Mr. Tea's Top 10 Badass Phenomena

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That diagram is inaccurate - surely the human should be cowering and shitting himself in terror?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Congratulations on this thread, by the way, one of the greatest anywhere, ever.

Cheers! It's great to see people enjoying it. Just goes to show that beneath all the fancy talk about obscure music, high-brow literature, fine food and politics, we're really just a bunch of boys who get off on gruesome creepy-crawlies and fuck-off explosions. Oh, and Beyonce. :D
 

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
On the topic of "We'd be fucked if this insect was gigantic" I give you: The Bombardier Beetle.

Brachinus_spPCCA20060328-2821B.jpg


That gigantic arse its got there? Oh that's only just a biological acid cannon. Read the description of how this thing works and just picture having something like that attached to your body:

A bombardier beetle produces and stores two reactant chemical compounds hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide in separate reservoirs in the rear tip of its abdomen. When threatened, the beetle contracts muscles that force the two reactants through valved tubes into a mixing chamber containing water and a mixture of catalytic enzymes. When combined, the reactants undergo a violent exothermic chemical reaction raising the temperature to near the boiling point of water. The corresponding pressure buildup forces the entrance valves from the reactant storage chambers to close, thus protecting the beetle's internal organs. The boiling, foul-smelling liquid partially becomes a gas (flash evaporation) and is expelled through an outlet valve into the atmosphere with a loud popping sound. The flow of reactants into the reaction chamber and subsequent ejection to the atmosphere occurs cyclically at a rate of about 500 times per second and with the total pulsation period lasting for only a fraction of a second.

The gland openings of some African bombardier beetles can swivel through 270° and thrust between the insect's legs so it can be discharged in all sorts of directions with considerable accuracy.

:eek:
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That sounds a hell of a lot like your...

like your m...

oh god I can't actually bring myself to type it. You get the idea, though.
 

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
That sounds a hell of a lot like your...

like your m...

oh god I can't actually bring myself to type it. You get the idea, though.

I only wish my mum could've imparted me genes that would allow me to have an arse that doubled as artillery. Although I reckon some people I know would argue this is something I might not actually be in need of.

Arsetillery?
 

sufi

lala
a lot like my parrot, his snap was sudden and painful.

what intrigues me is to what extent we are influenced to behave in one way or another by microbes and assorted parasites, it's a major phenomenon if you think about it. the effect of toxoplasmosis in rats is known, not so much the effect on human behaviour. in any case we are not as independent as we like to think we are, i would like to read more about this.
this is really badass
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/sfl-schizophrenia-link-082510,0,430261,full.story
i read somewhere there is correlation between toxo in national populations and world cup prowess
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
From that article:

"It was a colleague, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, who sealed the deal for Yolken by unearthing a trove of studies from as far back as the 1950s, many of them not written in English, suggesting links between infections and schizophrenia."

Buh?? :rolleyes:

Edit: also,

"I was taught they had nothing to do with each other," said Duckworth, at NAMI. But then he'd encounter a Lyme disease patient with something resembling psychosis, or an AIDS patient with depressive symptoms. "I think it's intuitively possible. After my experience with AIDS patients, I can think, 'Why not?' "

Yeah, who'd have guessed someone with AIDS might be a bit depressed?

Sorry, didn't mean to bitch, it's an interesting article. I've read stuff about this germ before, but not the schizophrenia link.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Speaking of cats, is there any sure-fire way to keep a cat from jumping up on a table other than cutting the fluffy little cunt's legs off?
 

Dr Awesome

Techsteppin'
A tinfoil moat, or tinfoil tablecloth would work.

You could just move the cat off the table, and or yell at it, give it a light whack etcetera etcetera...
 

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-157_Chandra_Update.html

Black holes about.


-Evidence for the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood has been found using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. The age and proximity of this object could provide astronomers with a unique opportunity to watch a black hole develop during its infancy.

The object in question is associated with SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 discovered by an amateur astronomer in 1979. While many likely new black holes in the distant Universe have been detected in the form of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), this nascent black hole candidate is much closer, at a distance of only 50 million light years from Earth.

Data from Chandra, as well as NASA's Swift, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady for the 12 years from 1995 to 2007 over which it has been observed. This behavior and the X-ray spectrum, or distribution of X-rays with energy, support the idea that the object is a black hole being fed either by material falling back into the black hole after the supernova, or from a binary companion.

"If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed," said Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. who led the study.

The scientists think that SN 1979C formed when a star about 20 times more massive than the Sun collapsed. It was a particular type of supernova where the exploded star had ejected some, but not all of its outer, hydrogen- rich envelope before the explosion, so it is unlikely to have been associated with a GRB. Supernovas have sometimes been associated with GRBs, but only where the exploded star had completely lost its hydrogen envelope.

"This may be the first time that the common way of making a black hole has been observed," said coauthor Abraham Loeb, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Most black holes in the Universe should form when the core of a star collapses and a gamma-ray burst is not produced."

The idea of a black hole with an observed age of only about 30 years is consistent with some re
 

routes

we can delay.ay.ay...
Speaking of cats, is there any sure-fire way to keep a cat from jumping up on a table other than cutting the fluffy little cunt's legs off?

get an old spraydetergent bottle and fill it with water.. every time the fluffy cunt jumps up onto table give it a darn good spraying. repeat a million times. it still might not actually work tho. cats, eh?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
get an old spraydetergent bottle and fill it with water.. every time the fluffy cunt jumps up onto table give it a darn good spraying. repeat a million times. it still might not actually work tho. cats, eh?

That's a damn good idea, thanks for that. I can see it taking at least a million times though - this little ginger bastard is basically Pavlov's nightmare, he seems totally immune to any kind of learning behaviour.
 
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