I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards
This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.
Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
> The Northern Hairy-nosed wombat is considered one of the rarest mammals in the world -- there are only 80 of them left. If you can, please donate or follow any of these organizations. I personally donated $10,000 to help kick things off.
Thank you :) All wombats are in some trouble right now (even the bare-nosed or "common" wombat), but the Northern Hairy-nosed is right on the edge of extinction.
Wombats never get much attention, so it's awesome to see this article and the response it's got.
A problem with metric-imperial conversion in the article? Based on having seen them in the bush, wombat poo is a 4 centimetre cube not a 4 inch cube. That would be a Diprotodon sized wombat. Lucky we're only talking about wombat poo, and not something important like a space craft...
Well, Mr. Oatmeal is apparently repeating an urban legend. I look at a wombat, and no way do I believe that thing can move at 25 mph (40 kph). I found a piece[0] which indicates this might have been some confusion as to metric vs imperial decades ago that was then retransmited through the ages.
We have four on the boundaries of our property. My 'Goldidor' (Labrador/retriever cross) has given chase a few times and has struggled to keep up. When they run they RUN. Maybe not pushing 40kph, not not far from it...
And yet the very article that you refer to confirms that anecdotal reports by the biologists studying these very animals report that during breeding seasons that the male Southern Hairy-Nose Wombat can reach these speeds in bursts:
>South Australian wildlife biologist [A/Prof] David Taggart has studied the southern hairy-nosed wombat since 1993. In the 2008 and 2024 editions of Strahan's mammal book, he writes that the southern hairy-nosed species can run at 40 kph. "I can confirm that I have clocked this species running at just over 40 kph, although they can't maintain that for long."
A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:
> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."
The other article [1] quote:
> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that science journalists and writers have scientist friends or advisors who they consult when something interesting happens? I imagine their correspondence going something like:
"Hi, Jack, came across this thing where they claim to have created artificial life. Is it real?"
"It's an impressive step..."
"Hey, Jack, there's this new thing called LK-99 that everyone is excited about. Why?"
"It's not real"
Some amount of `site:www.quantamagazine.org "Jack Szostak"` querying on Google seems to indicate this might be the case. Though I have to say it's probably not everyone who has a Nobel laureate on their rolodex for a quick "hi, is this real?"
Yes, good science writing almost always gets an opinion from someone not involved in the research for the article. I would guess varying definitions of "not involved" depending on the repute of the publication.
I think this is just a way of breaking up the quote that adds attribution in the middle. Probably a common reporting phrasing more so than an LLM invention (Or maybe it's a real quote in both cases, but they used an LLM to write parts of the article, just making sure the quotes are correct in the end).
Never have I considered the ignoble to be making fun of anyone. It is recognizing real, if bizarre, research. Science asking some real questions that make you appreciate the wonder of the universe.
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?
I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day
> I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers
Many observations are unexplained, and not just in biology. The difference between believers and atheists is that atheists stop there: it is unexplained, at least for now, that's how things are. Believers will instead attribute it to god, or some other form of higher power. In the end, it just shifts the problem, at some point you will have to admit that some things just are and there is no explanation, for atheists, these are the things themselves, for believers, it is god who made the things.
That's why being a believer or being an atheist doesn't have much to do with being a biologist. It is just a philosophical view of how you deal with the unknown and the unknowable. The only thing is that the religious dogma should not get in the way of proper science. That life is so beautiful that god must be behind it (are we still talking about poop cubes?) shouldn't prevent biologists from searching for an evolutionary explanation.
Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection, sometimes, things happen for no good reason. Maybe a particularly prolific male in a particularly successful colony happened to have a square poop mutation or something.
Yes, it seems the "why" here is more interesting than the "how", and is indeed going to be a matter of speculation.
As far as evolution in general, the big picture is more about "punctuated equilibrium" than incremental change. Individual genetic changes from parents to child are typically just benign and so accumulate in any inter-breeding population without much effect. Once in a while the environment may shift in some fairly major way (easier for environment to change quickly than genetics) and then an accumulation of previously benign changes may suddenly become collectively impactful in a positive or negative way.
I don't see any reason to assume that square poop was ever selected for - maybe it's just a harmless consequence of some genetic change that was impactful in another way. Speculating that square Wombat poop evolved to not fall off rocks is a "just so story" that raises more questions than it answers.
This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]
I hard the pleasure to assist David Hu's talk a few years ago where he presented his work on feline tongues, frogs tongues and wombat poop. Really fun guy. I always wondered how he got his funding because studying the "physics of animals" must not be on the top of the list of most funding agencies.
>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?
> Distinctive intestines mold feces into sharp-cornered poop
...written directly above a photo of the subject matter that clearly does not have sharp corners (which is all for the best, I guess, poor wombats!), not even sharp edges, just flattened sides.
No offence but reading this in the silence of my workplace, it was so difficult to control my giggling and laughter reading everyline and it just kept getting funnier XD
I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:
Spit it out man! It means CUNT.
