I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
The estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of taxine alkaloids is approximately 3.0 mg/kg body weight for humans.[27][28] Different studies show different toxicities; a major reason is the difficulty of measuring taxine alkaloids.[29]
It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams.
Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
> Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
How much is in one seed?
I could only find a few sources saying that you would need to eat about 50g of the needles to reach the LD, and that's... A lot. There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.
Not being a killjoy here, I grew up around yew trees and I was always told to be careful of them, but not with any sense of panic that would suggest "any exposure at all will kill”. I think you'd have a bad time even with low exposure but death seems unlikely by accident.
> There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.
My partner was worried when we moved into our current house that our then-18-month-old son would eat the poisonous cotoneaster berries on the bush in the garden.
But it turns out the LD50 is something like 50g/kg which means that even for a 12kg child they'd be eating huge heaping bowlfuls of them before anything happened.
As it turns out, he did eat one of the cotoneaster berries, spat it out, and went looking for some of the far nicer tasting alpine strawberries instead. The cotoneaster berries taste quite particularly horrible, and no-one is going to ever eat even close to the LD50 of them.
This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
I often cycle a road with lots of bats hunting and one evening two slammed into my face and upper body (and one only avoided by ducking quickly). It's pretty obvious that they are not perfect navigators.
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
Perhaps that's how aliens would see humans. Perpetually trying to die except for a small group of humans fighting disease, monitoring and protecting climate, keeping order, etc.
Horses are especially susceptible to *everything*.
Millenia of selective breeding to try for the healthiest strongest animals we can, and they're still shit.
They'll get ill if they breathe wrong. They'll get ill if they eat a mouthful too much or too little of grass that's ever so slightly too green. They'll get ill if it's too rainy or not rainy enough.
I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards
My understanding is that churches were built next to yew trees, not yew trees planted next to churches.
Pre-Christian religions had many associations with yew trees (they live for a long time, give off mildly hallucinogenic gasses on hot days, discourage animals), and so built their holy sites around them. When Christianity came to Britain, churches were deliberately built on pagan holy sites to overrun the old religions, in the same way that early Christianity took over roman holy days (Saturnalia -> Christmas, Lemuria -> All Saint's Day). This led to churches being built next to sites with copious yew trees.
There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
I think one of the problems is people thinking kids are more stupid than they are, and blanket "don't do that" statements without explanations don't really work for kids.
If they had told you they were highly poisonous instead of just telling you "not to eat them" you might have taken them more seriously. And if they had given you a taste of the red berry around it (which is sweet but not that special either, and the texture is not great) you might just have thought it was not necessary to play with them at all.
But that requires education at all levels, around here (Belgium) I sometimes see parents who seem deadly afraid of anything nature, I tell my kids to eat blackberries and they softly tell their kids next to us not to do that. You end up with generations who just don't know anything about what's around them and will eventually do stupid things.
It takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.
> A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.
For that, parents would need time. But if we have to spend half of our day with work or work-related tasks (commute, lunch break)...
Society (or let's be real, capitalism) forces us to work unhealthy amounts of hours and then wonders why there aren't enough children and of the children that remain, they dumb down every year...
It saved me a lot of time when my son was little because it meant he argued less with me over the necessity of things at the cost of an extra sentence here and there.
Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm?
Him: No!
And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so.
For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still mostly lands up having a bit of a tantrum all the way until I hand him over to his teacher.
His two-year older sister was a lot less difficult at his age.
I wouldn't recommend getting wrong things into their heads, because you (or someone else) will eventually have to teach them that it was not true, or they will discover it themselves, and that will undermine trust in the other things you said.
We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.
I like to extend it to: "the portion makes the poison." Beyond getting the alliteration, it also includes food, which I think is important. A glass of water won't kill you, two gallons of water will. An ice cream cone once in a while is nothing; one every day will make the doctor's eyes go wide.
Yes. IIRC Congress paid for a study in the early 20th century to try to nail a definition of the word "poison" by injecting mice with different quantities of bleach. The conclusion was that everything is a poison at the right dose. Most medicines are great at low doses, but then kill you when you take too much of them. Heck, even water is a poison.
