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'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws
- tempestn 4y agoIn case you want to see one of these things in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7aM5gU8mFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7aM5gU8mFY
- blahburn 4y agoGot 2 seconds in and quit out. Big nope.
- arthurcolle 4y agoIf you waited 15 seconds or so you could have seen it regurgitate some slimey green fluid!
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoThanks to your warning I made it out in a quick half a second. Still, that's half a second too long. Now to scrub it from my watch history lest youtube get the idea I wanna see more.
- ars 4y agoI enjoyed it :) I gave it a thumbs up, so I'm sure I'll get more. I was just interesting, the gross parts were only a few seconds at the begging and near the end, you should watch it.
- coding123 4y agoWas about to show my wife but realized she's eating.
- fartcannon 4y agoThat guy sounds a lot like the Boston baby whale/sunfish guy.
- gerdesj 4y agoThese charming 15" long worms with copper reinforced jaws are effectively in the Bronze Age. Soon they will transition to Iron, then they'll probably bypass the Industrial Age as too polluted (might as well learn from other's mistakes) and besides a coal fired worm is a pretty odd worm, and go full on nuclear. Worms with frikking lasers is what we will soon be contending with. Oh actually they are far more interesting than that: "The worms turn their digestive system inside-out and launch an appendage, called an eversible proboscis, at their prey." ... and they are venomous. So you approach your adversary. They turn around and drop their drawers and then it gets really weird. They extrude their entire large intestine through their arse and the end of it is sporting four metal fangs and dripping with poison.
- FredPret 4y agoBronze, iron, nuclear, spice
- GravitasFailure 4y agoHow about an iron age snail? It lives near deep sea vents and uses iron minerals in its shell and scales on its foot. It also has symbiotic bacteria in its gut so it doesn't feed directly. https://morethanadodo.com/2015/04/28/the-iron-snail/ https://morethanadodo.com/2015/04/28/the-iron-snail/
- whatshisface 4y agoIron sulfide is an unrefined ore that humans could access well before the iron age (if or when they ever had a use for it). Fortunately for the birds (and fish with the ecological role of birds) of the world, there are no truly iron snails.
- ngold 4y agoThey will skip the industrial age, evolve fusion generators as stomachs, and be impervious to deep space. Launching themselves into the universe with large trebuchets and fusion fart themselves into orbit.
- lukeschantz 4y agoThe Xenomorph from the Alien’s franchise extracts iron from blood of its host. That is where it gets the metal for its teeth. Not explicitly stated in the films but something mentioned in one of the books.
- RodgerTheGreat 4y agoGiven that a human body contains about 3-5 grams of iron total, those teeth must be smaller than they look.
- lukeschantz 4y agoIt’s almost as if the Aliens story universe is fictional, bruh.
- burnished 4y agoMy extremely rough math suggests 282-470 people go into the making of those teeth, assuming xenomorph teeth are roughly 10x the volume of a human tooth (5-6 mL) and that they have thirty of them, no losses, and we're talking pure elemental iron and not a protein/metal matrix or otherwise. Figure 7.8 g/mL as the density of iron, by 6 mL per tooth is roughly 47g per tooth, so in the ballpark of 10-15 humans worth of iron per tooth. Humans have 32 teeth and 30 seems as good as any other number, so 47g/tooth by 30 teeth is 1410g of iron. That gives us somewhere between 282-470 people per set of xenomorph teeth. I don't know where exactly I was going with this but it was fun to estimate.
- WJW 4y agoThey just eat tons and tons of people.
- kragen 4y agoNot metal, metal ions, unless "mineral...copper" means metallic copper. But the paper is only about the ionic copper. This is like saying your bones are metal because they're calcium phosphate and calcium is a metal. Neat animal (Glycera dibranchiata), lying clickbait headline, as you'd expect from Vice. Paper link: https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385%2822%2900153-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2590238522001539%3Fshowall%3Dtrue# https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385%2822%2900153... PDF link: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2590-2385%2822%2900153-9 https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2590-2385%2822%2900... "Extended PDF" link: https://www.cell.com/matter/pdfExtended/S2590-2385(22)00153-9 https://www.cell.com/matter/pdfExtended/S2590-2385(22)00153-... (which appears to be the regular PDF plus 13 pages of supplementary information but for some reason is 5 times as large)
- adrian_b 4y agoYou are perfectly right. As soon as I had seen the misleading title about "metal jaws", I was going to make the same comment. Unfortunately, this kind of stupid title about "metal" body parts appears periodically in popular science publications, whenever the topic is about animals which use skeleton reinforcing minerals that happen to use manganese, iron, copper or zinc ions, instead of the (more commonly encountered in skeleton minerals) ions of calcium, silicon, strontium or barium. There are a few bacteria which are able to reduce some metallic ions to the corresponding metal (e.g. silver ions to metallic silver), with the purpose of precipitating the metal ions from the water and thus avoiding the toxic effect of those metallic ions. However, there are no known living beings, except humans, which are able to build useful structures using metals.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoBut no tin. No bronze. Copper alone sucks. Meh.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fractallyte 4y agoAnd beavers have teeth reinforced with iron, which makes their front incisors a vivid orange: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/beavers-have-metal-teeth https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/beavers-have-...