Science

WTF Fun Fact 12613 – Frogs Barf Their Guts Out

When we saw a webpage titled “Frog Vomit: Everything There is to Know,” we knew there would be something great to share with you. And by “great,” we mean we hope your stomach has already committed to holding down your breakfast because we’re going to talk about barf. (Emetophobics – that is, people who have a fear of vomit – turn back now.)

Ok, so most frogs have a unique way of tossing their cookies, so to speak. The little creatures can’t just hurl the way the rest of us do.

When we vomit, it’s because of signals in our brain that contract all of our major muscle groups – diaphragm, chest wall, abdominal muscles – put so much pressure on our stomachs that the contents are then forced up through our throats and through our mouths. You probably know the feeling. But next time you have to heave, just be glad your stomach is staying where it is because that’s not the case for most frogs.

No matter what you think of vomiting, we must be able to do it because it can keep us safe from anything toxic being absorbed into our bloodstream and killing us. So frogs are lucky, too, because they CAN vomit. It’s just a bit more of a production.

Frogs expel the contents of their stomach via a full gastric eversion. And while your worst hangover might have felt like that, it wasn’t. A full gastric eversion is when a body doesn’t just eject vomit, it ejects the entire stomach organ.

When frogs puke, they actually see their stomachs outside of their bodies. Of course, it doesn’t freak them out because that’s just how their species rolls. But what we find fascinating is that their stomach can just be out there, all like “hello, world!” and then go back in without much drama.

According to the experts, frogs can even give their stomachs a bit of a dust-off while they’re at it, wiping their bellies clean of whatever might be stuck in there causing a problem. Seriously, they’ll use their little froggy hands to wipe it right off, using the front, right hand (obvs). (Ok, we also didn’t know this, but the front, right hand of a frog is the closest to their expelled stomach due to the way the stomach is positioned in their bodies.)

If you’re wondering what happens next, it’s all relatively routine after that. They just pick their expelled organ up, plop it back in their mouths, and swallow it. After all, it’s the only way back in!

And there’s no chance of them biting it either since frog teeth (which, we’ll admit, we never really thought about) are only used to keep food in, not for chewing.

Frogs vomit for many of the same reasons we do – because there’s something in their stomach that is toxic, inedible, or simply too big (buffet-lovers, you know what we mean). Frogs can even vomit due to motion sickness!

Now, if something very unnatural happens in their environments and they cannot re-swallow their stomach for some reason, the frogs will suffocate and die. So if you see the little guys (and gals) in a rough situation, give them a minute to swallow before you interfere.

If you got this far, we know what you’re thinking. So there’s a video below where you can see a frog barf its stomach out. You’re welcome. (Oh, and if the pedant in you wants to point out that this is a toad, please note the fun fact that a toad is a type of a frog and that there is no official scientific distinction between the two creatures.) – WTF fun facts

Source: “Frog Vomit: Everything There is to Know” — Toads N Frogs

WTF Fun Fact 12612 – The Cowbird’s Secret Password

Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) have an interesting way of parenting.

Females (known as “brood parasites”) use all their energy to produce eggs and can even lay around three dozen each summer. It seems like a lot of babies, right? But they’d never know because they abandon them all to whatever feathery foster parents they can find. They lay their eggs in the nest of other birds and expect those birds to raise their young. They’ll even lay their eggs in a nest with other chicks already in it and expect the resident birds to evict their own young in favor of the newcomers!

Even more interesting is that they don’t choose other cowbirds – the babies are raised by completely different species of birds. There are at least 220 other species of bird that could find cowbird eggs in their nest one day, but individual females tend to choose one species with which to leave all of their eggs.

Cowbirds have been a challenge for scientists to understand because it’s hard to follow and get to know birds that don’t build nests. But we’ve had more luck in recent years as their habitats have become smaller, and they’ve moved closer to humans (although that’s not really a good thing for the birds).

