Collected from the Egyptian desert in March of 1846, the Helix desertorum specimen was sent to the British Museum, where scientists thought it had expired in transit. It was glued to a cardboard display card shortly after.
One day four years later (there is conflicting information about whether it was four or five years), curators noticed something strange about their catatonic mollusk: the shell seemed to have moved from its glued position and a trail of discoloration followed it.
Archivists removed it from the card to give it a bath, with a suspicion the snail might have in fact been slumbering.
After just a few minutes of exposure to moisture, the snail’s head poked from its shell and surveyed its new home with four eye stalks.
As the snail adjusted to active life again, it became a minor celebrity and sat for a portrait by the museum’s zoological artist for inclusion in a book on mollusks, seen below:
According to the laws of physics, a planet in the shape of a doughnut (toroid) could exist. Physicist Anders Sandberg says that such planets would have very short nights and days, an arid outer equator, twilight polar regions, moons in strange orbits and regions with very different gravity and seasons.
petition to turn the earth into a fucking doughnut
THE STORY POTENTIAL FOR THIS IS AMAZING YOU COULD HAVE TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS SEPARATED BY DESERT ON THE OUTSIDE AND AN PERMANENT NIGHT-WINTER ON THE INSIDE
YOU COULD (WITH A LITTLE FUDGING ON TIDES OR SOME STABILIZATION FORCE) HAVE MOONS THAT GO THROUGH THE FUCKING HOLE, WITH LUNAR-POWERED SORCERERS LIVING ON THE INNER EQUATOR IN GIANT ICE CASTLES WAITING FOR THE TIME OF THE MONTH WHEN THE MOON ILLUMINATES THE ETERNAL NIGHTTIME AND THEIR SPELLS HAVE THE MOST POWER
YOU COULD HAVE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPECIES THAT EVOLVED ON OPPOSITE SIDES WHO ARE BASICALLY ALIENS ON THE SAME PLANET AND WHOEVER CROSSES THE GIANT DESERT OR ARCTIC CIRCLE (HEH) MAKES FIRST CONTACT
THIS IS SO COOL
THIS IS SO COOL
I WANT TO RUN FIFTY THOUSAND GAMES ON WORLDS LIKE THIS HOLY FUCK
THIS JUST IN IF I’M UNDERSTANDING THE MAGNETIC FIELDS CORRECTLY I THINK THE ETERNAL NIGHT ICE REALM WILL HAVE NEAR-CONSTANT ELECTRICAL STORMS
wait. wait wait. they let you play with liquid nitrogen?
okay. here is a HILARIOUS thing you can do with liquid nitrogen and 1 or 2 bottles of shaving cream.
okay so step one is you dunk the shaving cream into the liquid nitrogen. completely submerge it and let it freeze. the shaving cream i mean. then take out the shaving cream. you probably don’t need me to tell you this but for other people, you want to use tongs and safety gloves so you don’t lose a hand or two doing this. now you have frozen shaving cream. what do you do with frozen shaving cream? well, first you have to peel off the canister so you have just the shaving cream floating free. you had to freeze it first so that it wouldn’t explode when you do this part. now you have a frozen brick (or two if you did two) of shaving cream. so what do we do now?
we put that shit inside someone’s car we hate and/or love to prank on.
as it warms, it will gradually expand to fill the entire vehicle.
“this baby came out of you but im not 100% sure its yours”
Funny thing – a woman who applied for welfare after her husband left her hadto supply DNA evidence he was actually the father. The results: he was definitely the father, but she wasn’t the mother. Her children were removed from her custody and she was sued for fraud, even though she insisted they were her children.
Turns out, she wasn’t a surrogate or a kidnapper (the two most obvious explanations) – she was a chimera. As an embryo, she fused at a very early stage with her twin, forming one individual. Her ovaries apparently developed from cells that had originally belonged to her vanished twin. Later on more tests showed that while the woman’s skin and hair DNA did not match her childrens, DNA taken from her cervix did.
WHAT THE FUCk
This went from stupid to really interesting in point 5 seconds.
There’s multiple cases of this very thing
Idk weird stuff man
Science doing random shit to fuck with your head
We don’t actually know how many human chimeras there are because most of the time you can’t tell.
However, some cases of intersex and even some trans individuals may be chimeras that result from the fusion of two embryos that have different genetic sex. This may also explain why some female athletes fail a sex test. (Other possibilities include genetic transcription that resulted in the loss of the SRY gene from the Y chromosome. The SRY gene is the actual switch that results in the development of a male phenotype).
Chimerism is also seen in animals.
This is Dunbar’s Gold. As you can see he looks like a brindle dog.
At one point he was bred to a mare called Sharp One, who also had the same brindle pattern, in the hope that they could breed more brindle horses – which are vanishingly rare.
Both horses are Quarter Horses, and the breeder sent in a gene sample from the foal for typing to allow him to be registered.
The test showed that the foal was related to neither his sire nor his dam.
They even did the test twice. Most cases of failed genetic testing are a sample mixup (either the hair or the semen used to produce the foal).
It turned out Dunbar’s Gold had had to be tested three times to get a good sample – and the third time was a blood test not the hair follicle test normally done. On top of that, when they looked at his gene type again they realized something rather important to a stallion was missing – he had no Y chromosome.
It was eventually established that both horses were chimeras and that in Dunbars Gold two different gene types existed in his skin and coat (one male, one female, just to prove that happens). Each gene line had a different set of color genes, but both matched properly to his parents. His foals, of course, all matched to the male gene line.
When they tested Sharp One’s other foal they discovered she was producing eggs from both of her gene lines. (Something which could also happen with a human chimera).
Poliomyelitis is a highly contagious disease that can cause paralysis
of legs, arms, and respiratory muscles. “The polio virus is a silver
bullet designed to kill specific parts of the brain,” Richard Bruno, a
clinical psychophysiologist, and director of the International Centre
for Polio Education said. “But parents today have no idea what polio was
like, so it’s hard to convince somebody that lives are at risk if they
don’t vaccinate.”
When Lillard was a child, polio was every
parent’s worst nightmare. The worst polio outbreak year in US history
took place in 1952, a year before Lillard was infected. There were about
58,000 reported cases. Out of all the cases, 21,269 were paralyzed and
3,145 died. “They closed theaters, swimming pools, families would keep
their kids away from other kids because of the fear of transmission,”
Bruno said.
Children under the age of five are especially susceptible. In the 1940s
and 1950s, hospitals across the country were filled with rows of iron
lungs that kept victims alive. Lillard recalls being in rooms packed
with metal tubes—especially when there were storms and all the men,
women, adults, and children would be moved to the same room so nurses
could manually operate the iron lungs if the power went out. “The period
of time that it took the nurse to get out of the chair, it seemed like
forever because you weren’t breathing,” Lillard said. “You just laid
there and you could feel your heart beating and it was just terrifying.
The only noise that you can make when you can’t breathe is clicking your
tongue. And that whole dark room just sounded like a big room full of
chickens just cluck-cluck-clucking. All the nurses were saying, ‘Just a
second, you’ll be breathing in just a second.’”
I am not going to tag the name of the bird, because I’m pretty sure I would get tagged as NSFW if I did, but I assure you their beaks are getting longer and it’s probably because of the UK’s obsession with bird feeders.
Steel Phoenix Studios 