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GERD Anxiety, Crowd Math, Insect Catapult

Curiosity Weekly

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The Butt Flicker: The Secret to Intelligent Evolution

A researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta was doing a study on the physics of excretion or how different organisms get rid of waste. Saad Bhamla said he saw these insects peeing once and fell in love, realizing that leafhopper rain might hold the secret to any clever evolutionary innovations. The butt flicker flexes downward as the sharpshooter squeezes out a single drop of urine into a shape that builds pressure in their surface tension. And that drop becomes a certain size, the butt flicker bends even more and then suddenly launches the droplet. Think of the motion like a slingshot. It just flacks the pee out at a speed of

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