Can we stop with this "poop" nonsense. Number #2 and other forms, it's shit English, it's stupid. It's feces. Or shit. Or that fine old English word Turd.
Most school/education networks will have proxies and firewalls which limit access to "sensitive" destinations.
Avoiding triggering a profanity filter is a reasonable and sensible approach to publishing, for an educational site which wouldn't want to exclude part of their target audience.
I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards
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Here in the US the most common large wild grazing animals are deer, which can quite happily eat yew.
I hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)
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If they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.
There has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.
4 replies →
This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
3 replies →
We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
> if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes.
That is complete bullshit and you shouldn't be posting it this confidently.
Those seeds are very poisonous, yes, but not in that cartoonish way. It's not cyanide.
even cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI
substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
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There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
The amount of childhood survival that comes down to "thankfully I only poked it and didn't eat it" is kind of alarming in retrospect
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We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.
1 reply →
Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
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I don’t care if it is poison. Never gonna give yew up.
Yew gonna eat that?
The always excellent Oatmeal:
We need to have a conversation about wombats
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats
Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.
> The Northern Hairy-nosed wombat is considered one of the rarest mammals in the world -- there are only 80 of them left. If you can, please donate or follow any of these organizations. I personally donated $10,000 to help kick things off.
Thank you :) All wombats are in some trouble right now (even the bare-nosed or "common" wombat), but the Northern Hairy-nosed is right on the edge of extinction.
Wombats never get much attention, so it's awesome to see this article and the response it's got.
A problem with metric-imperial conversion in the article? Based on having seen them in the bush, wombat poo is a 4 centimetre cube not a 4 inch cube. That would be a Diprotodon sized wombat. Lucky we're only talking about wombat poo, and not something important like a space craft...
I think the 4 inches is in relation to the size of a human poo and not about the size of wombat poo.
1 reply →
Or a very very uncomfortable normal-sized wombat.
I now have a new perspective of what nature is capable of creating
Well, Mr. Oatmeal is apparently repeating an urban legend. I look at a wombat, and no way do I believe that thing can move at 25 mph (40 kph). I found a piece[0] which indicates this might have been some confusion as to metric vs imperial decades ago that was then retransmited through the ages.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-04-13/how-fast-can-...
We have four on the boundaries of our property. My 'Goldidor' (Labrador/retriever cross) has given chase a few times and has struggled to keep up. When they run they RUN. Maybe not pushing 40kph, not not far from it...
1 reply →
And yet the very article that you refer to confirms that anecdotal reports by the biologists studying these very animals report that during breeding seasons that the male Southern Hairy-Nose Wombat can reach these speeds in bursts:
>South Australian wildlife biologist [A/Prof] David Taggart has studied the southern hairy-nosed wombat since 1993. In the 2008 and 2024 editions of Strahan's mammal book, he writes that the southern hairy-nosed species can run at 40 kph. "I can confirm that I have clocked this species running at just over 40 kph, although they can't maintain that for long."
More non-peer reviewed information here from the Australian national science agency: https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/3758/Turns-out-wombat...
"exceptional excrement" "sharp-sided scat" "To get to the bottom of the mystery" "...aptly titled journal Soft Matter."
Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.
I first read this in 2001 on an outhouse door while treking in Tasmania:
ODE TO THE WOMBAT
As you pound along the track
Eyes wide open and ears pinned back
You may have noticed those queer square turds
And thought, if not expressed in words,
The pain of such defecation
Baffles the imagination.
But it ain't done to entertain us—
The wombat has an oblong anus.
So if at night you hear pained cries
Outside your tent, feel no surprise.
With eyes shut tight, teeth clenched with pain,
A wombat's gone and crapped again!
All that work I did for my PhD and I could have been studying this topic instead...
A bit of a tangent but I've read this phrase almost verbatim in another article[1] today:
> "This study is really good," says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals "are very special."
The other article [1] quote:
> It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak (opens a new tab), who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”
Are these editorial guidelines to get an independent read? Just coincidence? I don't think they are LLM bits because I expect better from these magazines, but it's too eerily similar.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-bui...
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that science journalists and writers have scientist friends or advisors who they consult when something interesting happens? I imagine their correspondence going something like:
"Hi, Jack, came across this thing where they claim to have created artificial life. Is it real?"
"It's an impressive step..."
"Hey, Jack, there's this new thing called LK-99 that everyone is excited about. Why?"
"It's not real"
Some amount of `site:www.quantamagazine.org "Jack Szostak"` querying on Google seems to indicate this might be the case. Though I have to say it's probably not everyone who has a Nobel laureate on their rolodex for a quick "hi, is this real?"
Yes, good science writing almost always gets an opinion from someone not involved in the research for the article. I would guess varying definitions of "not involved" depending on the repute of the publication.
Yes I understand, it's just the feeling I get is a bit odd, like the thing you get at the end of the ad like "9/10 doctors recommend this".
I think this is just a way of breaking up the quote that adds attribution in the middle. Probably a common reporting phrasing more so than an LLM invention (Or maybe it's a real quote in both cases, but they used an LLM to write parts of the article, just making sure the quotes are correct in the end).