So, you may wonder how cowbirds learn to become cowbirds if they are raised by other species. And that’s where the really interesting fact comes in.

Cowbirds eventually find their own kind and spend the rest of their lives associating with other cowbirds. They reunite with their species as juveniles, even though there’s no reason they should have the skills to recognize that they aren’t like their foster parents. (Bird brains aren’t that big.)

So how do cowbirds come to recognize one another? They have a password or “secret handshake” deal going on. Technically, it’s a very specialized chatter call. No matter their age, they can take to the trees, make their calls, and other cowbirds will come and find them. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Neural basis for parasitic cowbird’s secret password identified by researchers” — Science Daily

WTF Fun Fact 12600 – Potty-Trained Cattle

Did you know that cattle can be potty trained with less instruction than toddlers? Some say it’s “easier” or “faster,” but that’s really going to depend on your access to and familiarity with each. Still, we didn’t realize cows would have the inclination to do it at all!

Researchers and cattle ranchers have worked together in Germany to train cattle not to pee out in the open. And it’s not a matter of cleanliness; it’s a matter of survival. OUR survival.

There are around 1 billion cattle in the world. Each pees about 10 liters (or 5 gallons) a day. It’s a lot. But we all pee, so what’s the problem?

Well, there are a couple of issues here:
1. When cows release all that urine in barns, it mixes with poop on the floor and creates ammonia, leading to air pollution for nearby people.
2. When they pee in pastures, it leeches into local waterways. And while most places are equipped with treatment facilities, not all of that infrastructure is in great shape and can be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of potential pollutants in the water.
3. Cow urine also contains nitrous oxide. This substance gets trapped in the earth’s atmosphere and can prevent heat from escaping into space, increasing our planet’s average temperature.

So, if we can prevent all this, why wouldn’t we? And we can’t stop cows from peeing, so scientists want to see if they can capture the urine in a way that allows them to control it so that it causes less harm.

Potty training cows sounds ridiculous, but so does letting them pollute our atmosphere while we do nothing. (And let’s face it, we’re not getting rid of cows any time soon.)

Of course, they had to call it “MooLoo training,” so some of this remains pretty silly. The experiment also involved a “cow psychologist,” which is not something we ever heard about at career day.

Ok, so what does cow potty training actually look like? It’s not quite as bizarre as it sounds. It’s just a special pen with astroturf that cows can be trained to pee in. The floor is created in a way that allows the urine to be captured underneath. And some of it can even be used to make fertilizer.

Cows are pretty smart, but they’re also encouraged by food – so it didn’t take them long to realize they got a snack after using the “restroom,” making it much easier to train them.

The first experiment involved 16 cattle and the researchers had 11 of them trained after about 10 days.

Now that we know “MooLoo training” works, the goal will be to automate it so it can be adopted by farmers with much larger herds.

If you’re really eager to see a cow use the bathroom, there’s a video below!

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Potty-trained cattle could help reduce pollution” — Science News

WTF Fun Fact 12592 – The Robot Monk

Softbank’s former line of Pepper robots took on many tasks in Japan, including duties in hospitals, retail stores, and even Buddhist temples. Pepper was even programmed to become a stand-in for a Buddhist monk, news outlets reported in 2017.

While the robot monks can deliver blessings and beat a drum, their real purpose is to preside over funeral services in Japan, which has a significantly increasing elderly population.

The robot funerals not only pick up some slack when there aren’t enough human monks to go around, but they’re economical as well. A robot funeral cost about 1/5 of what a regular one would

It’s a question for the ethicists and theologians.

Another interesting fact is that human Buddhist monks have shown the same respect for robots as well, presiding over ceremonial funerals for obsolete robotic dogs in Japan.

– WTF fun facts

Source: “The Robot Priest” — Tech Top 10 List

WTF Fun Fact 12590 – The Spider That Eats Its Mother

It may sound like just another day at the office for some mothers used to giving their all to their children, but some spider moms really do make the ultimate sacrifice for their young.

