Thứ Năm, 8 tháng 12, 2016

Why is doves become a symbol of peace?

Why is doves become a symbol of peace? Keep reading to find out some more interesting information about them!

That’s a very interesting question. These gentle birds, that mate for life and take care of their young, were used as a peace symbol almost universally from the beginning of recorded history. The birds have always nested in areas close to developments with an unusual trust that they will be unharmed or even protected by humans. Egyptians were the first to record doves used in ceremonies to announce, to the people, the rise of a new pharaoh.


Central Asia also has a legend about two kings heading for war. One king calls for his armor and is told a dove has made a nest in his helmet. The king’s mother pleads with her son to leave the mother dove, a gentle bird associated with love, innocence, tenderness and purity, undisturbed.

The king agrees to leave the dove family and heads out to meet his enemy without protection. That might be one of the most awesome animal facts you had no idea before. The second king sees the king without armor and calls for a parley. Both kings lay down their weapons and talk. When the second king hears about the first king’s compassion for the mother dove he wonders if he has misjudged the man he thought was a tyrant. Both kings come to an agreement to seek peace for the two kingdoms instead of war. And the dove becomes known throughout the land as a bird of peace. 


In ancient Greek myth, Aphrodite, was often depicted with doves because She brought love and beauty and peace in which to enjoy the bounties of love. And the dove was the bird of Athena because it represented the renewal of life. How much do you know about tiger facts for kids ?

European superstition holds that the devil and witches can turn themselves into any bird shape except the Dove.

In Hinduism the dove is an emblem of the spirit, and the infinite capacity the spirit has for love.

Japan uses the dove with a sword as a symbol to announce the end of war. 

Some Native American cultures believe that the spirit of the recently deceased take the form of a dove. 

In America, perhaps the most well known depiction of the dove is from the bible. In the Old Testament a dove is released by Noah after the great flood to search for land. It returns with an olive branch to show that the Biblical flood has receded. The dove then symbolized deliverance and God's forgiveness. (Genesis 8:11). Take a quick look at funny pictures with captions that can help you reduce stress quickly.

These peaceful birds have woven themselves into histories of cultures all around the world through their gentle presence and fearlessness of humans. Their soulful calls and coos bring many people hope in a chaotic world.

Chủ Nhật, 20 tháng 11, 2016

Why Pigs Love Mud

Those who know about pigs will know the fact that they love mud, so what is the reason for this? Along with us discover the reason behind and also get other fact of life that are bound to interested to you.

Pigs roll in mud primarily in order to regulate their body temperature. This behavior is more commonly referred to as "wallowing."



As well as offering protection from the sun's rays, a coating of moist mud is crucial for keeping pigs cool in warm weather through gradual evaporation. This method is so effective that some have suggested wallowing as the reason for the limited evolutionary development of sweat glands in pigs. Pigs also wallow in cooler weather, indicating additional motivations such as the removal of parasites, and possibly marking territory with scent. Of course, pigs also genuinely enjoy wallowing for its own sake, showing signs of distress when farmers attempt to curb their behavior with anti-parasite medicines or air-conditioned barns.
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Thứ Năm, 17 tháng 11, 2016

Amazing Pangolin facts for kids

Right here in this article, you can learn about all your favourite animals, and even some you may have never heard of: Amazing Pangolin facts for kids


Pangolins, often called “scaly anteaters,” are covered in tough, overlapping scales. These burrowing mammals eat ants and termites using an extraordinarily long, sticky tongue, and are able to quickly roll themselves up into a tight ball when threatened. Eight different pangolin species can be found across Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Poaching for illegal wildlife trade and habitat loss have made these incredible creatures one of the most endangered groups of mammals in the world.

1. The pangolin’s closest relatives are carnivores, but they are the only mammals that are covered in scales. That might be one of the most awesome animals facts you had no idea before.
 
2. Pangolin scales are made of keratin, just like our finger nails, and make up 20 per cent of their body weight.

3. The word ‘pangolin’ comes from the Malay word ‘penggulung’, which means ‘one that rolls up’. When it is threatened a pangolin will curl itself into a tight ball, which is impenetrable to predators. 

4. The mammal can consume up to 20,000 ants a day. That’s about 73 million ants a year!

5. Pangolins can close their ears and nostrils using strong muscles. This helps protect them from ant attacks. 

6. They have long, sticky tongues, which are often longer than their body and attached near its pelvis and last pair of ribs. If a pangolin fully extends its tongue, it is longer than the animal’s head and body! Wanna take a quick look at funny pictures with captions that can help you relax effectively.

