Rabbit Population Growth

Rabbit population is very interesting. It just keeps on growing, doubling every year. Rabbits don't care about mating with family, they just reproduce, reproduce, reproduce. This means they just keep on having babies.
In class today, we did a project on this. We measured the amount of rabbits with different coloured beans, and we did indeed get double the previous amount every time. Here are the results:

Giant Carnivorous Centipede!

http://www.damninteresting.com/giant-carnivorous-centipedes/

Scolopendra gigantea. The largest centipede in the world is commonly known as the Amazonian giant centipede, and lives in South America's Amazon Jungle and also on the islands of Trinidad and Jamaica. They usually grow to around thirty-five centimeters, the size of a man's forearm, and they are a venomous, red-maroon centipede with forty-six yellow-tinted legs. They live in dark, damp corners of caves and rocks and creep out for food. Of course, many centipedes are carnivorous, but that diet usually included bugs smaller than themselves. The Amazonian giant centipede is not only an incredibly swift runner, but also is an amazing climber. It eats mice, lizards, frogs, birds and mice, and with a quick motion snags its prey and injects a deadly venom, killing small animals in seconds. Strangest of all, this creepy centipede preys on a hugely ambitious prey: bats. They silently scale cave walls to the roof, where the bats are nesting. They then hang on to the rock with their back legs and detach their front legs, grabbing an unsuspecting bat as it flies away. The bat writhes in the grasp of many legs, but is condemned by the injection of the poison. The centipede then eats the entire bat right there, on the cave ceiling, proceeding to pull its upper three quarters of the body back onto the rock and crawling back into its hole.

In my opinion, this creature is very creepy and weird, and yet amazing. Its size makes it incomparable to any other bug, and what it does freaks me out. It feasts on bats? How does it detach itself from the ceiling and catch a flying animal? Truly amazing.

What Bacteria Don't Know Can Hurt Them

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111117163703.htm

 Many infections resist treatment, making some impossible to cure. This has a main reason: bacteria for nutrients during infection. Starved bacteria resist nearly every type of antibiotic, even new ones they have never been exposed to before. Scientists say that bacteria becomes starved when they run out of nutrients in the body, or when they live in biofilms. Biofilms are clusters of bacteria encased in a slimy coating, and Dr. Pradeep Singh says that an important factor in why biofilms resist so much to antibiotics is that the bacteria on the outside receive most of the nutrients in the body, starving the bacteria on the inside, who then become immune to the antibiotics. Scientists have tested whether bacteria only become resistant if they are aware of their starvation, and have been amazed - bacteria that were unaware of their starvation were thousands of times less resistant to antibiotics than aware starved ones. This means that what bacteria don't know can hurt them.

I think that once again, "what you don't know can't hurt you" has been proved wrong. I also was really amazed that starving bacteria would, instead of weakening, become stronger! It's also really unfair, though, to patients and scientists. They say that because of this, it's really hard to invent new, effective antibiotics.

Extra Giant Planet May Have Dwelled in Our Solar System

http://www.livescience.com/17110-extra-giant-planet-solar-system.html

Billions of years ago, it is possible that a giant planet might have inhabitied the solar system alongside Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.

This possibility has been discovered using computer models, showing how our solar system formed. They suggested the two planets onceused gravity to sling one another across space, only settling into their own orbits after billions of years.

"During more than 6,000 scattering phase, planetary scientist David Nesvorny at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, found that a solar system that began with four giant planets only had a 2.5% chance of leading to the orbits presently seen now. These systems would be too violent in their youth to end up resembling ours, most likely resulting in systems that have less than four giants over time."

Instead, our solar system probably began with five giants, with a now lost world around the size of Uranus and Neptune. It was probably an "ice giant," just like them, Nesvorny explained.

When the solar system was around 600 million years old, there was a major period of instability that scattered giant planets and smaller worlds, researchers said. Eventually, a gravitational encounter would have flung the mystery planet to interstellar space around 4 billion years ago.

Many planets have been discovered in interstellar space, so such an ejection might be common.

Nesvorny says that this is just the beginning. "It will need quite a lot of work to see if there actually was a fifth planet. Iam not fully convinced myself."

As for me, Ithink that this is truly amazing and that the world should definitely be told about this if it turns out to be true.

Apple iPhone 4S "Drains Battery Too Fast" Complaints

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15559721

The new iPhone 4S has received many complaints about its battery, saying that the battery is absolutely terrible.

"The iPhone 4S has a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It is supposed to provide up to eight hours of 3G talk time (14 hours of 2G) with standby time of up to 200 hours."

But thousands of Apple customers are saying that "their iPhone battery drains at a ridiculous rate, even when on standby mode.

Apple told BBC it had no comments on the issue.

One man says "I have an iPhone 4 and since putting iOS 5 on it the battery life has been really bad it drops at a ridiculous rate even when I'm not using it where as it would barely drop any charge when it was in standby." Some blame it on iCloud services, others the Notifications, one of the key features of iOS 5.

One person said that deactivating the time zone setting function. When he did, he said, the iPhone was no longer constantly changing the time and using up so much battery.

When iPhone 4S was launched, however, Apple chief executive Tim Cook promised a significant change in battery life.

So what is Apple going to do?