Well, Mr. Oatmeal is apparently repeating an urban legend. I look at a wombat, and no way do I believe that thing can move at 25 mph (40 kph). I found a piece[0] which indicates this might have been some confusion as to metric vs imperial decades ago that was then retransmited through the ages.
And yet the very article that you refer to confirms that anecdotal reports by the biologists studying these very animals report that during breeding seasons that the male Southern Hairy-Nose Wombat can reach these speeds in bursts:
>South Australian wildlife biologist [A/Prof] David Taggart has studied the southern hairy-nosed wombat since 1993. In the 2008 and 2024 editions of Strahan's mammal book, he writes that the southern hairy-nosed species can run at 40 kph. "I can confirm that I have clocked this species running at just over 40 kph, although they can't maintain that for long."
We have four on the boundaries of our property. My 'Goldidor' (Labrador/retriever cross) has given chase a few times and has struggled to keep up. When they run they RUN. Maybe not pushing 40kph, not not far from it...
> The Northern Hairy-nosed wombat is considered one of the rarest mammals in the world -- there are only 80 of them left. If you can, please donate or follow any of these organizations. I personally donated $10,000 to help kick things off.
Thank you :) All wombats are in some trouble right now (even the bare-nosed or "common" wombat), but the Northern Hairy-nosed is right on the edge of extinction.
Wombats never get much attention, so it's awesome to see this article and the response it's got.
A problem with metric-imperial conversion in the article? Based on having seen them in the bush, wombat poo is a 4 centimetre cube not a 4 inch cube. That would be a Diprotodon sized wombat. Lucky we're only talking about wombat poo, and not something important like a space craft...
A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:
> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."
The other article [1] quote:
> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.
I think this is just a way of breaking up the quote that adds attribution in the middle. Probably a common reporting phrasing more so than an LLM invention (Or maybe it's a real quote in both cases, but they used an LLM to write parts of the article, just making sure the quotes are correct in the end).
Yes, good science writing almost always gets an opinion from someone not involved in the research for the article. I would guess varying definitions of "not involved" depending on the repute of the publication.
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that science journalists and writers have scientist friends or advisors who they consult when something interesting happens? I imagine their correspondence going something like:
"Hi, Jack, came across this thing where they claim to have created artificial life. Is it real?"
"It's an impressive step..."
"Hey, Jack, there's this new thing called LK-99 that everyone is excited about. Why?"
"It's not real"
Some amount of `site:www.quantamagazine.org "Jack Szostak"` querying on Google seems to indicate this might be the case. Though I have to say it's probably not everyone who has a Nobel laureate on their rolodex for a quick "hi, is this real?"
Never have I considered the ignoble to be making fun of anyone. It is recognizing real, if bizarre, research. Science asking some real questions that make you appreciate the wonder of the universe.
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?
I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day
Yes, it seems the "why" here is more interesting than the "how", and is indeed going to be a matter of speculation.
As far as evolution in general, the big picture is more about "punctuated equilibrium" than incremental change. Individual genetic changes from parents to child are typically just benign and so accumulate in any inter-breeding population without much effect. Once in a while the environment may shift in some fairly major way (easier for environment to change quickly than genetics) and then an accumulation of previously benign changes may suddenly become collectively impactful in a positive or negative way.
I don't see any reason to assume that square poop was ever selected for - maybe it's just a harmless consequence of some genetic change that was impactful in another way. Speculating that square Wombat poop evolved to not fall off rocks is a "just so story" that raises more questions than it answers.
> I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers
Many observations are unexplained, and not just in biology. The difference between believers and atheists is that atheists stop there: it is unexplained, at least for now, that's how things are. Believers will instead attribute it to god, or some other form of higher power. In the end, it just shifts the problem, at some point you will have to admit that some things just are and there is no explanation, for atheists, these are the things themselves, for believers, it is god who made the things.