If someone hasn't submitted this for an Ig Nobel, it would be a calamity.
It literally won years ago[0]. On reading the headline, I thought that was where it would link.
[0] https://improbable.com/ig/winners/
Does the ignoble exist for anything else besides making fun of easy targets, like a bunch of sniveling teenagers?
Yes.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
Never have I considered the ignoble to be making fun of anyone. It is recognizing real, if bizarre, research. Science asking some real questions that make you appreciate the wonder of the universe.
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https://soundcloud.com/noamhassenfeld/wombat-song
My kids can't stop laughing
Wombat Song by Noam Hassenfeld
Ending of Vox Unexplainable Podcast on Wombat cube poops
They eat six square meals a day!
I'll leave now...
Interesting. I always thought stools had tapered ends to prevent the door from slamming shut.
Nature keeps finding engineering solutions we would never arrive at from first principles
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?
I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day
> I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers
Many observations are unexplained, and not just in biology. The difference between believers and atheists is that atheists stop there: it is unexplained, at least for now, that's how things are. Believers will instead attribute it to god, or some other form of higher power. In the end, it just shifts the problem, at some point you will have to admit that some things just are and there is no explanation, for atheists, these are the things themselves, for believers, it is god who made the things.
That's why being a believer or being an atheist doesn't have much to do with being a biologist. It is just a philosophical view of how you deal with the unknown and the unknowable. The only thing is that the religious dogma should not get in the way of proper science. That life is so beautiful that god must be behind it (are we still talking about poop cubes?) shouldn't prevent biologists from searching for an evolutionary explanation.
Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection, sometimes, things happen for no good reason. Maybe a particularly prolific male in a particularly successful colony happened to have a square poop mutation or something.
Yes, it seems the "why" here is more interesting than the "how", and is indeed going to be a matter of speculation.
As far as evolution in general, the big picture is more about "punctuated equilibrium" than incremental change. Individual genetic changes from parents to child are typically just benign and so accumulate in any inter-breeding population without much effect. Once in a while the environment may shift in some fairly major way (easier for environment to change quickly than genetics) and then an accumulation of previously benign changes may suddenly become collectively impactful in a positive or negative way.
I don't see any reason to assume that square poop was ever selected for - maybe it's just a harmless consequence of some genetic change that was impactful in another way. Speculating that square Wombat poop evolved to not fall off rocks is a "just so story" that raises more questions than it answers.
This is most amazing when you click into the study[0] and see the supporting materials linked to at the bottom like a .mov of a rotating 3d model of wombat poop[1]
[0]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-abstract/17/3/475/708006/Int...
[1]https://pubs.rsc.org/sm/article-supplement/708006/mov/d0sm01...
even i am pooping cubes thanks to IBS-C since last 6 months. I have no idea how to reset it.
"God does not play dice with the wombats." – Einstein (maybe.)
If Einstein had known about this, physics might have gone in a very different direction
Turns out He definitely plays with the dice of the wombats.
Related: drilling square holes, not as much fun as a wombat though.
Surely it has something to do with their square arseholes.
I was so confused by wombat poop the first time I saw it. Wasn't sure what I was looking at so I poked it with a stick.
I hard the pleasure to assist David Hu's talk a few years ago where he presented his work on feline tongues, frogs tongues and wombat poop. Really fun guy. I always wondered how he got his funding because studying the "physics of animals" must not be on the top of the list of most funding agencies.
The pun in the title is just world class.
>Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
and those who of them who shit cubes ended up more likely to procreate...?
> Wombat dissections show that cubes are formed within the last 17 percent of the intestine.
the article itself is paywalled, I wonder how did they get the wombats to dissect.
They found one that got hit by a car
> Distinctive intestines mold feces into sharp-cornered poop
...written directly above a photo of the subject matter that clearly does not have sharp corners (which is all for the best, I guess, poor wombats!), not even sharp edges, just flattened sides.
No offence but reading this in the silence of my workplace, it was so difficult to control my giggling and laughter reading everyline and it just kept getting funnier XD
I was literally thinking this the other night ahahha, and forgot to ask ChatGPT in the morning; nice that I found the answer here.
Discipline
It’s hip to be square
well written and has a distinctly human feel to it, compared to the slop we get to read these days.
Mojang should add them as a mob... and then have their poop be little spheres.
https://ciechanow.ski/wombat-poop-cube/
I'm reminded of Professor Hermione Lee of the University of York English department facing a stuttering student explaining the contextual meaning of the word "quaint" in middle English poetry:
Can we stop with this "poop" nonsense. Number #2 and other forms, it's shit English, it's stupid. It's feces. Or shit. Or that fine old English word Turd.
Most school/education networks will have proxies and firewalls which limit access to "sensitive" destinations.
Avoiding triggering a profanity filter is a reasonable and sensible approach to publishing, for an educational site which wouldn't want to exclude part of their target audience.
I also really hate the word "poop". Its use as a noun and a verb here is particularly irritating. It just seems so childish.