#mammal

Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70) ↗

— Michael Benanav

#bloodstream #body-tissues #body-weight #camels #death

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #faith #mammals #religion #virtue

Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature's way of preparing us to face difficult realities. ↗

— Daniel Suarez

#human #mammals #nature #play #nature

The difference between humans and other mammals is that we know how to accessorize. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#difference #how #humans #know #mammals

To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also. ↗

— Robert T. Bakker

#also #ancestors #blooded #dinosaurs #mammal

That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. ↗

— Paul Berg

#basis #chemistry #dna #emergence #formed

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#consciousness #likely #mammals #most #probably

We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it? ↗

— David Brin

#does #elephant #enough #getting #heartbeats

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human. ↗

— William Gibson

#blue eyes #certainty #directly #even #exceedingly

These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#bill-bryson #cro-magnon #language #mammals #mother-tongue