That's why being a believer or being an atheist doesn't have much to do with being a biologist. It is just a philosophical view of how you deal with the unknown and the unknowable. The only thing is that the religious dogma should not get in the way of proper science. That life is so beautiful that god must be behind it (are we still talking about poop cubes?) shouldn't prevent biologists from searching for an evolutionary explanation.
Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection, sometimes, things happen for no good reason. Maybe a particularly prolific male in a particularly successful colony happened to have a square poop mutation or something.
This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]
I hard the pleasure to assist David Hu's talk a few years ago where he presented his work on feline tongues, frogs tongues and wombat poop. Really fun guy. I always wondered how he got his funding because studying the "physics of animals" must not be on the top of the list of most funding agencies.
> Distinctive intestines mold feces into sharp-cornered poop
...written directly above a photo of the subject matter that clearly does not have sharp corners (which is all for the best, I guess, poor wombats!), not even sharp edges, just flattened sides.
No offence but reading this in the silence of my workplace, it was so difficult to control my giggling and laughter reading everyline and it just kept getting funnier XD
>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?
I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:
Spit it out man! It means CUNT.
Can we stop with this "poop" nonsense. Number #2 and other forms, it's shit English, it's stupid. It's feces. Or shit. Or that fine old English word Turd.
Most school/education networks will have proxies and firewalls which limit access to "sensitive" destinations.
Avoiding triggering a profanity filter is a reasonable and sensible approach to publishing, for an educational site which wouldn't want to exclude part of their target audience.
I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
If they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.
There has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.
Taxine alkaloids[0]
It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams.
Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids
> Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
How much is in one seed?
I could only find a few sources saying that you would need to eat about 50g of the needles to reach the LD, and that's... A lot. There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.
Not being a killjoy here, I grew up around yew trees and I was always told to be careful of them, but not with any sense of panic that would suggest "any exposure at all will kill”. I think you'd have a bad time even with low exposure but death seems unlikely by accident.
A child might not need the whole 50g.
Not a good way to go, BTW: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462509/
> There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.
My partner was worried when we moved into our current house that our then-18-month-old son would eat the poisonous cotoneaster berries on the bush in the garden.
But it turns out the LD50 is something like 50g/kg which means that even for a 12kg child they'd be eating huge heaping bowlfuls of them before anything happened.
As it turns out, he did eat one of the cotoneaster berries, spat it out, and went looking for some of the far nicer tasting alpine strawberries instead. The cotoneaster berries taste quite particularly horrible, and no-one is going to ever eat even close to the LD50 of them.
This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
You have a source or observation for that? All I can find is the exact opposite, that they do just fine even in challenging conditions.
I often cycle a road with lots of bats hunting and one evening two slammed into my face and upper body (and one only avoided by ducking quickly). It's pretty obvious that they are not perfect navigators.
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
I hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)
The more I learn about horses the more they seem like a creature that’s continually trying to die - and humans get to try and stop them succeeding.
Perhaps that's how aliens would see humans. Perpetually trying to die except for a small group of humans fighting disease, monitoring and protecting climate, keeping order, etc.
Horses are especially susceptible to *everything*.
Millenia of selective breeding to try for the healthiest strongest animals we can, and they're still shit.
They'll get ill if they breathe wrong. They'll get ill if they eat a mouthful too much or too little of grass that's ever so slightly too green. They'll get ill if it's too rainy or not rainy enough.
How the hell did they even evolve?
I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards
My understanding is that churches were built next to yew trees, not yew trees planted next to churches.
Pre-Christian religions had many associations with yew trees (they live for a long time, give off mildly hallucinogenic gasses on hot days, discourage animals), and so built their holy sites around them. When Christianity came to Britain, churches were deliberately built on pagan holy sites to overrun the old religions, in the same way that early Christianity took over roman holy days (Saturnalia -> Christmas, Lemuria -> All Saint's Day). This led to churches being built next to sites with copious yew trees.
The Christmas/ Saturnalia link is a myth.
