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Today's Paper | November 22, 2024

Published 19 Sep, 2015 07:05am

The weekly weird

World’s first un-meltable ice cream

FED up with hands covered in melting ice-cream cone? Fret no more: you won’t be having sticky fingers now as the world’s first ‘un-meltable’ ice cream is unveiled at Alton Towers, UK. It comes after a poll carried out by the theme park revealed that almost half (48 per cent) of Brits were unable to finish an ice cream before it melts — and it was one of their biggest frustrations.

In response, Alton Towers said it had created a new 99 flake in its ‘innovation kitchen’, with each ice cream exposed to soaring temperatures to ensure they would withstand the heat.

The creators also carried out extensive testing on the cone to ensure it delivered ‘the right amount of crunch’ when coupled with the new formula.


The ‘goat-man’

THOMAS Thwaites spent three days as part of a herd in the Swiss Alps while investigating goat behaviour. He used special prosthetic limbs made to enable him to move around on all fours easily.

And the designer even considered having a fake stomach fitted to let him to eat grass, just like his four-legged friends.

Mr Thwaites is a British conceptual designer interested in how humans will use technology to fulfil their desires. He told, “My goal was to take a holiday from the pain and worry of being a self-conscious being, able to regret the past and worry about the future.”

But for him being a goat wasn’t a completely care-free existence. “I was able to keep up for maybe a kilometre or so on this migration down the side of this kind of rocky mountain, and then they just left me in the dust.

“So I spent the rest of the day trying to catch up to them and eventually I found them again, and it was quite nice, in the actual soft grassy pasture bit. But actually heading down the mountain was petrifying. Because if I fell I didn’t have any hands to stop me from hitting a rock.” Thwaites has written a book about his experiences, called GoatMan; How I Took a Holiday from Being Human.


Butterflies drinking turtle tears

IT might look like a magical, computer generated scene from a hit Disney movie, but this spellbinding scene is all real and is captured on camera in Ecuador in the Western Amazon.

In one awe-inspiring image, a Julia butterfly — also known as dryas iulia — is seen drinking the tears of a turtle. Perched on the tip of the reptile’s face, wings spread, the orange-winged creature sips straight from the turtle’s eye.But don’t be fooled; the turtle isn’t upset and the butterfly isn’t comforting it. In fact, the flying insect is merely doing what it needs to if it wants to remain healthy. This phenomenon is called lachryphagy, which means ‘tear-feeding’, and, it is one of the ways that butterflies can get precious nutrition. Butterflies need salt, or sodium, and other minerals — and a great place to get them is from turtle tears.

The fact that the reptiles are a slow target helps matters. And don’t worry, the turtles don’t get hurt in the process.

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