Welcome back to The Escapist‘s Strange Science Guessing Game! Did you think because it disappeared for a few months that we’d solved the final mysteries behind everything? Considering we’re on the cusp of discovering parallel dimensions, that’s pretty unlikely – which means we can probably continue these games right until the heat death of the universe, give or take a few millenia.
The rules are the same as before. We will present an unusual image from the worlds of science – without context – and your job is to see if you can figure out what it is. Once you think you’ve got it, or know that you don’t, click onto the next page to see the truth behind its mysterious likeness. If you get most of them right, you can rest assured that you are a well-read individual of all things strange.
And if you don’t get any right – well, we’re actually kind of jealous, because you’ll be learning all these cool things for the very first time.
Let’s get started!
A worm-like body, gaping maw, and desert environment? Is it possible we’re actually looking at some kind of Sarlacc – or at the very least a small Graboid from Tremors? Nope, nothing of the sort. It’s not even a worm. You’re looking at Hydnora Africana, an achlorophyllous plant native to Southern Africa that resembles our childhood nightmares almost entirely by coincidence.
There is one similarity to Sarlaccs: Hydnoras grow underground, with its “mouth” growing just above the surface. But don’t let that fool you – unlike the Venus fly trap and its ilk, Hydnoras aren’t carnivorous. That opening’s purpose is solely to lure insects and trap them just long enough to ensure they’re pollinating – at which point they’re released. Not exactly a thousand years of torture.
What the Hydnora actually feeds on is other plants. Hydnoras are parasites that attach to their neighbors, dissolve some of the roots, and absorb some nutrients from their host. Meanwhile, the Hydnora grows a fruit that ripens over the course of two years. You can even eat the fruit, although it’s not exactly something to write home about – it’s been described as having the taste and texture of a potato.
Still, I’m probably always going to think of baby Sarlaccs when I see them… which sounds way more adorable than it probably should.
I am not the sort of person who says that silly research topics shouldn’t be researched – we can uncover amazing things from seemingly ridiculous experiments. However, if someone were to say scientists have too much time on their hands they can point to this picture: An experiment attempting to discover how many licks it takes to get to the center of a lollipop.
No, seriously.
It all began at New York University, where researchers decided they wanted to see how solid objects dissolve when exposed to liquids. Naturally, the easiest way to study this phenomenon is with hard candies, which are meant to dissolve from the salivia in your mouth instead of being uncomfortably chewed. So the team designed candy spheres and cylinders and exposed them to a flowing fluid, carefully recording how they dissolved over time. What was surprising was that the candy shape didn’t matter – after being exposed to the same liquid flow, both objects eventually formed the same half-sphere shape pictured here.
Now here’s the part where it gets practical – while most people don’t care about the candy shape in your mouth, the same principle applies to land masses where water carves the land over time. It shows that the water flow – not necessarily properties of the mass it contacts – is what determines the imprint over time. And even the candy implies a biological purpose, since we’re knocking back foodstuffs and medications all the time that really should dissolve effectively.
Oh, and for the record? Since the flow is easier to measure than how many times you lick a candy, scientists can estimate you’ll reach the center in about 1000 licks. You’re welcome.
Okay, you got me – That’s a frog. Specifically, a frog covered in spikes like some kind of pond-dwelling porcupine. But that’s not the best part. What’s amazing about this frog is it didn’t have those spikes mere moments before.
(Click image for full-size view!)
The tiny frog, called Pristimantis mutabilis, was discovered in a protected cloud forest reserve in the Andes Mountains. When biologists finally got their hands on the seemingly rare specimin, they put it in a small glass so they could study it the next day. When they checked in, the spines were gone, making them think they’d taken the wrong frog. But after checking mere moments later, the spines had returned – making this potentially the first case of a shapeshifting amphibian ever discovered.
The spines themselves are likely a camouflage defence mechanism, but other than that scientists aren’t quite sure exactly what causes them What we know is that the spines can retract into the body in about 330 seconds, a remarkable speed for biological transformations that leave you thinking they’re separate species.
Dubbed the “Punk Rock” Rain Frog, this species could change much of what we know about amphibians going forward – I mean, can Kermit pull this off? What else isn’t he telling us?
At first glance, you might think you were looking at a piece of a coral reef. But that’s actually a Leafy Sea Dragon, described as one of the most ornately camouflaged animals on the planet. At just over 30 centimeters long this creature isn’t much bigger than a tea cup, yet covered in leafy structures that allows it to blend into seaweed and kelp formations.
Living in the waters of Australia, these creatures are closely related to the sea horse but don’t have the ability to grip objects with their tails. And while the name “dragon” implies they can powerfully sail through the oceans, they’re much happier to drift along the current with seaweed while steering with small fins.
Want another fun fact about sea dragons? While they have distinct male and female sexes, it’s actually the male that carries babies to term. Females deposit their eggs into a small pouch in the male dragon’s tail where they’re fertilized, releasing their young every four to six weeks.
The downside of being a sea dragon, however, is that humans keep trying to take you home as a pet. The problem became such that the Australian government had to declare sea dragons a protected species in the 1990s when their numbers drastically shrank. I mean, I know it sounds cool to say you caught a dragon and brought it home, but if it gets to the point where all you can find is actual seaweed? Maybe your pet hunting is getting excessive.
Some people will look at this space photograph and see the hand of God in everything. Others will look at it and realize Galactus is real. But according to scientists, it’s an exploding star… from which a hand emerged. Run.
Okay, it’s actually an enormous cloud of material that happens to look like a hand from our perspective. Specifically, it’s a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the remnants of a star that thought supernovas were in that millenia. The pulsar itself is spinning just like Earth, but much, much faster – as in seven rotations per second. Those speeds ejected a massive wave of particles that interact with nearby X-Rays, lighting them up just enough to look like God is saying hello.
The pulsar itself should be somewhere near the bright white spot, but is actually invisible – unlike the galactic high-five it spawned. There’s also a chance that an optical illusion is influencing the light to look like a hand, but astronomers can’t be sure if that’s the case at this time. But since space apparently also has a face, I’d suggest playing nice.
That’s it for this week! How did you do? Feel free to post your “answers” in the comments, and until next time – keep watching the skies for giant space hands.