Here in the US the most common large wild grazing animals are deer, which can quite happily eat yew.
There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
I think one of the problems is people thinking kids are more stupid than they are, and blanket "don't do that" statements without explanations don't really work for kids.
If they had told you they were highly poisonous instead of just telling you "not to eat them" you might have taken them more seriously. And if they had given you a taste of the red berry around it (which is sweet but not that special either, and the texture is not great) you might just have thought it was not necessary to play with them at all.
But that requires education at all levels, around here (Belgium) I sometimes see parents who seem deadly afraid of anything nature, I tell my kids to eat blackberries and they softly tell their kids next to us not to do that. You end up with generations who just don't know anything about what's around them and will eventually do stupid things.
It takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.
> A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.
For that, parents would need time. But if we have to spend half of our day with work or work-related tasks (commute, lunch break)...
Society (or let's be real, capitalism) forces us to work unhealthy amounts of hours and then wonders why there aren't enough children and of the children that remain, they dumb down every year...
It saved me a lot of time when my son was little because it meant he argued less with me over the necessity of things at the cost of an extra sentence here and there.
Depends on the kid and their age.
Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm?
Him: No!
And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so.
For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still mostly lands up having a bit of a tantrum all the way until I hand him over to his teacher.
His two-year older sister was a lot less difficult at his age.
"If you don't put on your slippers, your toes will fall off and then you won't be able to walk like everybody else!"
Sometimes the old-world spook stories work.
I wouldn't recommend getting wrong things into their heads, because you (or someone else) will eventually have to teach them that it was not true, or they will discover it themselves, and that will undermine trust in the other things you said.
Sometimes you just need to let them experience that you are right first, as long they're just making themselves miserable for a bit.
Also, it works wonders to let them make a choice between two acceptable solutions instead of giving them space to say no.
"Do you want the slippers or the thick socks?"
It doesn't always work, but kids that age are learning to set boundaries, and giving them the illusion of agency often helps.
We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.
The fact that the inviting red part is mostly fine but the plant around it is deadly is very on-brand for nature
The amount of childhood survival that comes down to "thankfully I only poked it and didn't eat it" is kind of alarming in retrospect
It’s probably selected for. We’re pokers by natural selection.
> if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes.
That is complete bullshit and you shouldn't be posting it this confidently.
Those seeds are very poisonous, yes, but not in that cartoonish way. It's not cyanide.
even cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI
substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
> substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
Doesn’t that apply to every single thing that exists?
The old toxicology proverb is: "The dose makes the poison"
I like to extend it to: "the portion makes the poison." Beyond getting the alliteration, it also includes food, which I think is important. A glass of water won't kill you, two gallons of water will. An ice cream cone once in a while is nothing; one every day will make the doctor's eyes go wide.
Jesus. I had a colonoscopy. Don't tell me about drinking 2 gallons of water. I won't even get started on an ice cream cone a day.
Yes. IIRC Congress paid for a study in the early 20th century to try to nail a definition of the word "poison" by injecting mice with different quantities of bleach. The conclusion was that everything is a poison at the right dose. Most medicines are great at low doses, but then kill you when you take too much of them. Heck, even water is a poison.
There Is No Safe Dose of Prions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3156228/
I don’t care if it is poison. Never gonna give yew up.
Yew gonna eat that?
The always excellent Oatmeal:
We need to have a conversation about wombats
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats
Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.
Well, Mr. Oatmeal is apparently repeating an urban legend. I look at a wombat, and no way do I believe that thing can move at 25 mph (40 kph). I found a piece[0] which indicates this might have been some confusion as to metric vs imperial decades ago that was then retransmited through the ages.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-04-13/how-fast-can-...
And yet the very article that you refer to confirms that anecdotal reports by the biologists studying these very animals report that during breeding seasons that the male Southern Hairy-Nose Wombat can reach these speeds in bursts:
>South Australian wildlife biologist [A/Prof] David Taggart has studied the southern hairy-nosed wombat since 1993. In the 2008 and 2024 editions of Strahan's mammal book, he writes that the southern hairy-nosed species can run at 40 kph. "I can confirm that I have clocked this species running at just over 40 kph, although they can't maintain that for long."
