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| Sloths can take up to a month to digest a single leaf. | |
| By Kristina Wright | |
| For a sloth, there’s no such thing as rushing through lunch — in fact, a sloth can take up to a month to process just one leaf through its digestive system. Their leafy diet is low in calories and difficult to digest, so they’ve evolved a slow metabolism and a digestive system that allows food to remain in the gut for a remarkably long time. Microbes help break down tough plant fibers and unlock nutrients and energy from the leaves they eat. That slow digestion fits with the sloth’s energy-saving lifestyle. A sloth’s metabolic rate is just 40% to 74% of what would be expected for another mammal of the same body weight. Sloths conserve energy by moving slowly, eating relatively little, and spending much of their time resting. Because food can remain in the digestive tract for weeks, sloths typically defecate only about once a week. | |
| