Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
[November 18-24th, 2018] A rhinestone-clad pigeon, a busy speed camera, parrot alarm, and the secrets of wombat digestion.
We’re used to stuffing ourselves with turkey around Thanksgiving, but soon we may be stuffing our power plants with coal made from turkey excrement. A team of scientists at Ben-Gurion University has found that when cooked under the right pressure, turkey droppings can be burned as a fuel very close to coal. With an estimated 46 million turkeys consumed on Thanksgiving alone, all of the bird’s waste has to end up somewhere, and the researchers hope they’ve found a sustainable place.
A fabulous pigeon is missing its owner at the Fallen Feather Bird Rescue in Arizona. The bird was found trying to sneak into someone’s window. Caretakers quickly noticed there was something different about this pigeon. It was wearing a rhinestone vest. Naming their ward “Liberace,” the shelter is hoping to find out where the bird came from soon.
The tiny town of Acquetico in Italy only has about 120 residents, but the village is beset by motorists speeding through. To combat this, they decided to install a speed camera. Believe it or not, in the first two weeks alone, it has captured 58,000 speeding incidents
Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue got an alert of a fire alarm activation, but when they got to the house, no one was home and there was no sign of immediate danger. Outside, however, they kept hearing the alarm go off—or at least they thought they did. Inside, it was actually the resident’s gray parrot mimicking the alarm.
Believe it or not, wombat poop is cube-shaped, and scientists think they have finally unraveled the mystery as to why. Their special digestive tracts make it possible to shape their droppings uniformly, allowing them to be easily stacked. University of Tasmania ecologists believe wombats stack their feces into piles, using them to communicate with other wombats. They also are believed to use the piles as landmarks that can be easily sniffed out.
Source: Why Is Wombat Poop Cube-Shaped?