More non-peer reviewed information here from the Australian national science agency: https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/3758/Turns-out-wombat...
We have four on the boundaries of our property. My 'Goldidor' (Labrador/retriever cross) has given chase a few times and has struggled to keep up. When they run they RUN. Maybe not pushing 40kph, not not far from it...
I got our dog up to 35-40kmh when he chased me on a bike one day, and he maintained it for quite a while.
If it’s outrunning a dog, it’s moving quick.
> The Northern Hairy-nosed wombat is considered one of the rarest mammals in the world -- there are only 80 of them left. If you can, please donate or follow any of these organizations. I personally donated $10,000 to help kick things off.
Thank you :) All wombats are in some trouble right now (even the bare-nosed or "common" wombat), but the Northern Hairy-nosed is right on the edge of extinction.
Wombats never get much attention, so it's awesome to see this article and the response it's got.
A problem with metric-imperial conversion in the article? Based on having seen them in the bush, wombat poo is a 4 centimetre cube not a 4 inch cube. That would be a Diprotodon sized wombat. Lucky we're only talking about wombat poo, and not something important like a space craft...
I think the 4 inches is in relation to the size of a human poo and not about the size of wombat poo.
Or a very very uncomfortable normal-sized wombat.
I now have a new perspective of what nature is capable of creating
"exceptional excrement" "sharp-sided scat" "To get to the bottom of the mystery" "...aptly titled journal Soft Matter."
Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.
I first read this in 2001 on an outhouse door while treking in Tasmania:
ODE TO THE WOMBAT
As you pound along the track
Eyes wide open and ears pinned back
You may have noticed those queer square turds
And thought, if not expressed in words,
The pain of such defecation
Baffles the imagination.
But it ain't done to entertain us—
The wombat has an oblong anus.
So if at night you hear pained cries
Outside your tent, feel no surprise.
With eyes shut tight, teeth clenched with pain,
A wombat's gone and crapped again!
All that work I did for my PhD and I could have been studying this topic instead...
A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:
> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."
The other article [1] quote:
> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-bui...
I think this is just a way of breaking up the quote that adds attribution in the middle. Probably a common reporting phrasing more so than an LLM invention (Or maybe it's a real quote in both cases, but they used an LLM to write parts of the article, just making sure the quotes are correct in the end).
Yes, good science writing almost always gets an opinion from someone not involved in the research for the article. I would guess varying definitions of "not involved" depending on the repute of the publication.
Yes I understand, it's just the feeling I get is a bit odd, like the thing you get at the end of the ad like "9/10 doctors recommend this".
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that science journalists and writers have scientist friends or advisors who they consult when something interesting happens? I imagine their correspondence going something like:
"Hi, Jack, came across this thing where they claim to have created artificial life. Is it real?"
"It's an impressive step..."
"Hey, Jack, there's this new thing called LK-99 that everyone is excited about. Why?"
"It's not real"
Some amount of `site:www.quantamagazine.org "Jack Szostak"` querying on Google seems to indicate this might be the case. Though I have to say it's probably not everyone who has a Nobel laureate on their rolodex for a quick "hi, is this real?"
If someone hasn't submitted this for an Ig Nobel, it would be a calamity.
Does the ignoble exist for anything else besides making fun of easy targets, like a bunch of sniveling teenagers?
Yes.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
Never have I considered the ignoble to be making fun of anyone. It is recognizing real, if bizarre, research. Science asking some real questions that make you appreciate the wonder of the universe.
Interesting. Somehow I never see people referencing them in this spirit, but that may be more on those people than on the price itself, perhaps.
It literally won years ago[0]. On reading the headline, I thought that was where it would link.
[0] https://improbable.com/ig/winners/
https://soundcloud.com/noamhassenfeld/wombat-song
My kids can't stop laughing
Wombat Song by Noam Hassenfeld
Ending of Vox Unexplainable Podcast on Wombat cube poops
even i am pooping cubes thanks to IBS-C since last 6 months. I have no idea how to reset it.
