Woodpecker vs. Snake
A crimson-crested woodpecker battles an olive whipsnake on Peru’s Yarapa River. One presumes that the snake was stealing eggs or attacking chicks in the woodpeckers’ nest. The battle ends by the 3:00 mark.
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Killer Rabbits
For weeks, Armando Del Manso found dead snakes with teeth marks on his property near Cairns, Australia. He assumed his dog was killing the snakes until he saw two rabbits killing another snake!
“We were watching from the veranda with a spotlight, and I thought, who is going to believe this, they’ll think I’m crazy.”
He said the rabbits lived under a pile of wood in the backyard and were around the same size as a household cat.
“These are killer rabbits man,” he said.
“I’ve never ever seen or heard anything like this happening, it could be a breakthrough.”
The rabbits are apparently protecting two baby bunnies. Del Manso is glad to have the rabbits around, as he raises chickens and hasn’t lost any to a snake. Link -via Arbroath
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Snake Found with a Foot
A 16-inch snake was killed at a home in China and then found to have a foot growing out of its body! 66-year-old Dean Qiongxiu said she awoke to find the reptile clinging to a wall in her bedroom. She killed the snake with a shoe and when she saw the clawed foot, she put the body in alcohol to preserve it. It was taken to the Life Sciences Department at China’s West Normal University in Nanchang for study.
Snake expert Long Shuai said: “It is truly shocking but we won’t know the cause until we’ve conducted an autopsy.”
Link -via the Presurfer
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Carnegie Mellon Scientists Create Snake Robot That Can Crawl Up Your Leg
What do you get when you cross a snake with a robot? Howie Choset and the rest of the wily geniuses at Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created snakebots that can move by sidewinding, corkscrewing, rolling … and as you can see in the video clip, can also climb up your leg (yikes!)
All of us at Neatorama would like to be the first to welcome our new robot snake overlord: Link – via Suicide Bots
Previously on Neatorama: Snakebot and other robotic snakes
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Tower Snake by Huang Yong Ping
Photo: Gladstone Gallery
You’re looking at Tower Snake, a spiral ramp built with bamboo and cast-aluminum snake skeleton by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, currently on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York.
The Gallery describes Yong Ping’s creation in amusing art-speak as "subtly transforming the cruciform symbol of Christian salvation into the tangled figure of Edenic tempation" (huh?) but I say it’s pretty darn cool to imagine walking into the belly of a giant snake: Link | More photos at the Gladstone Gallery
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Scientists Solve Snake's Slithering Secrets
Snakes slither to get around but how exactly do they snake move? Scientists used to think that they move by pushing against objects like rocks but it turns out that something else is going on:
New research confirms that friction is indeed at work but instead at a microscopic scale: The snakes’ overlapping belly scales react against uneven areas on the ground, said lead study author David Hu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech
The reptiles don’t lie totally flat on the ground as they move, [...] David Hu said. "If you imagine you have a shoestring on the ground in the shape of an s, the curved parts of the s are lifted slightly, and the remaining weight is concentrated on the middle part of the s."
So snakes will lean on the lifted areas with the most force–an adaptation that allows them to travel much faster.
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Snake Charming School for Kids
When other kids are going to kindergarten, the children of the nomadic Indian tribe of Vadi are also going to school of sorts. Except that the ABCs aren’t in the curriculum – instead, these kids are learning to be snake charmers with real cobras:
Divided between the sexes, the act of snake charming with traditional flute is the role of the men, while the Vadi women care for the snakes and handle them when their husbands or brothers are not around.
‘The training begins at two, the children then are then taught the ancient ways of snake charming until they are ready to take up their roles in our community,’ said chief snake charmer Babanath Mithunath Madari, 60.
‘At twelve the children will know everything that they can know about snakes.
‘They are then ready to continue the traditions of the Vadi tribe which can be stretched back over one thousands years to India’s great Raja’s (kings).’