It’s called matriphagy, the act of eating one’s mother, and it’s rare. But it happens in a spider species called Stegodyphus lineatus.

These spiders only have one group of babies throughout their lives. And when these spider babies are born, they are entirely dependent on their mothers to regurgitate food and feed it to them so they can grow up.

And what does she get in return?

Well, to be fair, the moms don’t put up a fight. After about two weeks of motherhood, they allow their children to consume them, leaving behind only an exoskeleton.

The spiders are native to Israel, and research into matriphagy in this species showed another interesting thing. Females that had given birth actually started to digest their own tissues before their gruesome deaths. Now, that might be a sign that the species just wasn’t designed to survive motherhood. However, Dr. Mor Salomon, a postdoctoral fellow in entomology at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Environment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also found that the ovaries and the heart were the last organs to degenerate.

It also seems that spider mothers know their time is limited because they stop maintaining their web after their babies begin to grow.

Please don’t assume that females who don’t give birth have it any easier. They also tend to sacrifice themselves when a member of the colony has babies. Researchers are still looking into whether this is conditioned behavior or part of the species’ biology. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Arachnid Matriphagy: These Spider Mothers Literally Die for Their Young” — Entomology Today

WTF Fun Fact 12589 – Lockheed Martin’s Metric Problem

In a move that John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s space policy institute, called “so dumb,” engineers at Lockheed Martin made a math error that cost millions.

Sloppy errors had plagued the U.S. space program for years by the time it all took place in 1999, but this mistake was one for the record books.

NASA’s rockets were being built by engineering powerhouse Lockheed Martin before being sent to NASA. Meanwhile, the Mars mission launched in early 1999 was run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the nine months between launch and mishap, no one had noticed that the math for the Orbiter’s orbiting program was off.

The LA Times explained:

“A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds.
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.”

Instead of landing on Mars, the Orbiter entered the planet’s atmosphere incorrectly and burned up upon entry, costing roughly $125 million.

The Times went on to explain why people were pretty fed up at this point:

“The loss of the Mars probe was the latest in a series of major spaceflight failures this year that destroyed billions of dollars worth of research, military and communications satellites or left them spinning in useless orbits. Earlier this month, an independent national security review concluded that many of those failures stemmed from an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement, and poor quality control at Lockheed Martin, which manufactured several of the malfunctioning rockets.”

The basic discrepancy wasn’t all Lockheed Martin’s fault. Engineers at the two facilities had been exchanging data for months and no one ever noticed the numbers were off.

There was a shot at redemption that year as the Mars Polar Lander was scheduled to set down on December 3, 1999, on the frozen terrain of Mars’ south polar cap.

Unfortunately, it crashed into the planet’s surface along with $165 million of hopes and dreams. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error” — Los Angeles Times

WTF Fun Fact 12581 – The Shrinking Human Brain

All jokes about human intelligence these days aside, it’s true that humans have smaller brains than ever before.

The human brain has been shrinking in size for tens of thousands of years (so we can’t blame video games or reality TV or politics). According to anthropologists, the brain volume of Homo sapiens has decreased by about 10% over the last 40,000 years.

We’re used to hearing about the increasing size of brains as humans evolved, but that is a trend that goes back millions of years in human evolution.

And to be fair, our brains may be smaller today, but they are still about 3x bigger than other primates based on body weight.

Anthropologists estimate the brain sizes of our ancestors by measuring the amount of room in the skull. The oldest ancestors of humans had brains the size of a modern chimp’s. The skull cavity could hold about 1.5 cups (to put it in quantities that are easier to picture).

Then, between 2 and 4 million years ago, craniums (and therefore brains) got bigger, distinguishing humans from other primate ancestors. They could hold about 2 cups.

If you go back “just” 1 million years (to our ancestors Homo erectus), their brains could hold 4 cups. And Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (going back about 130,000 years) had craniums that could hold 6 cups.

