“What for?” you may ask. After all, they could hurt someone or something, or they could even be hurt by their own pins. Amazingly, the pins are too tiny, soft and flexible to even hurt anyone or anything. That is why, if you’ve ever had a wall gecko climb on you, you would never see any scar on your body. The information you are about to read reveal the very reason gecko lizards can climb and walk on almost any surface. It was discovered that gecko lizards possess extremely tiny hairs under each of their feet. These hairs rise and flatten, and can be detached easily from surfaces because of the direction, or angle, in which they grow. These hair-like pins, more appropriately called setae , also have several smaller parts on each of them, making them look like ceiling brooms. The tinier hairs, which are more of fiber, are called spatulae . The setae are made of keratin_ the same material human fingers are made of. Due to their structure, size, mass number and the material with whic
Does it surprise you to think that an animal can escape death, talk less of a housefly? Of course it shouldn’t. Remember the first science post on this blog that explained how fireflies escape danger, thanks to their wing speed and exceptional flying skills. Like fireflies, houseflies obviously have wing speed and flying skills, though they flap their wings at a much lesser speed than fireflies, that is 80 times per second, compared to fireflies that flap theirs 200 times per second. However, this post is not about speed or flight skills. This is about surviving a death trap. So just picture the following scenario. You used a local African broom to hit a housefly so that it doesn’t fly anymore, but you still manage to leave it alive so that you can punish it. You carry a condemned water bottle and fill it almost to the brim with water. After that, you picked up the weak fly, put it inside the water bottle (maybe even use a small stick to push the fly down the liquid to drown it sin