Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Trivia Facts

1. Chewing on gum while cutting onions can help a person from stop producing tears. Try it next time you chop onions.

2. Until babies are six months old, they can breathe and swallow at the same time. Indeed convenient!

3. Offered a new pen to write with, 97% of all people will write their own name to test it.

4. Male mosquitoes are vegetarians. Only females bite.

5. The average person's field of vision encompasses a 200-degree wide angle.

6. To find out if a watermelon is ripe, knock it, and if it sounds hollow then it is ripe.

7. Canadians can send letters with personalized postage stamps showing their own photos on each stamp.

8. Babies' eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.

9. It snowed in the Sahara Desert in February of 1979.

10. Plants watered with warm water grow larger and more quickly than plants watered with cold water.

11. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.

12. Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.

13. Those stars and colours you see when you rub your eyes are called phosphenes.

14. Our eyes (Pupils) are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

15. Everyone's tongue print is different, like fingerprints.

16. Contrary to popular belief, a swallowed chewing gum doesn't stay in the gut. It will pass through the system and be excreted.

17. At 40 Centigrade a person loses about 14.4 calories per hour by breathing.

18. There is a hotel in Sweden built entirely out of ice; it is rebuilt every year.

19. Cats, camels and giraffes are the only animals in the world that walk right foot, right foot, left foot, left foot, rather than right foot, left foot .

20. Onions help reduce cholesterol if eaten after a fatty meal.

21. The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.

(Thanks Karthick)

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Golden Ray photos of amazing mass migration

Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico.




The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.

Gliding silently beneath the waves they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.




Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks.

She said: "It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.

"It's hard to say exactly how many there were but in the range of a few thousand.




"We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too.

"I feel very fortunate I was there in the right place at the right time to experienced nature at his best."




Measuring up to 7ft (2.1 metres) from wing-tip to wing-tip, Golden rays are also more prosaically known as cow nose rays.

They have long, pointed pectoral fins that separate into two lobes in front of their high-domed heads and give them a cow-like appearance.

Despite having poisonous stingers they are known to be shy and non-threatening when in large schools.

The population in the Gulf of Mexico migrates, in schools of as many as 10,000, clockwise from western Florida to the Yucatan.

News source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3345275/Golden-Ray-photos-of-amazing-mass-migration.html