The premise is that you can tell a lot from just reading page 99 of any book. If, after reading page 99, you wish to continue to read, then you'd probably enjoy the entire book. URL: www.page99test.com
| We may know which kind of meat we like best, but few of us know the reason for the difference.
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| Turkeys and chickens, remember, are ground-dwelling birds that spend all of their waking hours walking, running, and scratching for food. The muscles in their legs are adapted for constant use and do not fatigue easily. The individual red fibers are very fine and contain an abundance of compounds that make them efficient at aerobic respiration. These tissues are also high in both fat and sugar, which act as fuel for aerobic metabolism. Small songbirds, by contrast, can fly efficiently for hours at a time because they have a predominance of red fibers in their flight muscles.
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| While turkeys can fly, too, they aren't capable of sustained flight. The large muscles that we call "white meat" are adapted for explosive bursts of power -- such as when one of these heavy-bodied birds is surprised by a predator and must escape in a flash of speed (turkeys have been clocked at 55 miles per hour). These muscles are powered by anaerobic metabolism and tend to fatigue quickly.
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| The opposite is true of ducks and geese. These birds are long-distance fliers, and their large breast muscles consist of dark meat that's high in fat content. Yet the birds with the greatest concentration of red muscle fibers in their flight muscles are not the ones that make the longest migratory flights. No, it's the birds that utilize the highest number of wing beats during sustained flight. And which birds are those? Hummingbirds, of course.Read more at enature.com |
Phoebe Allens is back and building another nest in the rose bush. URL: phoebeallens.com
Okay - now that's a scary sound! URL: www.enature.com
| Fall is the time of year when male tarantulas, having finally reached adulthood, come out of the burrows in which they have lived for the first 5 to 12 years of their lives. Their mission? To seek out females and mate with them. |
| When a male tarantula approaches the burrow of a female, he first tastes the silk that lies around the entrance. If he detects a mature female in residence, he responds by drumming on the surface with his legs and his pedipalps (the leg-like first set of appendages, which are very long on tarantulas). The reason for this drumming is to let the female know that he is interested in mating -- and would rather not be mistaken for a meal by the larger and always hungry female. |
| If she's receptive, she will raise up the front end of her body and allow him to grab her fangs with the hook-like projections on his forelegs. He then transfers his sperm to her with his pedipalps. |
That was the easy part -- the difficult task still lies ahead: he must release her fangs, disengage himself, and make a hasty retreat before she can overpower him and eat him. Even if he successfully escapes from his big date, the male tarantula is still not long for this world. Adult males (mated or not) usually die before winter arrives.
Read more at enature.com |
According to Bugs of the World (1993), aphids are “among the most destructive insect pests on cultivated plants in temperate regions.” Ha - there you have it. Pesky little suckers. When it comes to group dynamics, however, and successful survival, plant lice can’t be beaten. |
Like a true knight in often bright red shining armor, the ladybug just loves plant lice. In fact, some Asian ladybird species were introduced to North America as recently as 1988 and to Europe in 2004 to combat plant lice – successfully, so far. |
There are times when we take a deep breath, leap over the precipice that marks the end of our comfort zone and discover we can fly. |
But as talented a horse whisperer as Swigart is, nothing prepared her for looking out the plane window at the vast steppe below and seeing for the first time the quest on which she was about to embark. |
Riding 600 miles, on horse, across Mongolia. |
Swigart has signed up for something called the Mongol Derby. It is an endurance race over nine days that requires riders to navigate their way from yurt to yurt over land they've never seen – with endless plains and few distinct markings. |
They will ride a breed of horses that has changed little since the days of Genghis Khan. |
And the horse whisperers for such beasts? Mongolian nomads, who are considered some of the finest riders on the planet. |
Her stirrup leathers break after a few days. She fixes it. A horse falls, her with it. Her metal water bottle is crushed. But her helmet saves her skull. A fellow rider gets lost overnight. But Swigart stays on course, her spirit in flight. |
"There's nothing better than galloping across an open field," she tells me. |
She doesn't win, but she doesn't come in last either. When you hurl yourself over the precipice in Mongolia, finish times don't matter. |
The only thing that matters is discovering you can fly. |
This is a point that we've been making for years (and often highlighting the research that proves this), but innovation and good ideas tend not to come from the proverbial "spark of genius." Study after study after study has shown that's almost never the case. Almost all good ideas come from people building on the works of others, with a minor tweak here or there, or a random decision based on a suggestion from someone new, after an idea percolates for months or years. The more open systems are to sharing ideas and spreading information and allowing those collisions to happen, the more likely that new good ideas and new innovations occur. That's why it's so harmful that today's intellectual property systems are built on the false assumption that innovation really does happen through that "spark of genius."
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The key thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches. That's what often happens. You have half of an idea and someone else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property. You know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will 'remain valuable' and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.
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Of course, I think an even better example is the recent research on Alzheimer's that really only took off when everyone involved opened up their data and agreed to avoid patents. Or, how about the research on the human genome that compared patented and public domain gene research, and showed that the patents limited commercial viability. But when the genes were opened up to the public, much more value came out of it. The more you look, the more you find these results pretty much everywhere you look. And it's nearly impossible to find any evidence to support the idea of a "flash of genius" for key innovations in history. In fact, almost every key innovation in history has been shown to have come about to multiple people at once, as ideas are shared and the general progress of knowledge and innovation pushes forward.
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Why do leaves change color?