FD: v5 (Second Timers)

ANNA’S HUMMER:  The male Anna’s Hummingbird has an unusual mating ritual.  It makes two sounds, a bloop and at the bottom of a dive and a zit-zit sound as it hovers after the dive.

ANNA’S HUMMER: Scientists thought hummingbirds were making the chirp sound at the bottom of their dive through their chest feathers. However their chest isn’t big enough to make a sound that loud.

ANNA’S HUMMER:  The male Anna’s Hummingbird makes the sound by spreading its tail feathers at the bottom of its dive as it pulls out.  It does it in such a way that it makes the air go over the tail feathers and make a bloop sound.  The little hummer fans its tail feathers out in a shockingly fast 60 thousandths of a second in the upswing of the dive!

ANNA’S HUMMER:  The Hummingbird’s routine starts with it flying straight up 100 feet into the air, then turning and diving straight back down. During this dive, he accelerates so fast that he hits accelerations of up to 10g’s. This is faster than any other animal can accelerate, and at accelerations this fast, even a human can pass out!

ANNA’S HUMMER: The fanning out of the hummingbird’s tail feathers causes the tapered feathers to vibrate rapidly making the loud chirp. The structure of the feathers are just right for making these sounds. The sides of the tail feathers flutter up and down in a wave. The 140,000 beat per second sound (4kHz) is only produced if a wave moves over the entire length of the tail feather.

ANNA’S HUMMER: When the scientists separated some of the feather barbs and stopped them from hooking to each other, this stopped the feathers’ ability to make the bloop sound. The feather sound, however, could be restored simply by reconnecting the barbs in the feathers so they could vibrate like a wave.

DOLPHIN HYDRODYNAMICS: Dolphins can jump between 16 and 20 feet out of the water even though they weigh more than 5000 pounds.

DOLPHIN HYDRODYNAMICS: There are probably monitors of some sort in the tail fluke of the dolphin which keep the tail exactly flat when the dolphin launches out of the water. If the tail wasn’t flat in its launch, the dolphin’s jump would be crooked.

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: Human hemoglobin has 574 amino acids in the correct order.

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: Human Titin protein has 34,350 amino acids in the correct order.

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: mRNA is a carbon copy of part of the DNA made by RNA polymerase. The coded snake-like mRNA floats from the DNA in the nucleus through complex gateways in the cell membrane to the ribosomes.

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: Hemoglobin protein–which is found in red blood cells– holds 4 oxygen molecules with exactly the right amount of grip. There are an astonishing 300 billion of these proteins in each RBC and each of these proteins has 574 amino acids put in the correct order!

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: Titin sounds like Saturn’s largest moon TITAN! It’s a humongous rubber-band protein used in our nerve cells. It helps to anchor the compressing nerve proteins and causes them to snap back into place once they are relaxed This monstrous protein has 34,350 amino acids in the correct order! Unbelievable!

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: After a protein is folded, it is shipped with others in a huge Santa Claus–type sack across the cell to the places where it will be used. There are motor proteins that walk called kinesin motor proteins. They carry these big “bags” of proteins on cytoskeleton filament bridges that criss-cross the cell.

AMINO ACIDS AND DNA: Ribosomes use the mRNA as a coding machine to put amino acids that they receive from tRNA in a long chain in a process called “Translation”.