I believe you will find many magical creatures when you come to Australia.
And among them, there is a very common, and even common, animal that does not feel special, its name is Wombat, also known as the koala.
It is, however, the only creature in the world that can make a cube of poop!
There's only one in the world!
In fact, despite the problem of poop, wombat is still very cute, you can see it in the zoo.
It is also more common in Tasmania.
About a meter long and weighing about 20 to 35 kilograms, wombat feeds mainly on grass, bark, roots, strong teeth and claws, and lives in his own burrows. Wombat is also a master of earth warfare. When it is attacked underground by a Tasmanian badger and an Australian barbdog, it destroys the underground tunnel and buries the attacker alive; Or block a predator's bite with a fat tail, short butt, and kick like a donkey with his hind legs; You can even crush a predator's head against a predator's head with the power of his hind legs. Wombat is still the only marsupial bag with a back mouth, avoiding mud "flooding" the baby when digging a hole.
But compared with wombat's poop, there's no mystery.
In fact, scientists have been working on a problem until yesterday! To be published:
Why is wombat pooping a cube?
To say that you may not believe it, the problem has plagued scientists for a long time.
Now, the findings will be announced at the 71st Annual meeting of the physical Society of fluid Dynamics.
So how did wombat produce this cube-poop art? After all, their intestines are not square?
Dr Yang, an expert in fluid dynamics at Georgia Institute of Technology, and his team (including several Chinese) studied this to reveal the physiological processes involved in wombat's unique digestive skills.
Dr Yang and colleagues dissected wombat, who was injured in a traffic accident in Tasmania and was euthanized by a veterinarian, and found that their feces, after a 14-day long journey inside the body, began about 8 percent of the end of the gut. A solid state consisting of a separation cube of 2 cm in size from a liquid tube. They believe that this change may be caused by the elastic changes in the intestinal wall of wombat. To test the idea, the researchers emptied the intestines and filled them with long balloons, which turned out to be square, and tests found that the local elastic pressure of the intestines ranged from 20% to 75% from the corner to the edge. This means that wombat created these cube-poop works of art through different pressures on the gut wall.
According to the researchers, there are only two ways we used to know how to make cubes, one is molding, the other is cutting, and wombat creatively invented a third way of manufacturing that can be studied in mechanical engineering. This digestive mechanism of wombat can also be used in medicine, such as gastrointestinal therapy.
I don't know, because of the special shape of poop, this little creature of wombat has so much value to study!