Constantly Sci-Tracked

My dog Scamp, the goodest of good boys. Author's own I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess that you love cute animals? Awesome you've come to the right place. Next question, do you want to know why they evolved to become cute? Even if your answer to that second question was no, you should keep reading, I'm sure there's more than enough cuteness here to keep you satisfied. So without further ado, here's my list of the 5 cutest animals in the world (based on a comparison of Google search results, so don't blame me if your favourite wasn't included), and an explanation of why they became so cute. 5. Sea Otters They're fluffy, they hold hands and they have a favourite rock. Really what's not to love about sea otters? The hand holding is cute, but it also serves a vital purpose. Sleeping out in the ocean means these otters can easily drift off. Holding hands allows families to form a raft that stays together. Th...

Tardigrades, better known as water bears, are small gummy-bear like animals that seem to have won the game of life. These little guys can survive just about anything, from Antarctica to hot springs, and outer-space to the Mariana trench. Honestly it would be quicker to write a list of the few things they can't survive than it would be to tell you all the things they can survive, but it would also sound much less impressive so I'm not going to do that. The indestructible gummy bear (tardigrades). Image credit: Willow Gabriel, Goldstein Lab ( Wikimedia Commons ) So what can they survive? Instead of telling you that now, I might first explain HOW they survive. You'd be forgiven for thinking that because tardigrades can survive so many different things they must have an entire repertoire of extreme survival tricks (like being Batman). But the truth is that they have one trick that just seems to work against everything (more like being Hawkeye, exc...

Ok don’t start panicking, it’s not like that lobster you gulfed down last night is slowly nipping its way out.   The immortal crustacean - Don't worry, he's never going to come nipping out of your belly after a lobster dinner. Image credit: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( Wikimedia Commons ) You see they aren’t exactly “immortal” per se, they can still die, they just don’t exactly age like you and I. We grow up and reach our prime, then it all starts going downhill (my back is already trying to tell me I'm old). Lobsters reach their prime, and then grow to a bigger , better (and more fertile ) prime. I’m guessing you all want to know their secret by now, right? It’s all thanks to a nifty little enzyme known as telomerase. But before I talk about that, I might just start by taking a step back and telling you about these little things called telomeres (the smart ones among you may have noticed a similarity with the names. Don’t worry I’ll...

You may not have heard of them, in fact I very much doubt you have, but I just want to say that the bar-headed goose is an absolute marvel of nature. This goose can fly over Mount Everest. That means they fly almost 9000 metres up in the air. The bar-headed goose (Anser indicus). Image credit: Noel Reynolds ( Wikimedia Commons ) "Whoop-de-doo" you might think. After all, they can fly so it shouldn’t be that hard. Wrong! Flying is already tough enough as it is. I mean I can’t do it, can you? (and no planes do not count). Flying is an incredibly tiring activity under normal circumstances, but this goose faces further adversity from chilly winds and oxygen starvation. The only question now is 'how do they do it?' The problem A big problem with flying as high as the bar-headed goose does is that the air is very thin. But what does this even mean? Mount Everest. Image credit: Ocrambo ( Wikimedia Commons ) I'd like you to imagi...

It’s no secret that we love our fluffy friends. Studies have even shown that humans have evolved to release oxytocin (the love hormone) just from gazing into the eyes of our four-legged pals . But have you ever wondered how we created such lovable companions? What was the process that created our best friends? One fox, two fox, nice fox, mean fox Since 1959, Dmitry Belyaev and his student Lyudmila Trut have been running a continuous genetic experiment . Put simply, they have been raising a population of foxes and splitting them into separate groups of friendly and mean. “Why?” You ask. Belyaev wanted to replicate the domestication of dogs to prove that domestication has a genetic basis. He also wanted to link the ‘tameness’ trait to other traits commonly found in domestic species but not in their wild ancestors (more on that later). Belyaev was meticulous in ensuring that all his results were due to genetics alone. Contact with humans was kept to a minimum ...