7. Pangolins don't have teeth, so they can’t chew. Instead, they have keratinous spines in their stomach and swallow stones that help them grind up their food in much the same manner as a bird’s gizzard.

8. There are eight pangolin species, four Asian and four African. They include the Chinese pangolin (critically endangered), Sunda pangolin (critically endangered), Indian pangolin (endangered), Philippine pangolin (endangered), Cape or Temminck’s ground pangolin (vulnerable), tree pangolin (vulnerable), giant ground pangolin (vulnerable) and black-bellied pangolin (vulnerable). However, fossil evidence suggests that they evolved in Europe. How much do you know about tiger facts for kids? Let’s check.

9. Pangolins are hunted for meat, for use in traditional medicine and as fashion accessories. The large-scale illegal trade in Asian pangolins is drastically driving down their numbers.

Chủ Nhật, 4 tháng 9, 2016

What does the giraffe say?

What does the giraffe, giraffe baby say? Don't you know the answer? Don't worry, this writing will help you. Keep reading to know

The researchers suspected the reason no one heard giraffe communication was because the sound frequency was too low for humans to hear. Elephants and other large animals use an ultra-low frequency “rumble” for long-distance communication; why not giraffes?

Image result for What noise does a giraffe make?

Giraffes very rarely make sounds, but they do have the ability to make noises such as moos, snorts, hisses, grunts and flute-like sounds. It has been suggested through various studies that the sounds giraffes make are often below the level of human hearing. Therefore, it is a common misconception that they do not have voices.

Image result for What noise does a giraffe make?

If a giraffe is startled or feels threatened, it may make a snorting sound, or it may just wander off. In the wild, giraffes often indicate to other animals that danger is nearby, and when a giraffe herd takes off, most other animals willfollow. Humans, lions and crocodiles are the only species that hunt giraffes.

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Thứ Hai, 29 tháng 8, 2016

Whether or not elephants can run?

Keep reading  to find out some elephants for kids about whether or not elephants can run

African elephant faces the viewer

A charging elephant might not look like it's merely walking, but that's exactly what it may be doing. Surprisingly, scientists don't agree on whether elephants run in the traditional sense. Now a new study splits the difference, suggesting that a rushing elephant may be walking and running at the same time.

Elephants break all the rules of animal movement. Most four-legged vertebrates change their stride when they move at high speeds so that all four feet leave the ground at once. Elephants take faster and longer steps, but they never take all four feet off the ground. That helps them spread out their massive weight as much as possible, says Norman Heglund, a biomechanics expert at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. But then, are they really running?

That's been a tough question to answer. It turns out there's a lot more involved in running than just taking one's feet off the ground. The legs also flex in particular ways that change an animal's center of gravity and the force it exerts on the ground. Scientists can measure these changes in humans and other animals by making them walk across force sensing plates. But just try doing that with a 4000-kilogram elephant.

The closest researchers have come is high-speed video of rushing elephants analyzed by a team of researchers in 2003. John Hutchinson, a biologist of the University of London's Royal Veterinary College, and colleagues concluded from the footage that, when elephants move at high speeds, their back legs bend slightly, like a runner springing from step to step. But scientists wanted to see more quantitative data.

So in the new study, Heglund and colleagues engineered a heavy-duty force-sensing plate that could withstand being trampled by a charging elephant. They shipped sixteen of the plates, along with computers and video cameras to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang Province. There, they constructed a 2 meter by 8 meter track from the plates and filmed 34 elephants, each guided by a mounted trainer, as they traversed the track at a range of speeds.
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Despite their size, elephants step lightly, the team reports today in The Journal of Experimental Biology. A human runner exerts peak forces of 3 times his or her body weight when running, while elephants exert at most 1.4 times their body weight. They also don't move their center of gravity much: Even at an 18 kilometer-per-hour charge, an elephant's center of mass moves up and down by about a centimeter, a smaller vertical movement than human runners make.

Image result for elephant can run

As to whether elephants actually run, the answer seems to be, well, sort of. While Hutchinson's team saw that an elephants' front legs walked while the back legs trotted, Heglund's team's measurements indicated the opposite: When stepping with a forelimb, the elephants' center of mass lowered slightly as the force on the ground increased, indicating a spring-like mechanism typical of a dog or a human's run. Meanwhile, even at high speeds, the elephants' back legs seemed to stay rigid, which is typical of a walk. "They don't really run in the classical sense," Heglund says. "They can't quite kick it into second gear, so they're stuck halfway in between" a walk and a run.