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VideoSift Clips of the Week
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There’s something very wrong with this kitchen I can’t believe we nearly bought this! A chilling tale of horror for house hunters. |
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Russian female enjoying an AK-47 I hope everyone was wearing their Kevlar vests – these guns have a bit of a kick to them. |
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Andy Warhol uses an Amiga 1000 to ‘paint’ Debbie Harry, 1985 Weird to think that the era of Andy Warhol intersected with the computer mouse – and he even seems fairly adept with it. |
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Monster Truck Does Quite Impressive Backflip And unlike most monster truck flips – I think this one was even on purpose. |
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Frog escapes from snake after being almost completely ingested A snake has just about swallowed an entire frog when suddenly the frog decides to fight back and eventually escapes up and out of the snake’s stomach. Score one for amphibians! |
For more the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
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Google Street View of a Man Walking His Boa Constrictor
Google Maps: Link
You’d walk your pet dog, so why not a pet boa constrictor? That’s exactly what Leon Kidd, 25, did when he got his pic snapped by Google Street View. Thank goodness, Telegraph was there:
Leon Kidd, 25, who has five snakes, was photographed with his 10ft red-tailed boa Nibblez as he carried her along Clarkson Road in North Earlham, Norwich, last summer.
Mr Kidd, who lives in nearby Gentry Place, said he goes out for walks with the female boa almost every day in the summer.
Despite her size and appearance Nibblez loves the outdoors and sliding around in the grass at Earlham Park.
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VideoSift Clips of the Week
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Ricky Gervais + Elmo = Hilarity! Set your piggies free: Link |
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Rube Golberg Corkscrew Machine |
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Bunny vs. Snake |
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My Legs Give Me Superpowers Who said what about disability now? Link |
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How Much is a Billion Dollars? Here's a video clip that puts it in perspective: Link |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift (good luck with the recovery, guys!)
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Nickel Particles Self-Assemble into Life-like Snakes
Physicists Alex Snezhko and Igor Aronson at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have made an interesting discovery. They placed nickel particles in a beaker of liquid, and applied a magnet hooked up to an alternating current. This alternating current switches the magnetic field back and forth. At a certain frequency, the nickel particles grouped together and moved around in the liquid in a life-like manner similar to snakes.
The study of how these inorganic materials form shapes and move has many potential benefits, from studying how primordial soup first formed, to medical applications.
“You have a deliberately nonbiological system, but it’s behaving a bit like a biological system,” says Iain Couzin, who heads Princeton’s Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory. “I just like the way that it spans across biology and physics in quite a beautiful way.”
And the research may one day have practical applications. Some day, the swimmers may be used to help scrub the surfaces of materials — or maybe they’ll hook up one of the snakes to a cell and drag it around. Wai Kwok, the head of the superconductivity and magnetism group at Argonne, calls attaching magnetic particles to living cells “feasible.”
“If you can do that, you can control an actual living organism,” Kwok says.
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Brady Barr Returns to Snake Cave
I hate snakes – it’s the one animal that really gives me the ooies. But I have to admit, they’re endlessly fascinating.
Here’s a YouTube clip of Brady Barr of National Geographic’s Dangerous Encounter coming back to a snake cave where he got bit a year ago. (Posted on Neatorama here):
… Brady’s back in Indonesia, dodging deadly vipers, trudging through waist deep guano and heading into the cave where he was bitten a year ago in search of a monster python. He’s going deeper, braving the dangers of the cave and using new techniques to try to capture one of the biggest snakes he has ever captured in his career.
Coming back? After the whole "I got a really baaaaad bite" thing? You’re so crazy, Brady!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Minjae Ormes!
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Jelly The Cat Cheats Death
This is one of the lucky cat! Nine-year-old Jelly was spotted by owner Wendy Wallis walking around with a copperhead snake wrapped around her neck and immediately called wildlife rescuers to have the snake removed.
“Both the cat and the snake seemed quite happy,” Ms Wallis said. “She didn’t show any signs of a bite last night, but this morning she was almost paralysed”.
“She is currently at the Montrose vet at the moment being pumped full of anti-venom, but the vet says she’ll recover fully.”
Ms Wallis said she snapped the picture through a glass door, but didn’t dare open the door as the cat would have walked inside.
Jelly may well be thinking “One life down, eight to go!”
Via: Mercury
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