MinuteEarth

Many bones have special layers of cells on each end known as "growth plates"; these cells are constantly dividing and turning into brand-new bone. That's what makes both you and, say, an alligator grow.

But in humans, once puberty is complete, our bodies release hormones that harden our growth plates permanently, turning them into "no-more-growth" plates.

Humans –along with other mammals, and birds– are energy-hungry critters. Our fast metabolisms allow us to run –or swim or fly– long distances, but they require a lot of energy to sustain, even when we’re at rest. And burning all that energy produces a lot of heat. And if you recall, as an animal grows, its volume, and therefore the amount of heat it produces, increases much faster than its surface area does – surface that's needed to vent that heat outward. Getting too big would burn us up, so it makes sense that there’s a biological process that limits our growth.

MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC

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Here are three of our best theories:

The first is that fungi might not get anything from producing psilocybin. Maybe the compound is an evolutionary accident like our widow’s peaks, or a relic from the species’ past, like our tailbone nubbins.

Another idea is that maybe it helps them fend off hungry critters… after all, soil-bound species make all sorts of chemicals whose bitter taste or toxins keep herbivores at bay.

A third idea is that psilocybin helps the fungus spread its reproductive spores far and wide. Like, say a slug munches on a mushroom, triggering a psilocybin-induced seizure. That tripping-out slug with a belly full of spores might attract the attention of a toad, which might eat the slug, and then hop far away before it poops out the spores.

So, despite a lot of study, scientists still don't have a grand unified theory of what psilocybin does for fungi.

For now, the bottom line is that when it comes to our scientific understanding of psilocybin, there is still so mushroom for improvement.

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An electric eel can deliver a shock of as much as 860 volts, which is about seven times higher than the voltage of the average US power outlet. That’s enough to paralyze other animals, or even kill them outright.

Being able to produce electric shocks sounds… well… shocking, but all animals are capable of producing electricity – even you. Every time an animal’s nerve or muscle cell fires, it generates an itty-bitty amount of electricity; these tiny jolts do all sorts of important jobs, from regulating an animal’s heartbeat to making it’s body move.

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One of the best ways to help save at-risk premature babies is to have their parents spend hours snuggling them to their bare chests; it's called kangaroo care because the skin-to-skin contact it creates is a lot like the cozy confines of a kangaroo’s pouch.

There seems to be a couple major reasons it works so well. First, kangaroo care is a great way to keep a baby warm.

Premature babies have less fat and more relative surface area than full-term babies, so they can’t always keep their body temperature up. And it turns out that skin is way better at conducting heat than air is. Preemies that get skin-to-skin care are 67% less likely to suffer from hypothermia than those that don’t.

Second, during kangaroo care, bacteria from the parent’s skin hop onto the baby. Which sounds dangerous, but in order to develop a healthy immune system, a baby needs to be exposed to the right amount of bacteria early in life. Full-term babies get this exposure in their mom’s womb during the last few months of pregnancy, but preemies miss out. By microdosing them with bacteria, kangaroo care can cut a preemie’s chances of developing a major infection like sepsis in half.

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One of the strangest-ever crime sprees hit a small town in England in 1921. It wasn't murder or bank robbery - instead, people were finding that the milk bottles delivered to their houses would have the foil caps pierced and the cream on top of the milk sucked out. Turns out, birds - specifically a species called great tits - had learned a new way to find a meal. The wildest part is that within a few years, birds all over Europe had copied the behavior.

The original birds who had figured out how to steal the cream had taught their neighbors how to do it, who in turn, taught their friends. It's a phenomenon called social transmission, and scientists can replicate it by teaching birds a pretty arbitrary skill - like opening a puzzle box in a specific way - and watching how it spreads through a population. Studying this phenomenon gives scientists a window into the way non-human animals learn new behaviors, even naughty ones like stealing.

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