Odd Things There are a lot of odd things which happen in the world and many of them we are not aware of. It may be because we have been told the wrong things about what is really going on. Let me give you an example. How may times have you heard all animals are afraid of fire and only humans can handle it and this is what separates us from the animal kingdom? This is not true and it is being proven over and over again by birds. Yes, I said birds. It turns out some birds in Australia are using fire for hunting. There are aboriginal legends of this, but nobody believed it until birds were seen carrying sticks which were on fire and dropping them in areas where they had game they could eat. The idea was to stampede the game and then fly down and grab them. Just in case you think this was an accident, birds there have been seen picking up sticks which are not on fire and taking them to a fire and lighting them and then carrying them to an area they want to start on fire. It turned out fire fighters were investigating how a fire was able to jump over a large area and as they investigated they were shocked to see birds carrying lighted sticks and dropping them. I guess man is no longer the lord of fire. It has been reported at least three different species of birds use fire. According to some scientists one of the strange things about us humans is we seem to need sleep, but scientists don’t know why. There have been reports of people who don’t need much sleep and reports of people who need far more than the 7 or 8 hours which is said to be normal. The idea we need to sleep 8 hours to conserve energy seemed reasonable until the African elephant was studied. The animal has far more bulk than us and yet in the wild it only sleeps 2 hours or so. Some scientists think we have to sleep that long in order to commit to memory everything we learned during the day, but science has not agreed with this reason by and large. One thing we know is if we are deprived of sleep it messes us up and can disrupt our attention span and cause us to doze off. Some incredible things happen everyday on earth without us being aware. When we see an intense lighting storm we usually do not think about lightning causing a nuclear reaction, but it does. Japanese researchers have found powerful electrical charges can produce gamma rays which are the most powerful radioactive waves there are. They react with the air in our atmosphere and this produces radioisotopes along with positrons. A positron is the antimatter counterpart of an electron. This reaction can increase the temperature in the upper atmosphere to as high as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit and all this is taking place right over our heads without us knowing it. In 2017 a lightning strike produced a gamma-ray burst which was measured by a detector on the ground and that burst lasted about one minute. Marijuana growers in California are causing a national disaster. They are worried about their crops so they put rat poison around them. You can imagine what this does to the wildlife in the area. Unfortunately poisoning a rat or mouse this way causes other problems, because these animals are food for bigger animals. Because of this practice, owls are dying off since they eat rats and mice and the poison in the rats and mice then goes into the owls. What do alligators do to survive when their swamp freezes over? It turns out they do something which is very strange. They allow themselves to be frozen with their nostrils sticking out. There is nothing stranger to see than a bunch of alligator noises sticking out of the frozen ice. When we are asked what is the biggest thing which ever lived on the planet we can be excused for thinking it was a dinosaur. Yes, some of them were tremendous, but nothing which has lived on the earth, so far as we know, has ever compared to what was found. It was a fungus which covered at least 2,000 acres and was killing the trees in that area. An Armillaria mushroom was found growing in Oregon in 1992 which covered 37 acres. There are plenty of waterfalls on earth, but not many can boast at being underwater. The southwest coast of Mauritius has an undersea waterfall. It is caused by swirling ocean currents and can be seen on Google Earth. We have all seen plenty of bridges in our lives, but there is a bridge in German which is different from almost all others. This bridge is for ships. It allows ships to cross over a river. The bridge is filled with water of course and continues a river. The name of the bridge is the Magdeburg Water Bridge. Many amusement parks have swing chairs attached by chains to a spinning top, but not of them can compare to one located in Vienna. The reason for this is the one in Vienna is not for the faint of heart, because the seats are over 385 feet in the air. |