But that may not be the final answer, warns Hutchinson, who studied the same group of elephants alongside Heglund's team. He says that the elephants' feet likely touched more than one plate at once, making it hard to separate what individual limbs were doing. Still, he says, the research is important because it quantifies the forces with which elephants hit the ground. "It's nice to have the numbers."

If nothing else, the study illustrates that, when it comes to running in animals, "it's not one size fits all," says Daniel Schmitt, an expert in primate locomotion at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "That speaks to how evolution works."

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Thứ Năm, 25 tháng 8, 2016

Genetic similarity between humans and animals

I love to know and share science facts about genetic similarity between humans and animals:

Image result for genome

It is very difficult to find reliable data comparing the human genome to animal genome. The principal reason is that few animals have had their full genome sequenced. Even those that have cannot be easily compared in terms of percentages because the genomic length and chromosomal division can vary greatly from one species to another.

Scouring the Web, here is what I have found so far.

- Genome-wide variation from one human being to another can be up to 0.5% (99.5% similarity)

- Chimpanzees are 96% to 98% similar to humans, depending on how it is calculated.

- Cats have 90% of homologous genes with humans, 82% with dogs, 80% with cows, 79% with chimpanzees, 69% with rats and 67% with mice. 
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- Cows (Bos taurus) are 80% genetically similar to humans.

- 75% of mouse genes have equivalents in humans (source), 90% of the mouse genome could be lined up with a region on the human genome (source) 99% of mouse genes turn out to have analogues in humans 

- The fruit fly (Drosophila) shares about 60% of its DNA with humans.

- About 60% of chicken genes correspond to a similar human gene.

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Thứ Tư, 17 tháng 8, 2016

Interesting Facts About Elephants

If you’re looking for the most interesting elephant facts, you’re at the right place. Here are list of amazing facts about them

photo of baby elephant



  • An elephant is one of the few four legged animals, which cannot run or jump.
  • At birth, the baby elephants are blind and they depend on their trunk and their mothers to help them.
  • Females can mate and have babies until they are around 50 years old, and they tend to give birth every 2.5 to 4 years.
  • Elephants feed around 16 hours a day and they consume around 300 to 600 pounds of vegetation every day.
  • Male elephants go through bouts of aggression, which last for short periods.  Hence, female elephants are kept at the zoos and used in the circus, as they are gentler in nature.
  • Elephants are social animals and they are often seen touching and caressing one another and playing around with the trunks.
  • An elephants tusk grows up to around 10 feet and weighs around 200 pounds.
  • Elephants cool themselves by fanning their ears. This cool down the blood in their ears, which completely cools them off.
  • Despite the size of elephant ears the quality of hearing is poor! The body at the back of an elephant ear is surprisingly soft, and called the knuckle, this area is used by trainers to steer and give commands to the elephant. The ears on an African elephant are flapped to help keep the animal cool
  • Elephants are herbivores, they eat varying types of vegetation including grass, leaves, fruits, and bark
  • Elephants have a walking speed of approximately 4 mph. A surprising fact is that they are able to swim for long distances!
  • Elephants can spend up to 16 hours a day eating; on average they can eat approximately 495 pounds of food each day - that's a lot of leaves
  • A female elephant has the longest gestation period (pregnancy) than any other land mammal on earth; 22 months. When a calf is born it weighs approximately 100kg, it will be raised in a strong family group led by one matriarchal older female. Baby elephants are often depicted holding onto the tails of their elders
  • A male calf is raised by a female herd until it reaches the age of 12-15, when it leaves to joins the males or live alone. It will be reunited with females annually in order to mate
  • A fully grown adult male African Elephants can reach 10 - 13 feet high and weigh about 15,400 pounds. In comparison, a fully grown male Indian Elephant is unlikely to grow beyond 10 feet, it will weigh approximately 11,000 pounds
  • Elephant tusks are made of ivory and are actually enormouslyenlarged teeth (incisors). They start to grow between 6–12 months of age to replace the milk teeth, they grow approximately 17cm a year
  • Not all elephants have tusks; generally both male and female African elephants have tusks that are of similar size. Only the males in the Asian species have large tusks, if the females have them they are much smaller. It is quite common for Sri Lankan male elephants to have no tusk at all. Tusks are also known as ivory

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Thứ Ba, 16 tháng 8, 2016

Facts you didn't know about elephant trunk



Here are seven facts you didn't know about elephant facts and their trunk: 

An elephant's trunk is the most conspicuous part of its body, but gaze upon an elephant skeleton and you'd never realize that such an appendage existed, as there are no bones to mark its presence. A fusion of the nose and upper lip, the trunk is an elephant's most versatile tool, used for breathing, smelling, touching, grasping, and producing sound. It's probably the most amazing body part in the animal kingdom!

