What – you haven’t heard of the latest competition?
Well, if you’re feeling funny (funny as in ha, ha, not strange), have a go at the May cartoon caption competition
It was time for some new aliens – evil ones – dressed is hot pink with bright purple feathers and a cigarette hanging half out their mouth.
And did you know Jupiter is a giant gas planet? I used to think all planets were just giant rocks, some with water if you were lucky like earth. Jupiter is made up predominantly of hydrogen (about 90%) and helium (9%) with a few sprinklings of some other elements.
And for those scientifically minded people out there, I know there are some errors in science within the making of this cartoon, but hey, that’s what’s great cartooning is all about – bending of the truth!
So, here’s the puzzle for the day. I can think of 2 obvious scientific errors – can you guess what they are? (I’ll post the answer, next time I post the adventures of these two new characters)
I remembered being taught about the 5 senses at school. I was surprised to discover that in the mean time scientists have added another 5 to the list.
- Balance and acceleration
- Temperature
- Kinesthetic sense
- Pain
- Other internal senses – a sense which is stimulated within the body
And to top that off, some animals have some really cool senses, we humans lack
- Electroreception – able to detect electric fields (some fish, sharks and dolphins)
- Magnetoception – able to detect direction using the earth’s magnetic field (typically observed in birds – so that’s how migratory birds do it!)
- Pressure detection – within the gas bladder organ of a fish to help it regulate buoyancy
- Current detection – enables fish to navigate, hunt and hang around in schools
- Polarized light direction – an orientation ability found in bees, helping them to navigate on cloudy days
- Slit sensillae – enables a spider to detect mechanical strain in the exoskeleton, helping them to sense force and vibration
Check out Wiki for definitions and examples
During adverse conditions, such as drought, snails have the ability to sleep for long periods of time. Perhaps the better description is that they estivate (the summer equivalent to winter hibernation).
The Cambridge Natural History 1895Â compendium cites an incident involving the ‘sleeping’ of snails. Whilst travelling in Egypt a Mr. Vernedi discovered a bush covered with snails. He plucked a few and decided to keep them in his desk drawer. Â Somehow, four years later, two of them ended up in the British museum, alive and kicking (or should I say ‘alive’ and ‘slipping’).
Although I have used the poor lemming in a few cartoons now, it would be remiss of me not to do my bit for this adorable little rodent and put an end to the myth that lemmings have a predisposition to jumping off cliffs. Well, it’s just not true.
The origin of this misunderstanding is believed to have come from the Walt Disney 1958 animal documentary White Wilderness. Filmed in remote Canada, where lemmings are nowhere to be found, producers decided to bring in some imports for filming purposes. To illustrate the cliff plunge scene, a group of lemmings were pushed via a rotating platform, forcing them to run off a small cliff into a river, and so the myth began. Apparently the movie didn’t suggest it was a mass suicide attempt, but rather a migration undertaking, but the myth still remains today.
And now for 3 things you mightn’t know about Chuck:
- On his 25th birthday, Captain FitzRoy named a mountain in honour of Charles. Mt Darwin is the tallest mountain in Tierra del Fuego (in the Andes). And if that wasn’t enough, a year earlier FitzRoy had named an expanse of water next to the then unnamed Mt Darwin, the Darwin Sound, to commemorate Darwin’s quick wit and courage. He saved them all from being marooned when giant waves created from a mass of ice split from a glacier and loomed towards their boat.
- Darwin created a pros and cons list to help him determine if marriage was the right thing for him to pursue. Apparently it was, with one of the ‘pros’ for marriage ‘Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow’
- Taking the latter point into account, this may be why he decided to keep marriage within the family. He wedded his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood (as in the fine china manufacturer).
Congratulations to Froggwell on winning the April ‘How many jelly beans’ competition.
You can visit Froggwell at their blog site – it’s all about ‘Great art, in a great setting’
And the answer to the jelly bean question is 178 (‘My gosh! -That’s a lot. You are very industrious creating all those images.’ I hear you cry. And my response is ‘Yes, it is. I’m still recovering’).
As always, thanks for all your entries. If you missed out this time, not to worry – enter the May competition and try again.
I came up with the cartoon drawing before thinking of cheese names. I then found out that not all cheeses fit in text wise into the teeny, weeny sign I created. So off the Wiki I went, in search of cheese names. True to Wiki form, I found a list of different cheeses (why someone would go to the trouble of creating something like this, I don’t know). Anyway, I learnt two new cheeses:
Skyr and Oka. The Ukraines came through with the former cheese, their version of a cottage type cheese. The latter is Canadian, and has origins back to the Tappist monks from Oka, Quebec.
I typed ‘sleeping sheep’ into Google to see what would pop up.
I found a game called ‘Sheep Dash’ on a BBC website. It tests your reaction time to tranquillising the fleeing sheep. If you hit them, they go to sleep. It then gives you a result. I didn’t fare too well. Apart from a woeful speed statistic of 0.87 seconds average speed response time, I was given the badge “sluggish snail”.
Let me know how you fared?