#1
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The human testis develop inside the body and shortly before birth they will descend into the scrotum through the anulus inguinalis externis. Normally the scrotum won't be able to be 'sucked in' again once the individu is adult.
Sumo wrestlers however want to avoid being grabbed by their testicles and will keep this anulus open by daily pushing their testis back in as kid. This way they can basically suck in their testis even when they are adults.
Problems occur when abdominal cavity contents protrude through this opened inguinal canal, this is called inguinal hernia and is often caused by lifting heavy things with spread legs (don't worry
fitness boys)
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Do you live close to the woods and did you find your cat dead on a little road as if it was hit by a car? It might not have been a car that killed it, but a bullet or a bear trap. A few weeks ago we were explained by our professor who also is an avid hunter that we should be aware of this possibility as a vet and should perform an autopsy if needed.
Cats and hunters aren't the best friends, cats are a real plague for them as they breed like rabbits and hunt their game (rabbits etc...). Hubters used to shoot up to 8000 cats (usually stray cats) per year in Belgium alone, but since a few years there are laws that forbid this.
Hunters often still shoot cats though, or they use a bear trap which is extremely lethal to cats as their humerus has a foramen supracondylare. Through this foramen, an artery enters the humerus bone to provide bloodflow to the front paw. When a cat breaks it's humerus it will most certainly bleed to death.
To cover up the illegal killing, hunters sometimes throw the corpse in the back of their car, drive it to the nearest road and put it on the ground. Before they leave they make sure to drive one of their wheels over the dead cat to make it look as if it was hit by a car.
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horses have a very long neck and an extremely heavy head. How are they able to hold this weight so far from their shoulders without getting tired?
Now take a look at the picture. What you see here is not a muscle, but actually an elastic ligament: the nuchal ligament.
Thanks to the elasticity of this ligament, the horse doesn't need to exert energy when.moving it's head upwards, it litarally gets passively pulled up. Only when the head needs to move to the ground, muscles are used and so the downward motion is active.
This way horses can keep their head up without getting tired and only have to use energy when holding the head at the ground. Horses without this ligament won't be able to move their head up.
"The champion in this regard seems to be the recently discovered (1973) Fitzroy River turtle Rheodytes leukops ('white-eyed stream-diver'), which is confined to its namesake river in Queensland, Australia. It lives in shallow rapids where the water is highly oxygenated. One can detect the keen sense of discovery in the account by the scientists who found it, John Legler and John Cann: 'One of our vivid early impressions of Rheodytes was that adults of both sexes swam with a widely gaping cloacal orifice (up to 30mm in diameter). The orifice remains open when individuals are out of the water. We first became aware of the large cloacal bursae when a female was examined in bright sunlight; the carapace transmitted enough light to illuminate the coelomic cavity and produce a spectacular view internally for at least 100mm, via the cloaca, revealing a large sac lined with vascular, villose mucosa. . . . Water is pumped in and out of the bursae of captives and experimental animals at rates of 15 to 60 times per minute' (Legler and Cann 1980). Only dedicated herpetologists could characterize the vista up a turtle's gaping bunghole as a 'spectacular view.' But you can understand their enthusiasm--since the turtle's shell is only 260 millimeters long, a 100-millimeter-long bursa is relatively enormous. Up to 68 percent of the turtle's oxygen uptake is accomplished through the cloacal bursae, so it rarely needs to come to the surface to bask or breathe.
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source:http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2325/is-it-true-turtles-breathe-through-their-butts (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2325/is-it-true-turtles-breathe-through-their-butts)
#4
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Two things today, I'll first start with the picture. This is a Belgian Blue bull, known for it's 'double-muscling'. The double-muscling phenotype is a heritable condition which results in the increased number of muscle fibers (hyperplasia) rather than the normal enlargement of individual muscle fibers (hypertrophy).
Anti-GMO websites will often use pics from this breed with as title: 'GMO gone wrong' or you might have been told they got hormone injections all day. Both claims are absolutely wrong because the Belgian Blue is actually the results of selective breeding and has been around since the 1950's.
Now also on the topic of cattle:
Cows are often intentionally impregnated and butchered before the birth of their young(s). This maynsound horrible, but it actually is a very common way to get more money for the meat. In fact, as long as the young hasn't been birthed yet, it's value is zero (nada); it even is a risk because the mother may die.
At the end of the pregnancy, cows are figuratively speaking (just like humans) 'hormone bombs'. Now you might think hormones aren't allowed in meat, but actually this doesn't count for natural hormones. Because of these hormones, the muscles of the mother animal will retain a lot of water, which makes them much heavier and thus they will cost more (even though your steak will immediatelly shrink when you heat it).
The second reason why they are butchered before the partus is because pregnant cows will not allow a bull to mount them, they will step away. Where another cow would stand still and get quite a few bruises from the extremely heavy male (pic semi related, belgian blues usually are impregnsted by artificial insemination). These bruises lower the quality of the meat a lot and thus will be prevented by impregnating the cows so both the females and males stay away from eachother.
Apologies for the shitty text, I write everything from my phone.