Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

The 15 litres of semen from South Africa, from assorted males, would be enough to inseminate some 324 elephants and thereby freshen up the gene pool. But the elephant semen painstakingly gathered for America has been sitting in Pretoria for well over a year because of bureaucratic red tape. South African officials have been slow to grant a permit to export the semen to America simply because they have never done it before.

You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware? It's fucking cold.

If jelly is so fortifying, why does it wobble so much?

Cod hate cages — they don't like being handled, are very sensitive to changes in their environment and are very hard to breed.

Most commercial species have been reduced by over 75% and some, like whitetip sharks and common skate, by 99%. For all the marvellous improvements in technology, British fishermen, mostly using sail-power, caught more than twice as much cod, haddock and plaice in the 1880s as they do today. By one esti­mate, for every hour of fishing, with electronic sonar fish finders and industrial winches, dredges and nets, they catch 6% of what their forebears caught 120 year ago.

Many shallow-water species have highly evolved visual cortexes and their eyes can contain up to eight different light-absorbing photopig- ments, compared with the paltry red, blue and green which humans pos­sess. These extra light receptors give fish increased sensitivity to other wavelengths; some species can even see ultraviolet light, which is invis­ible to humans.

In Africa it is said that "even the jackal deserves to drink".

It was a Unicorn poop.

A hen is merely an egg's way of making another egg.

Before locusts fly, they march. Millions of juveniles crawl up to 500 meters a day, munching everything in front of them, in bands that stretch for kilometres. This is when the Australian Plague Locust Com­mission tries to reduce their numbers, by laying strips of insecticide in their path. But often a swarm changes direction without warning. The university group, led by Jerome Buhl, suggests that such changes of movement are mathematically similar to the behaviour of a mag­netic material like iron — which, if heated above a certain temperature, known as the Curie temperature, loses its magnetism. In both of these examples interactions between individual particles (magnetic domains in the case of iron, individual insects in the case of locusts) drive sud­den changes in group dynamics. The iron stops being magnetic. The locusts change direction.

Lobbyists are swarming over Capital Hill like locusts.

As the researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, com­pared with other flying animals the fish score well at 4.4:1. This makes them more efficient than swallowtail butterflies (3.6), fruit flies (1.8) and bumble bees (2.5). Flying fish are just as effective at gliding as birds that are known for being strong flyers, like red-shouldered hawks (3.8) and petrels (4). Nighthawks (9) and black vultures (17) make more impressive gliders. When the shape of a wing creates more lift from the air passing around it than it does drag (air resistance), an aircraft will fly. And the higher the ratio, the farther the aircraft will glide. This means if you cut the engine on a small Cessna with a lift-to-drag ratio of 7:1 it would fly seven metres forward for each metre of descent.

Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.

What is bad news for rodents, though, could be good news for primates.

Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Ja­pan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw America's occupation. The aim was to provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation. Masayuki Ko- matsu, Japan's former IWC negotiator, who is notoriously blunt and once called minke whales the "cockroaches of the sea".

Why did the turtle stick its head in a bucket?" sounds like the sort of rid­dle asked by ten-year-olds in school playgrounds. But it was also asked recently by Yuen Ip of the National University of Singapore. And his an­swer, it has to be said, is precisely the sort that would appeal to a ten- year-old. It is that turtles pee through their mouths. The question was, why?

Primates apart, few mammals employ tools. Sea otters use rocks to smash clams open, dolphins wrap sponges around their noses to protect themselves while they forage on the seabed, elephants swat insects with branches and humpback whales exhale cur­tains of bubbles to trap schools of fish; the grizzly bear, seems to be the only species other than humans to have invented the comb.