Mildly interesting
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The inside of the leaning tower of pisa is empty.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Mildly interesting:
@jon-nyc said in Mildly interesting:
Fucking bacteria.
Apparently, you're not a biologist after all. Bacteria don't reproduce that way.
Since when has @jon-nyc ever considered that before hitting it?
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The Bullet Ant
The bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) is a tropical rainforest ant named for its powerfully painful sting, which is said to be comparable to being shot with a bullet.
Entomologist Dr. Justin Schmidt describes the sting from this venomous ant as ‘pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over a flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail embedded in your heel.’
When one ant stings, it releases chemicals that signal other ants in the vicinity to sting repeatedly. The bullet ant has the most painful sting of any insect, according to the Schmidt Pain Index. The pain is described as blinding, electric pain, comparable to being shot with a gun. Bullet ant stings produce waves of agony that last 12 to 24 hours.
Habitat: Tropical forests of Central and South America.
Nerdy Stuff: The primary toxin in bullet ant venom is poneratoxin. Poneratoxin is a small neurotoxic peptide that inactivates voltage-gated sodium ion channels in skeletal muscle to block synapse transmission in the central nervous system. In addition to excruciating pain, the venom produces temporary paralysis and uncontrollable shaking. Other symptoms include nausea, vomiting, fever, and cardiac arrhythmia.
The Sateré-Mawé people of Brazil use ant stings as part of a traditional rite of passage. To complete the initiation rite, boys first gather the ants. The ants are sedated by immersion in an herbal preparation and placed into gloves woven of leaves with all their stingers facing inward. The boy must wear the mitt a total of 20 times before he is considered to be a warrior.
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I didn’t know that a blight wiped out all the American chestnut trees in the late 19th century.
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From Foreign Affairs magazine:
"We stand at the beginning of history. For every person alive today, ten have lived and died in the past. But if human beings survive as long as the average mammal species, then for every person alive today, a thousand people will live in the future. We are the ancients. On the scale of a typical human life, humanity today is barely an infant struggling to walk."
Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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@Catseye3 said in Mildly interesting:
From Foreign Affairs magazine:
"We stand at the beginning of history. For every person alive today, ten have lived and died in the past. But if human beings survive as long as the average mammal species, then for every person alive today, a thousand people will live in the future. We are the ancients. On the scale of a typical human life, humanity today is barely an infant struggling to walk."
That’s the foundation of what is known as the doomsday principle. Basically a statistical argument for the notion that we are likely to destroy ourselves as a species well before we have a normal span of time on this planet, to say nothing of a future on other planets.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