1. Elephant trunks can lift up to 770 pounds! That's right, an elephant can hoist Ulambayaryn Byambajav, a 340-lb world champion sumo wrestler, like he was a bag of peanuts.

2. Elephants are the only animals that can snorkel without aid. By holding the tips of their trunks above the water's surface, elephants can traverse rivers totally submerged. They simply walk across the riverbed.


3. Elephant Trunks actually have "fingers." African elephants have two while Asian elephants only have one. That's why the former is able to grasp objects by pinching the opposing tips of the trunk while the latter must wrap its trunk round objects like a boa constrictor.


4. The elephant's trunk contains over 40,000 muscles, divided into as many as 150,000 individual units! Compare that to the human body, which contains a paltry 639 muscles, and you start to get an idea how intricate the appendage is.

5. Thanks to its trunk, an elephant sports a sense of smell up to four times as sensitive as a bloodhound's. It's been reported that an elephant can smell water several miles away! Key to this ability are millions of receptor cells housed in the animal's upper nasal cavity.

6. Humans have a body part similar to a trunk, and that's the tongue. (The nose, of course, is also analogous.) Both the tongue and the trunk are muscular hydrostats -- body parts composed almost exclusively of muscle tissue that utilize water pressure to move. These body parts have muscles oriented in many varied directions, which grant acrobatic maneuverability.

7. Elephant trunks are stunted at birth, then rapidly elongate over the course of a few days. Calves (elephant babies) aren't at all adept at using these complex appendages at first, so they often tread on their own trunks. Luckily for human children, they don't have to worry about tripping over their noses, only their feet.
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How many Bengal tiger facts did you know?

Some of the most rare and wonderful animal facts from all over the world. Keep reading to find out some facts about Bengal tiger facts!

The Bengal tiger (also known as the Royal Bengal tiger) is a subspecies of tiger, found across theIndian subcontinent. The Bengal tiger is the national animal of Bangladesh and is considered to be the second largest tiger in the world.

  1. The Bengal tiger is the most numerous species oftiger in Asia and is found in dense forests and mangrove swamps and jungles throughout India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, although the Bengal tiger'srange today is much smaller than it once was.
  2. The Bengal tiger is considered to be the second largest species of tiger, although recent reports suggest that the Bengal tiger is on average, larger than the Siberiantiger. The Bengal tiger has a yellow or light orange coat, with black or dark brown stripes and a white belly.
  3. Bengal tigers are defined by three distinct mitochondrial nucleotide sites and 12 unique microsatellite alleles. The pattern of genetic variation in the Bengal tiger corresponds to the premise that they arrived in India approximately 12,000 years ago. This is consistent with the lack of tiger fossils from the Indian subcontinent prior to the late Pleistocene and the absence of tigers from Sri Lanka, which was separated from the subcontinent by rising sea levels in the early Holocene.
  4. The Bengal tiger is a dominant and carnivorous predator, hunting its prey by stalking it until the Bengal tiger has the opportunity to catch it off guard. Bengaltigers primarily hunt larger mammals including deer, wild boar, cattle and goats.
  5. Due to the size and power of the Bengal tiger, it has no natural predators in its native environment. Humans that hunt the Bengal tiger and habitat loss are the only threats to the Bengal tiger.
  6. After a gestation period of 3 to 4 months, the female Bengal tiger gives birth to up to 5 cubs. Newborn Bengal tiger cubs weigh about 1 kg (2 lb) and are blind and helpless. The mother feeds them milk for about 2 months and then the Bengaltiger cubs are introduced to meat. Bengal tiger cubs depend on their mother for the first 18 months and then they start hunting on their own.
  7. Today, due to habitat loss caused by deforestation, and hunting by humanpoachers, the Bengal tiger is considered to be an endangered species. Despite being the most common of all the tiger species, there are thought to be around 2,000 Bengal tigers left in the wild.

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