• Waste not, want not: Stockholm burns culled bunnies for heating fuel.
• Helicopters search for radioactive rabbit poop near the Hanford nuclear reservation. Workers to begin removing the poop soon, which might be the worst job ever.
• Mathematician predicts an ESPN fantasy—a Dodgers-Yanks World Series. FOX Sports also has its fingers crossed.
• Doctors enjoy the five-fingered discount by pocking watches, severed hands from hospitals.
• Think technology is invasive now? A new camera is under development that could capture your entire life.
We here at Discoblog are just about obsessed with poop stories. But today’s installment isn’t just a laughing matter, it’s record-breaking: Researchers have discovered the oldest human hair ever—between about 200,000 and 250,000 years old—and it was recovered from a white, round fossilized hyena poop in a cave in South Africa.
Getting the hair out of the hard-as-a-rock hyena dung wasn’t easy—the researchers had to use tweezers to pluck the 40 fossilized hairs. Unable to gather any DNA information from the decrepit sample, they were fortunately able to see patterns of wavy, scaly bands on the hair, which is typically seen in modern primates. In this case, the researchers said the strands looked most like human hair.
We’ll have to excuse the researchers for not reporting whether the hair was black or curly or straight or bleached blonde—these details were lost within the guts of the hyena who’d chowed down on the rotting human corpses.
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Image: flickr/ patries71
It’s hard to get any respect when you eat feces. Maybe that’s why one species of lowly dung beetle has forsaken its namesake for a more glamorous place on the food chain—that of a ferocious carnivore. The species Deltochilum valgum may look like any other dung-roller, but it has adapted to feed on giant millipedes more than ten times its size—for comparison, picture a house cat taking down and subsequently devouring an anaconda.
When rumors of Peruvian dung beetles eating millipedes started floating around, a research team led by Trond Larsen of Princeton University headed to the Peruvian rainforests to see for themselves. After setting up more than 1,000 beetle traps baited with either dung, fungus, fruit, or millipedes in various stages of life and death, they found that D. valgum‘s food of choice is in fact injured millipedes. When D. valgum finds an injured millipede, it uses its powerful hind legs—originally adapted for rolling neat balls of dung—to grasp the millipede’s body. After the millipede finishes flailing about, the beetles uses its sharp teeth to saw between its prey’s body segments, sometimes decapitating it. The corpse is then dragged to a safe location where the beetle devours the soft inner tissue.
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