How do wombats poop cubes?
science.orgI climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards
I hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)
> if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes.
That is complete bullshit and you shouldn't be posting it this confidently.
Those seeds are very poisonous, yes, but not in that cartoonish way. It's not cyanide.
even cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI
substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
If they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.
There has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.
Taxine alkaloids[0]
It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams.The estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of taxine alkaloids is approximately 3.0 mg/kg body weight for humans.[27][28] Different studies show different toxicities; a major reason is the difficulty of measuring taxine alkaloids.[29]Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
> Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
How much is in one seed?
I could only find a few sources saying that you would need to eat about 50g of the needles to reach the LD, and that's... A lot. There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.
Not being a killjoy here, I grew up around yew trees and I was always told to be careful of them, but not with any sense of panic that would suggest "any exposure at all will kill”. I think you'd have a bad time even with low exposure but death seems unlikely by accident.
A child might not need the whole 50g.
Not a good way to go, BTW: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462509/
This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.
Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
I think one of the problems is people thinking kids are more stupid than they are, and blanket "don't do that" statements without explanations don't really work for kids.
If they had told you they were highly poisonous instead of just telling you "not to eat them" you might have taken them more seriously. And if they had given you a taste of the red berry around it (which is sweet but not that special either, and the texture is not great) you might just have thought it was not necessary to play with them at all.
But that requires education at all levels, around here (Belgium) I sometimes see parents who seem deadly afraid of anything nature, I tell my kids to eat blackberries and they softly tell their kids next to us not to do that. You end up with generations who just don't know anything about what's around them and will eventually do stupid things.
It takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.
The always excellent Oatmeal:
We need to have a conversation about wombats
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats
Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.
Well, Mr. Oatmeal is apparently repeating an urban legend. I look at a wombat, and no way do I believe that thing can move at 25 mph (40 kph). I found a piece[0] which indicates this might have been some confusion as to metric vs imperial decades ago that was then retransmited through the ages.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-04-13/how-fast-can-...
We have four on the boundaries of our property. My 'Goldidor' (Labrador/retriever cross) has given chase a few times and has struggled to keep up. When they run they RUN. Maybe not pushing 40kph, not not far from it...
And yet the very article that you refer to confirms that anecdotal reports by the biologists studying these very animals report that during breeding seasons that the male Southern Hairy-Nose Wombat can reach these speeds in bursts:
>South Australian wildlife biologist [A/Prof] David Taggart has studied the southern hairy-nosed wombat since 1993. In the 2008 and 2024 editions of Strahan's mammal book, he writes that the southern hairy-nosed species can run at 40 kph. "I can confirm that I have clocked this species running at just over 40 kph, although they can't maintain that for long."
More non-peer reviewed information here from the Australian national science agency: https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/3758/Turns-out-wombat...
"exceptional excrement" "sharp-sided scat" "To get to the bottom of the mystery" "...aptly titled journal Soft Matter."
Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.
Nature keeps finding engineering solutions we would never arrive at from first principles
All that work I did for my PhD and I could have been studying this topic instead...
A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:
> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."
The other article [1] quote:
> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-bui...
Yes, good science writing almost always gets an opinion from someone not involved in the research for the article. I would guess varying definitions of "not involved" depending on the repute of the publication.
Yes I understand, it's just the feeling I get is a bit odd, like the thing you get at the end of the ad like "9/10 doctors recommend this".
I think this is just a way of breaking up the quote that adds attribution in the middle. Probably a common reporting phrasing more so than an LLM invention (Or maybe it's a real quote in both cases, but they used an LLM to write parts of the article, just making sure the quotes are correct in the end).
If someone hasn't submitted this for an Ig Nobel, it would be a calamity.
It literally won years ago[0]. On reading the headline, I thought that was where it would link.
Does the ignoble exist for anything else besides making fun of easy targets, like a bunch of sniveling teenagers?
Yes.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_PrizeIts aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think".Never have I considered the ignoble to be making fun of anyone. It is recognizing real, if bizarre, research. Science asking some real questions that make you appreciate the wonder of the universe.
Interesting. Somehow I never see people referencing them in this spirit, but that may be more on those people than on the price itself, perhaps.
https://soundcloud.com/noamhassenfeld/wombat-song
My kids can't stop laughing
Wombat Song by Noam Hassenfeld
Ending of Vox Unexplainable Podcast on Wombat cube poops
This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]
[0]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-abstract/17/3/475/708006/Int...
[1]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-supplement/708006/mov/d0sm01...
Related: drilling square holes, not as much fun as a wombat though.
Surely it has something to do with their square arseholes.
"God does not play dice with the wombats." – Einstein (maybe.)
I was so confused by wombat poop the first time I saw it. Wasn't sure what I was looking at so I poked it with a stick.
>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?
The pun in the title is just world class.
Discipline
Mojang should add them as a mob... and then have their poop be little spheres.
It’s hip to be square
well written and has a distinctly human feel to it, compared to the slop we get to read these days.
I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:
Spit it out man! It means CUNT.
Most school/education networks will have proxies and firewalls which limit access to "sensitive" destinations.
Avoiding triggering a profanity filter is a reasonable and sensible approach to publishing, for an educational site which wouldn't want to exclude part of their target audience.
I also really hate the word "poop". Its use as a noun and a verb here is particularly irritating. It just seems so childish.