Asfag

02/01/2023

The pterosaurs—comparable in size to your average giraffe—had a wingspan of 35 feet and could fly for thousands of miles, according to National Geographic. "Instead of taking off with their legs alone, like birds, pterosaurs probably took off using all four of their limbs," paleontologist Michael Habib told The Telegraph. He says that using their strong arms as "the main engines for launching instead of their legs may explain how pterosaurs became so much larger than any other flying animals known."

02/01/2023

Of course, William Shakespeare wrote about both love and hate. However, he focused much more on the former than on the latter. In his plays alone, he used the word "love" 1,640 times and the word "hate" 163 times. And when it comes to Shakespeare's complete works, "love" appears a total of 2,209 times, according to Open Source Shakespeare.

23/12/2022

On July 1, 1941, the L.A. Dodgers were playing the Philadelphia Phillies in New York at Ebbets Field. And while the game was surely exciting on its own, those who were watching at home on the NBC-owned WNBT—now WNBC—also saw another exciting historical moment: the very first TV commercial shown in the United States.

23/12/2022

When most people think of rainforests, they picture massive jungles filled with trees and critters. However, somewhere in the Sargasso Sea sits the so-called "floating rainforest" that consists not of dense vegetation on land, but of seaweed under water.

According to Smithsonian magazine, each strand of brown Sargassum marine algae can grow to be the length of a school bus. When they become matted together in the water, the masses—or "forests"—of algae can be as large as several football fields. The seaweed is not only impressively long and large, but also provides the perfect place for a diverse collection of animals to live—not unlike an actual rainforest!

21/12/2022

The fact that some snakes are born with two heads is pretty incredible as is, but what about the added detail that these heads are actually two distinct parts that both work with one another and also see each other as competition?

19/12/2022

Animals That Sleep A lot

We know that sleep is vital to our health. Researchers have stopped searching how important is sleep because even if sleep could be overcome there would be at least one animal that would figure it out.

19/12/2022

Sloth Trivia | 40 facts about the cute animal

Sloths are a group of arboreal Neotropical xenarthran mammals, constituting the suborder Folivora.

19/12/2022

For years, mysterious 10-feet deep sand holes kept appearing, then disappearing in dunes at a national park in Indiana. After multiple people—including a six-year-old boy—fell in, scientists discovered that the holes were formed when sand-covered trees decayed over time.

A 2016 study by Indiana University Northwest's department of geosciences found that the trees were once covered in fungi that formed a cement-like substance that held its shape even when the tree rotted away. When the cement-like covering and the sand around it eventually gave way, it formed the holes.

19/12/2022

You're no doubt familiar with a shark's ability to detect even small amounts of blood in the water from as far as a quarter mile away. However, what you may not realize is that this is due to the animal's ability to "smell in stereo."

As reported in the journal Nature in 2010, sharks can detect tiny delays in the time it takes for a scent to reach one nostril compared to the other—even when it's just a fraction of a second. This delay allows them to determine from which side the scent came and in response, they can head that way in search of prey.

14/12/2022

Those who suffer from koumpounophobia will do their best to avoid anything and everything to do with buttons—looking at them, touching them, wearing clothing affixed with them, even thinking about them. If you suffer from this affliction, you're repulsed by buttons of every shape, size, color, and material. Anecdotal evidence, according to The Guardian, suggests that one in every 75,000 people lives with this phobia. But only one case study (from 2002) has ever been done.