diabetes and brain atrophy.
In terms of overall animal health, Weindruch notes, the restricted diet leads to longer lifespan and improved quality of life in old age. “There is a major effect of caloric restriction in increasing survival if you look at deaths due to the diseases of aging,” he says.
The incidence of cancerous tumors and cardiovascular disease in animals on a restricted diet was less than half that seen in animals permitted to eat freely. Remarkably, while diabetes or impaired glucose regulation is common in monkeys that can eat all they want, it has yet to be observed in any animal on a restricted diet. “So far, we’ve seen the complete prevention of diabetes,” says Weindruch.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
You Auto Lay an Egg (AKA It’s a Bird) is a 1930 short film by cartoonist Charley Bowers and directed by Harold L. Muller in which a freaky, talking, stop-motion bird lays an egg that hatches into a (real) full-size car.
It looks like they accomplished the trick by sawing the car into tiny bits frame by frame and then running the film backwards, but the results are truly astonishing however they were achieved (Remember, this is before the age of CGI). Set some time aside, because you’re probably going to watch this clip three time in a row.
– via monstersandrockets
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
The American Heart Association is funding a student project to develop a CPR certification program that uses the Nintendo Wii:
A biomedical engineering professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham envisioned a program for home computers that could sync via wireless with the Wii remote, and train users on proper resuscitation of people who have suffered cardiac arrest. The students hope to make the program available for download this fall, free of charge, on the American Heart Association’s website.
This video is about a man who lives with First-Person Shooter Disease (AKA Duke Nukem’s Disease) – he can only interact with the world in the manner of a video game character. Yet he bravely struggles on to overcome obstacles of hand-eye coordination and peripheral vision.
Via Geekologie
An animal rescue helped save three baby bunnies that were attacked by a dog and orphaned. The clinic workers noticed that a one-legged homing pigeon that also resided at the clinic began watching the babies through their cage and even sleeping just outside the cage door.
”Then suddenly, there were only two bunnies in the cage. To everyone’s surprise there was the tiny bunny under Noah’s wing sound asleep! That little bunny rabbit had crawled through the cage, preferring a featherbed!”
Now Noah, the pigeon looks after the bunnies and makes sure they are warm and well-cuddled.
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Craig Nelson offers ten lesser-known facts about the first human moon landing:
6. The “one small step for man” wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface.
7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle’s door because there was no outer handle.
8. The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag. NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and then took care not to accidentally knock it over.
Abigail Tucker presents some interesting historical facts about the traditional cake served at a wedding in the West:
One early British recipe for “Bride’s Pye” mixed cockscombs, lamb testicles, sweetbreads, oysters and (mercifully) plenty of spices. Another version called for boiled calf’s feet.
By the mid sixteenth century, though, sugar was becoming plentiful in England. The more refined the sugar, the whiter it was. Pure white icing soon became a wedding cake staple. Not only did the color allude to the bride’s virginity, as Carol Wilson points out in her Gastronomica article “Wedding Cake: A Slice of History,” but the whiteness was “a status symbol, a display of the family’s wealth.” Later, tiered cakes, with their cement-like supports of decorative dried icing, also advertised affluence. Formal wedding cakes became bigger and more elaborate through the Victorian age. In 1947, when Queen Elizabeth II (then Princess Elizabeth) wed Prince Philip, the cake weighed 500 pounds.
Although I approve of striking a blow against our would-be overlords, this move seems to be needlessly antagonistic:
Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets. At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return. Its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair. They could be out of work for a long time. Japanese industrial production has plummeted almost 40 percent and with it, the demand for robots.
It’s only a matter of time before rioting, unemployed robots kill us off, or take over and enslave us to work in their mines. Better go get some insurance now.
Link via Geekologie
The items featured here are so old, obsolete, awful or just plain stupid that we are horrified that people might be actually checking these items out and depending on the information.
This blog contains actual library holdings. No specific libraries or librarians are named to protect the guilty. Check your shelves, it could be you.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
Musicians and scientists have re-created a lost musical instrument known as the ‘lituus’:
In 1737-8, Johann Sebastian Bach composed and performed a cantata, “O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht” (”O Jesus Christ, light of my life”). Among the instruments called for in the score are “two Litui.” However, the Lituus is a forgotten instrument. No one has played or heard the instrument in modern times; there aren’t even illustrations of one.
Musicians at a Swiss conservatory, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (SCB), had heard of a computer program developed by a University of Edinburgh Ph.D. student to help in the design of modern brass instruments. The SCB provided a group of Edinburgh scientists with design requirements, such as notes that would have been played with the Lituus, how it sounded and how it might have been played. (Though likely made of wood, the Lituus qualifies as a brass instrument.) The result: a two-and-a-half-meter-long horn made of pine with a flared bell at one end and a mouthpiece made of cow horn at the other. And they built two.
Geek Dad has a list of one hundred skills that he thinks that every geek should know. A few examples:
26. Boot a computer off a thumb drive.
40. Transcode a DVD to play on a portable device.
71. Explain that the colours in a rainbow are roygbiv.
84. Know where your towel is and why it is important.
96. Have a documented plan on what to do during a zombie or robot uprising.
100. Get something on the front page of Digg.
What is your geek quotient? What would you add to the list?
Ever cuss a blue streak after hitting your thumb with a hammer? You may be helping yourself cope with pain:
Holy @$#%! According to neuroscientists from Britain’s Keele University, dropping the f-bomb can actually relieve physical pain. In the upcoming August 5th issue of the journal NeuroReport, the researchers say swearing is a different phenomenon than most language. It activates emotional centers in the right side of the brain, rather than those &#*@ing cerebral areas reserved for regular #$#y communication in the left hemisphere.
