Don't Panic

Happy Towel Day, folks.

Yes indeed, today is the anniversary of the publication of the HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy novel. And people all around the world are apparently carrying their towels, the single most useful item an intergalactic traveller can carry.

So here is something that might be handy: 42 ways to use a towel.

Spit on this.

Oh. My. God.

Look at this!!!!

Apparently cobras can track movements and predict where to spit their venom (with absolute and deadly accuracy)... all within 200 milliseconds. They are truly amazing. As soon as I saw this my jaw dropped - just... incredible.

Nothing to do with mammoth sexual deviancy this time.

New Scientist are forever printing questions like "Does God Eat Wasps" and suchlike in their Last Word column, and subsequently reprinting these questions in rather successful books. One was titled "Why Don't Penguins Feet Freeze?" I've not got s copy of this book myself, but I daresay at some point some wag said "probably the same reason that woolly mammoths managed to stay alive in freezing temperatures." Well, I don't know about penguins, might be something to do with minimal blood flow in the feet at a guess. However, we can answer the question about mammoths now.

It turns out they had antifreeze in their blood. Blimey. Reminds me a little of a quote about Jim Morrison I saw recently. Based on video footage of that crazy so-and-so where he was slurring incoherently someone commented "what's the matter with him, was he on drugs or something?" The in-no-way-funny reply to this was: "I think they found some blood in his alcohol."

Ho ho!

Smells like... what, exactly?

This is very interesting, albeit a few years old.

Ever taste metallic water? Ever open a can of beer and go, "hmm, it's a bit, well, tinny"? And ever grasped an iron bar, only to smell the iron on your hand a few moments later?

No you haven't.

It turns out that metals have no taste or smell, which is rather contrary to what we believe. It turns out that what we percieve as a metallic flavour is actually a chemical reaction of impurities within the metal with compounds in the skin and tongue. One of the more common compounds is 1-octen-3-one, a rather smelly substance. How's about that?