An unnamed man went to get some cash from a Caja Madrid bank machine in Llodio, Alava, Spain and saw his cash coming from the slot -plus a snake! Even though the snake lunged toward his hand, he grabbed his money, then summoned the police. A bank manager activated the cash release that had trapped the snake, which was then boxed and taken to an animal shelter. Link -via Arbroath

The nearly universal human fear of snakes is caused by the minority of them that can kill you. Venomous snakes are found all over the temperate zones of the world. Find out which ones are the most dangerous, and whether they may be near you! Pictured is a small but deadly African snake called the boomslang. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Steven Gilham)

Photo Credit: AP

Not that one is to believe that two heads are better than one… especially when it comes to snakes!  Zookeepers in the Ukraine’s Skazka Zoo have experienced a doubling of visitors since this two-headed albino snake arrived on loan from Germany. Each head is able to act and think on its own.  Zookeeper Rusian Yakovenko stated that sometimes the two heads will fight for food, not realizing that it has the same destination. They’ll even steal food from each other, making feedings interesting, to say the least. Workers state that the three-year-old two foot long snake is quite a handful. The private zoo is in the resort of Yalta on the Black Sea.

Link

This snake takes a pretty picture! The Ruby-Eyed Green Pit Viper (Cryptelytrops rubeus) is a newly-discovered species that lives near Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and in Cambodia. National Geographic has more picture of the snake, including its attempt to eat an entire frog that’s as big as the snake. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

(Image credit: Jeremy Holden)

Melissa Moorhouse was riding the subway when her pet boa, Penelope, went missing.  Melissa notified the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and the car was searched. No Penelope!

Fast forward one month. A commuter spots Penelope on the red line.  The train car is taken out of service and searched. Penelope is found. Yippee! Snake and owner are reunited!

Melissa’s happiness, however, doesn’t last long.  She is now being billed $650 for the expense of searching the train and sanitizing the car.

“To rid the subway car of any traces of germs such as salmonella, which may have been left by your snake, MBTA maintenance crews had to scrub and disinfect the Red Line car in which your snake was found,” wrote Wesley Wallace, MBTA Treasurer.

Link

Someone bought this necklace featuring a snake fetus in a vial, but the Etsy seller has more vials of creepy things for sale. The necklace is part of a list of 10 Shockingly Creepy Pieces of Taxidermy Jewelry. Bones, feathers, teeth, and other animal parts are available for you to wear. But would you want to? Link

… a foot-long serpentine robot designed to assist in cardiac surgery. The device worms its way into a patient’s chest through a three-quarter-inch incision in the solar plexus. A surgeon controls movement of the robot’s head with a joystick, and the rest of its 102 joints snake along behind. A tiny, front-mounted camera lets the operator see where the Cardio Arm is going and make course corrections.

Daniel Lametti of Discover reports: Link

In the U.S. government-funded project, tablets of concentrated acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are placed in dead thumb-size mice, which are then used as bait for brown tree snakes.

In humans, acetaminophen helps soothe aches, pains, and fevers. But when ingested by brown tree snakes, the drug disrupts the oxygen-carrying ability of the snakes’ hemoglobin blood proteins.

“They go into a coma, and then death,” said Peter Savarie, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Wildlife Services, which has been developing the technique since 1995 through grants from the U.S. Departments of Defense and Interior.

Some of the mice are equipped with radio transmitters, so the success of the program can be tracked. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

(Image credit: George Grall/National Geographic)

Thanks to modern medical science, we now can see the process of a Burmese Python ingesting a rat in all its gory details:

Using a combination of computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), scientists Kasper Hansen and Henrik Lauridsen of Aarhus University in Denmark were able to visualize the entire internal organ structures and vascular systems (aka "guts") of a Burmese Python digesting a rat.

By choosing the right settings for contrast and light intensity during the scanning process, the scientists were able to highlight specific organs and make them appear in different colors. The non-invasive CT and MRI scans could let scientists look at animal anatomy without the need for other invasive methods such as dissections.

Link – via Rue The Day!

The bad news: It’s filled with snakes.

Atlas Obscura has more on the intriguing Snake Island of Brazil:

Off the shore of Brazil, almost due south of the heart of São Paulo, is a Ilha de Queimada Grande. The island is untouched by human developers, and for very good reason. Researchers estimate that on the island live between one and five snakes per square meter. The snakes live on the many migratory birds (enough to keep the snake density remarkably high) that use the island as a resting point.