The researchers had groups of undergraduate students submerge their hands in a tub of witch$@&#* cold water and repeat the swear word of their choice. And students could tolerate the icy abyss much longer than when they were only allowed to say more socially acceptable words. The researchers say the foul-mouthed students also had increased heart rates, which indicates that swearing activates a &#*@ing classic “fight or flight” response. You know, when you act all bad$(# to downplay the fact that you’re scared @$#%^ss.
Image by flickr user Billie used under creative commons license
The Gibson electric guitar was patented in the United States seventy-two years ago today. The first electric guitars were developed by the mid-30s in response to the needs of guitarists in jazz orchestras to produce more volume. These were played flat on the lap and became popular with Hawaiian bands. Guy Hart, general manager of the Gibson guitar company, worked on a better design in order to exploit this market:
In late 1935, Gibson rolled out the E-150, its first electric, Hawaiian-style lap steel guitar. It came with an amplifier (just like all electric guitars of the era), and the whole package sold for $150 (more than $2,300 in today’s leaf).
Unlike Rickenbacker’s “frying pan,” Gibson’s guitar actually looked like a guitar, complete with round feminine curves, shoulders and scooped waist. Early models were made of aluminum, but in early 1936, Gibson started building them out of the same wood as its acoustic instruments, making the E-150 look more like a traditional guitar.
Soon thereafter, Gibson duplicated the success of the Hawaiian model by adapting one of its more common “Spanish style” guitars into an electric.
Image by flickr user crandlehall2008 used under creative commons license
The United States has few castles, so each one stands out as unusual. Above is a picture of Martin Castle, built in the 1960-1970s by real estate developer Rex Martin. He built it when his wife became enamored of castles after a trip to Europe. Construction was never finished because Martin and his wife divorced. He has since tried to find a buyer that might want to turn it into a museum.
Link via The Presurfer
Index of castles in the United States
They make train robberies look so easy in the movies, don’t they? You jump on to a train with guns a-blazin’ and a bandana covering your face, rob the safe and jump off, never to be caught. But in real life, the gangs who robbed trains were almost always caught and brought to justice. Here are a few of their stories.
Photo from History of the James-Younger Gang
Police had no clue what had happened and a two-month investigation ensued. Hundreds of people were questioned without any hope of a lead, but by August, suspicion fell on Edward Agar. Agar was sent to prison for passing a fake check, but wanted to make sure that the mother of his child had money to provide for the young one. He informed her that she would be receiving £7,000 from a colleague of his, and when the money didn’t show, he blew the whistle on the whole operation. He and the colleague, William Pierce, had hatched a complicated plot to steal the gold years earlier. They involved a clerk in the railway office when they found out that he briefly had possession of the keys that locked the boxes the gold was sealed in; the clerk was able to get the keys to Agar who made an impression of them in wax and later had the keys replicated.
There was a second key to the safes that wasn’t quite as easy to get. Agar ended up sending a £200 box of bullion on the same route (under an assumed name, of course), then showed up to collect it and watched the clerk carefully to see where he got the second key to the safe. Turned out it wasn’t quite as complicated as they thought – the key was simply stored in a cupboard that wasn’t very well guarded at all. When the time came, Agar and Pierce strolled right into the office when it was unoccupied and made a quick wax imprint of the key.
They brought the lead shot onto the train in carpet bags; Pierce got into a first class carriage and Agar boarded with the train’s guard, James Burgess, who was in on the whole thing. Agar took the iron bars off with a mallet and chisel, replaced the gold bars with lead shot, replaced the iron bars and stuck a new wax seal on the box to make it look like it had never been tampered with.
When Agar turned Pierce in, police recovered about £2,000 of the £12,000 worth of gold stolen.
Michael Crichton later based his novel The Great Train Robbery on the incident, which was turned into a movie starring Sean Connery as William Pierce. (pictured)
Photo from MGMHD.
On October 6, 1866, the Reno brothers jumped onto an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train in Indiana and emptied one of the safes. They tossed another one out the window so they could take it with them, and then they jumped off of the train, completing the first train robbery in the United States. It was definitely a catching trend – in the two weeks following the Reno brothers’ first moving holdup, two more trains were robbed. A passenger testified that he saw the faces of two of the robbers from the first holdup, but after he was shot and killed, other passengers clammed up and none of the burglars were charged. At least, not at that time. After their fifth robbery a couple of years later, the Pinkertons finally caught up with the Reno brothers. Ten agents were waiting on the train to bust the boys, and although most of them escaped, they were arrested the next day.
Some members of the gang were hanged, but a lynch mob got to the others before official justice could be served.
They didn’t pull it off, though – the gang left the train rife with fingerprints, and left all kinds of evidence littered about the farmhouse they took refuge in for five days in Buckinghamshire. Not only were fingerprints found, they were allegedly found on a Monopoly board that the robbers had used to amuse themselves with while they were holed up. They used real money, of course.
13 of the gang members were eventually caught (that’s a few of them in the picture), although at least one of them didn’t stay caught for long. Ronnie Biggs escaped about 15 months into his prison sentence and moved to Paris, where he had plastic surgery. Then he moved to Australia and lived under the radar for quite a few years, until his identity was exposed, forcing him to move to Brazil. He lived there until 2001, when a series of strokes made him want to return to England to buy a proper pint before he died, although most people suspect he wanted the healthcare. He was returned to jail to finish out his sentence and is still there – Biggs was just denied parole on July 2 because the Justice Secretary felt that “Mr. Biggs is wholly unrepentant.”
Photo from HowStuffWorks