They eat six square meals a day!
I'll leave now...
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?
I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day
Yes, it seems the "why" here is more interesting than the "how", and is indeed going to be a matter of speculation.
As far as evolution in general, the big picture is more about "punctuated equilibrium" than incremental change. Individual genetic changes from parents to child are typically just benign and so accumulate in any inter-breeding population without much effect. Once in a while the environment may shift in some fairly major way (easier for environment to change quickly than genetics) and then an accumulation of previously benign changes may suddenly become collectively impactful in a positive or negative way.
I don't see any reason to assume that square poop was ever selected for - maybe it's just a harmless consequence of some genetic change that was impactful in another way. Speculating that square Wombat poop evolved to not fall off rocks is a "just so story" that raises more questions than it answers.
> I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers
Many observations are unexplained, and not just in biology. The difference between believers and atheists is that atheists stop there: it is unexplained, at least for now, that's how things are. Believers will instead attribute it to god, or some other form of higher power. In the end, it just shifts the problem, at some point you will have to admit that some things just are and there is no explanation, for atheists, these are the things themselves, for believers, it is god who made the things.
That's why being a believer or being an atheist doesn't have much to do with being a biologist. It is just a philosophical view of how you deal with the unknown and the unknowable. The only thing is that the religious dogma should not get in the way of proper science. That life is so beautiful that god must be behind it (are we still talking about poop cubes?) shouldn't prevent biologists from searching for an evolutionary explanation.
Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection, sometimes, things happen for no good reason. Maybe a particularly prolific male in a particularly successful colony happened to have a square poop mutation or something.
Interesting. I always thought stools had tapered ends to prevent the door from slamming shut.
Nature keeps finding engineering solutions we would never arrive at from first principles
This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]
[0]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-abstract/17/3/475/708006/Int...
[1]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-supplement/708006/mov/d0sm01...
"God does not play dice with the wombats." – Einstein (maybe.)
If Einstein had known about this, physics might have gone in a very different direction
Turns out He definitely plays with the dice of the wombats.
Related: drilling square holes, not as much fun as a wombat though.
I hard the pleasure to assist David Hu's talk a few years ago where he presented his work on feline tongues, frogs tongues and wombat poop. Really fun guy. I always wondered how he got his funding because studying the "physics of animals" must not be on the top of the list of most funding agencies.
Surely it has something to do with their square arseholes.
I was so confused by wombat poop the first time I saw it. Wasn't sure what I was looking at so I poked it with a stick.
> Wombat dissections show that cubes are formed within the last 17 percent of the intestine.
the article itself is paywalled, I wonder how did they get the wombats to dissect.
They found one that got hit by a car
The pun in the title is just world class.
> Distinctive intestines mold feces into sharp-cornered poop
...written directly above a photo of the subject matter that clearly does not have sharp corners (which is all for the best, I guess, poor wombats!), not even sharp edges, just flattened sides.
No offence but reading this in the silence of my workplace, it was so difficult to control my giggling and laughter reading everyline and it just kept getting funnier XD
>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?
I was literally thinking this the other night ahahha, and forgot to ask ChatGPT in the morning; nice that I found the answer here.
Discipline
It’s hip to be square
well written and has a distinctly human feel to it, compared to the slop we get to read these days.
Mojang should add them as a mob... and then have their poop be little spheres.
https://ciechanow.ski/wombat-poop-cube/
I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:
Can we stop with this "poop" nonsense. Number #2 and other forms, it's shit English, it's stupid. It's feces. Or shit. Or that fine old English word Turd.
I also really hate the word "poop". Its use as a noun and a verb here is particularly irritating. It just seems so childish.
Most school/education networks will have proxies and firewalls which limit access to "sensitive" destinations.
Avoiding triggering a profanity filter is a reasonable and sensible approach to publishing, for an educational site which wouldn't want to exclude part of their target audience.