81–90 of 122 posts
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 R…
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taxine alkaloids[0] 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". [0] https://en.w…
> 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 y…
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.
The always excellent Oatmeal: We need to have a conversation about wombats https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.
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...
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
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 R…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The always excellent Oatmeal: We need to have a conversation about wombats https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.