So if you go back far enough, you see that brain size did increase, up to a point. After that, they began shrinking in size.

Today, the average human brain holds around 5.7 cups. But why? We can only make assumptions.

For starters, human bodies got smaller once the Ice Age was over, and so did skulls and brains.

But Discover Magazine claims that the most convincing hypothesis comes from anthropologist Brian Hare, which he calls “survival of the friendliest.”

This hypothesizes that Stone Age societies valued different, more domestic traits – specifically, ones that made humans more social. Social behavior is regulated by hormones that also affect brain and body size. So when we selected for these behaviors (by breeding with more social humans), we also chose genes that made bodies and brains smaller.

A reduction in skull and brain size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may be that we needed less brain volume as we began to live in collectives, cooperate, and rely on our communities. In other words, now we share the burden of survival with others, so our brains don’t have to hold every element of survival. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age” — Discover

WTF Fun Fact 12579 – Viruses Aren’t Living Things

There’s really not that much disagreement in the scientific community – in fact, what constitutes being “alive” is more of a philosophical question. But at some point, it’s both helpful and fascinating to think about what really counts as “being alive.”

In many ways, viruses simply don’t make the cut, even though we talk about them as if they were alive. But that’s because we tend to use metaphors of living things to describe them.

Why not? Well, here are a few reasons:
– They cannot carry out any metabolic processes on their own (generally the definition of being alive)
– They cannot reproduce on their own, only replicate within a host cell.
– They don’t have ribosomes (in fact, they don’t even have cells)
– They cannot produce energy or control the environment in which they exist (only replicate in it).
– They cannot independently form proteins from messenger RNA
– They’re just so darn small (which, to be fair, is not a big part of the argument but something to consider).

In the end, they are just a jumble of protein and RNA that needs a spark of life from somewhere else to do anything at all.

Of course, there are some arguments to the contrary. Those who believe viruses should be considered living things point out the following:
– They have genomes
– They can evolve
– Under the right conditions, they do have the ability to reproduce (even if it’s not on their own)

So perhaps viruses are in between somewhere, only being alive when they can reproduce. That’s something to consider, but only for fun really, since the answer won’t help us solve our viral issues. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Viruses Alive?” — The University of Texas at Austin Biodiversity Center

WTF Fun Fact 12570 – The Telephone’s Real Inventor

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was one of a handful of men who were working on a machine that transmitted vocal communications telegrphically. But we only remember him because he got to the patent office first (and he was already a well-known inventor).

Historians and government officials have since reexamined the research and found that Bell wasn’t actually the first to create the world-changing technology. That honor goes to an Italian-American immigrant and mechanical genius from Florence, Antonio Meucci.

In fact, in 2002, U.S. Congress recognized an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell. The Guardian reported, “Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognize a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.”

“It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged,” the resolution stated. (You can read the resolution (107th Congress, H Res 269) on Congress.gov.)

While you might think there was a mad dash to the patent office, it’s actually the case that 16 years went by between Meucci’s demonstration of his “teletrofono” in New York in 1860 and Graham’s 1876 patent.

However, it was Bell’s telephone design that ended up being used to create the first telephones, so he does deserve some pretty massive credit. It’s just that Meucci deserves some and well and never really gets it.

The title of the most annoyed competitor of Bell’s likely goes to Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College. He actually sent his lawyer to the patent office on the same day. Bell’s lawyer got to the desk first on February 14, 1876. His filing was the fifth entry of the day, while Gray’s lawyer was 39th. The U.S. Patent Office awarded Bell with the first patent for a telephone (US Patent Number 174,465).

Some historians actually claim that Bell knew what was happening and may have bribed someone at the patent office to doctor documents showing his patent came in first, but we’ll probably never know. – WTF Fun Fact

Source: “Who is credited with inventing the telephone?” — Library of Congress