I was reading through an article on the variability of gene expression, when I came across something I had never know about bees.
That seems like important information to know. You’d think that would have gotten around.
What odd things have you learned recently, important or otherwise.
I learned what hummingbird poop is made from, right here on the SDMB.
Not as useful as the banana and beehive info, though.
Answer: mostly spider exoskeletons.
Hummingbirds eat spiders? :eek:
That’s another thing I’ve learned. They looked so sweet and peaceful sipping at those flowers.
Related, hummingbirds build their nests from spider silk and lichens.
Also, they aren’t sweet. They’re kind of rude and mean, in a very tiny cute way.
Lots of exposure to sunlight can affect the color of your eyes.
Yeah. I learned recently (I probably read it here, actually) that hummingbirds are fiercely territorial and will fight each other over access to food sources. You can see hummingbird fights on YouTube. It’s pretty cool.
And speaking of You Tube, there are a shitload (pun intended) of videos of cats pooping in the toilet. Yes, I did start a thread on this subject in case the topic looks familiar.
Which begs the questions, what kind of weirdo posts things like this, never mind WATCHES things like this? Really, I only saw one. It was a Sphynx who drank out of the “birdbath” first.
Every last inch of me’s covered in hair… above the ankles. Below? Nada. Just noticed this the other day.
I just learned that Morgan Spurlock made the “One Direction” movie. What…???
I learned that mud daubers do, in spite of what I’ve been told my entire life here in southern Indiana where people should know better, sting. They don’t have a really painful sting, and they’re sort of polite and almost apologetic about it, but they do indeed sting.
Roy Chapman Andrews, suspected of being the inspiration (or at least an inspiration) for Indiana Jones (among other things, he was well known for wearing an unusual hat and traveling armed while hunting dinosaur fossils) once had an incident involving snakes. Vipers crawled into the tents of his expedition in Mongolia (presumably seeking warmth in the cooling desert air), and Andrews supposedly was in such a hurry to get away his men found it funny.
I don’t know if that’s the inspiration behind Indy’s feelings about snakes in the movies, but it’s a nice bit of trivia.
Not something learned, but maybe a learning experience. Slate has posted an interactive game on their site. Pick a time (the earliest is 16-something), push the button, and find out what you would have died of if you lived then. I had to push the button multiple times to see what my choices were. My first death was of tooth or gum disease.
Hoss Cartwright had a real given name, mentioned once, or something like that, in the first season.
Vince Gilligan, the creator and writer of Breaking Bad, wrote Home Fries, a romantic comedy with Luke Wilson and Drew Barrymore.
In fact, the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was often depicted as a hummingbird.
A few months ago I was reading “The Violinist’s Thumb” by Sam Kean, and I learned that mother and baby do not share blood through the umbilical cord.
This may be obvious to everyone else, but I had never given it much thought. I figured the umbilical cord simply connected the two circulatory systems and that was that. The reality is that the placenta serves as a sort of DMZ where momma and baby blood cells pass stuff back and forth like prisoners passing objects through a chain link fence.
The chapter in the book had made a point of how extremely rare it was for mother and fetus to come down with cancer at the same time, occurring a few dozen times since the first known case in the 1860s. With my erroneous “cross connected pipelines” understanding of the momma-baby system, this didn’t make sense: wouldn’t the baby catch whatever was in the mother’s veins? Now I know better.
One of the CODs is “purging and vomiting.” Not a good way to die.
I’ve learned that there are some amazingly talented children out there. To wit, 8-year-old Alexey Poblete on the drums, covering Rush’s YYZ:
And also that Rush’s drummer, Neil Peart, is a complete class act:
The Argentine coat of arms is a beanie on a stick. 
In California, bodies donated for medical research are shipped piecemeal. If the entire body is shipped intact, it must be carried in a hearse. Once all research/training/experiments are finished, all pieces are returned, and the family of the deceased is notified that they may have the remains back, if that is what the deceased wanted.
My god, reading this post I sound like an idiot. My company uses cadavers for doctor training, among other things, and our staff in CA shared this info with me.