That figure might not be so terrible if the snakes were, say, 2 inches long and nonvenomous. The snakes on Queimada Grande, however, are a unique species of pit viper, the golden lancehead. The lancehead genus of snakes is responsible for 90% of Brazilian snakebite-related fatalities. The golden lanceheads that occupy Snake Island grow to well over half a meter long, and they possess a powerful fast-acting poison that melts the flesh around their bites. Golden lanceheads are so dangerous that, with the exception of some scientific outfits, the Brazilian Navy has expressly forbidden anyone from landing on the island.

http://atlasobscura.com/place/snake-island-ilha-de-queimada-grande

Loyd Church, who lives along Vannoy Road, said he was in his garden last week when the snake snapped at him and bit him on his hand between his thumb and index finger.

"I was picking cucumbers, and he was hiding up under them vines," the soft-spoken Church said Friday.

Church, who avoids going to the doctor whenever possible, said he remembered seeing his father treat snake bites as a boy and decided to perform the same procedure.

"I gripped my hand and stuck it down in," Church said, describing how he used a knife to cut a slit between the two fang marks before sucking the venom out. He then killed the snake by stomping on it with his boot.

Now if that isn’t badassery, I don’t know what is: Link (Photo: Chris Petersen)

Note: here’s the appropriate first aid for snakebites

We found him sitting in front of a laptop computer, updating his website (www.snakeman.co.za) and contemplating making a cup of tea, though that would require some care, since a cobra had taken up residence in the cupboard with his tea bags.

"I had a cobra try to strike at me the other day, while I was making a cup of tea." [...]

His roommates include puff adders, snouted cobras, boomslangs and green and black mambas. "Collectively they are very, very dangerous. They would all put you in hospital. And untreated most of them will kill you," he said.

Ian Williams of NBC News World Blog has the story: Link | David Jones’ website

When University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Wilson stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur eggs, he discovered something quite remarkable – a death scene best described as "Anaconda" meets "Jurassic Park":

"It was amazing," Wilson recalls, "because we realized that not only do we have an egg, not only do we have a chain of vertebrae, but they are arranged in a coil, and on top of the coil was a skull."

The snake was coiled around the broken eggshell. "Next to that coil, eggshell, skull, was a solid egg, and another solid egg, and then some larger bones," says Wilson.

Those bones belonged to a baby sauropod. Full-grown sauropods were the vegetarian 100-ton giants of the dinosaur world. But the baby was only about a foot-and-a-half long. It had apparently just hatched from that broken egg. The snake, about 11 feet long, had been waiting for the baby to hatch in order to eat it.

Link

A variety of birds may use their crests and protruberant feathers to feel their surroundings.  Studies were conducted on auklets, who breed in dark, rocky crevices.

The researchers placed individual auklets into a dark experimental maze, designed to resemble a natural crevice, and recorded how often they bumped into things.  Both crested and whiskered auklets bumped their heads 2.5 times more often if their feathers on their heads had been artificially flattened.

When the ornithologists then compared the lifestyles of birds with their feather patterns, they found that “Birds that live in complex, cluttered habitats and are active at night tend to have a greater probability to express such facial feathers.”

Cat owners will not be surprised by this news, since whiskers serve an equivalent purpose.

Coincidentally, this week National Geographic is reporting the existence of a tentacled snake whose head appendages are used to find prey in murky lakes at night.

Link.

This may look like a snake attack, but it’s actually an ad on a bus inviting everyone to the Copenhagen Zoo. Link -via J-Walk Blog

YouTube link

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.

“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

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

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

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

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.

Link

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).’

Link

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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. Link
	Russian female enjoying an AK-47 I hope everyone was wearing their Kevlar vests – these guns have a bit of a kick to them. Link
	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. Link
	Monster Truck Does Quite Impressive Backflip And unlike most monster truck flips – I think this one was even on purpose. Link
	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! Link

For more the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift. ]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/13/24217/feed/ 5 http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/06/google-street-view-of-a-man-walking-his-boa-constrictor/ http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/06/google-street-view-of-a-man-walking-his-boa-constrictor/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 17:53:46 +0000 Alex http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/06/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.

Link

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	Ricky Gervais + Elmo = Hilarity! It doesn't get much better than this comedy gold Elmo interviews comedian Ricky Gervais (G to E: "do you know what necrophilia is?") Set your piggies free: Link
	Rube Golberg Corkscrew Machine British designer Rob Higgs was commissioned by Marcus Wilkinson of ONEOFONEHUNDRED to build this fantastic Rube Goldbergian contraption: an amazing mechanical device, made from almost 300 found objects, to uncork a bottle and pour a glass of wine. Link
	Bunny vs. Snake Which is more vicious a cute little bunny rabbit or a big snake? Find out here - the ending may just surprise you: Link
	My Legs Give Me Superpowers Athlete, actress and fashion model Aimee Mullins gave a talk at TED about a dozen or so of her prosthetic legs, and the superpowers they gave her: speed, beauty ... and an extra 6 inches of height! Who said what about disability now? Link
	How Much is a Billion Dollars? Most people understand $100 - even say, a million bucks. But what about a billion dollars? Just how big is that? 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!)

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

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!

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