secrets
of snow-diving foxes:
'I'm
a fox. It's January. I'm hungry. I want a meal. My food, however, is buried 3
feet down, deep in the snow, hiding. It's alive, in motion, and very small, being
a mouse.' So how does an above-ground fox catch an underground mouse? Well, the
answer is nothing short of astonishing.
Think
about this ... an ordinary fox can stalk a mole, mouse, vole or shrew
from a distance of about 8m (~25 feet), which means its food is making a
barely audible rustling sound, hiding almost two car lengths away. And
yet our fox hurls itself into the air — in an arc determined by the fox,
the speed and trajectory of the scurrying mouse, any breezes, the
thickness of the ground cover, the depth of the snow — and somehow, it
can land straight on top of the mouse, pinning it with its forepaws or
grabbing the mouse's head with its teeth.
Thought to be the largest arthropods on Earth, giant spider crabs spend their time foraging on the ocean floor up to a thousand feet(300 meters)deep.
These rare, leggy behemoths, native to the waters off Japan, can measure up to 12 feet(3.7 meters)from claw tip to claw tip.'
The average adult heart beats 72 times a minute;100,000 times a day; 3,600,000
times a year; and 2.5 billion times during a lifetime.
The volume of blood pumped by the heart can vary
over a wide range, from five to 30 liters per minute.
Every day, the heart creates enough energy to drive
a truck 20 miles. In a lifetime, that is equivalent to driving to the moon and
back.
Because the heart has its own electrical impulse,
it can continue to beat even when separated from the body, as long as it has an
adequate supply of oxygen.
The heart pumps blood to almost all of the body’s
75 trillion cells. Only the corneas receive no blood supply.
The “thump-thump” of a heartbeat is the sound made
by the four valves of the heart closing.
Cocaine affects the heart’s electrical activity and
causes spasm of the arteries, which can lead to a heart attack or stroke, even
in healthy people.
