If you weren't freaked out by rats before, you soon will be ...
1. A rat can squeeze through extremely small holes thanks to its collapsible skeleton. Its ribs are hinged at the spine and can fold down like an umbrella, which means that any hole that's bigenough for a rat's head is big enough for the rest of him. 2. Rats can chew their way through almost anything — thick wood, metal pipes, brick walls, and cement. Their front teeth are long and also very sharp. When rats bite, they mean business. 3. Rats will usually only bite when cornered. But then they bite hard — very hard. Their teeth can easily slice down to human bone. 4. Rats are superb athletes. The long claws on a rat's feet allow it to scale brick or cement walls with Spider-man-like ease. Getting down isn't a problem, either: A rat can fall 50 feet (15m) and land on its feet without injuries. Rats can also leap half a metre in the air from a standing position and lift more than their own body weight. 5. Rats are sex machines. During a single six-hour period of receptivity, a female rat may mate as many as 500 times, which helps explain how a pair of rats can end up producing 15,000 descendants in one year and why they are the most common mammal in the world. 6. Rats prefer that you do not wash your face. Occasionally rats will bite people's faces and hands at night while they sleep, drawn by food residue on their skin. 7. Rats can survive nuclear detonations. During the 1950s, roof rats living on Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific confounded scientists by surviving atomic bomb testing. While the details are sketchy, it's believed that early nuclear testing obliterated the Polynesian rat population, and that the atoll was then repopulated with a different species of rat that burrowed deep down to survive future testing. (Via Mental Floss)
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"This new build for a self storage in Wairau Road, Glenfield caught my eye," writes Grahame (Boffin) Waite.
Italian police arrested a Mafia fugitive last week after they spotted his distinctive tattoos in the cooking tutorials he had been uploading on YouTube. Marc Feren Claude Biart was always careful to hide his face in his Italian cooking tutorials, filming the YouTube videos while laying low from police on a sandy beach in the Caribbean. But he had failed to obscure his tattoos.
Thick thighs save lives
According to a Danish study, those of us with bigger thighs have been found to be at a lower risk of heart disease and premature death. Scientists evaluated 2816 men and women ages 35 to 65 who were free of heart disease, stroke, and cancer when they joined the study in the late 1980s and tracked the volunteers for an average of 12.5 years. A thigh circumference of about 62 cm was most protective.
