Bizarre Newt Uses Ribs as Weapons

The Spanish ribbed newt has a pretty bizarre defense mechanism - when attacked, it secretes poison and pushes out its ribs until they pierce its skin, creating a row of sharp bones that act like barbs:

The newt has to force its bones through its skin every time it is attacked, say scientists, who have described the form and function of the barbs in detail. [...]

When the newt becomes agitated or perceives a threat, it swings its ribs forward, increasing their angle to the spine by up to 50 degrees.

As it does this, the newt keeps the rest of its body still.

"The forward movement of the ribs increases the body size and stretches the skin to the point of piercing it," says zoologist Egon Heiss of the University of Vienna in Austria.

The tips of the newt's ribs then stick outside its body, like exposed spines.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by dangana.


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Having worked in jobs where locations were maintained across the globe, time zones were one of the toughest things to deal with. Originally, we kept times on servers local to the location. This kept customers happy, but caused other issues. Every support team had to translate the time to their own locale. It was double the pain when you have to work across teams. This was even harder when individual countries would update time zone rules for short periods of time(EX. Egypt would change it for ramadan which is different every year).

Eventually we decided "set everything to UTC!" Still a pain, but at least you only have to do one conversion to local time instead of constantly looking it up.
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Like Zulu Time (GMT) in the Army. Places like Calais Maine and St. Stephen New Brunswick are two times zones (Atlantic and Eastern) across the river and border from each other. That was odd.
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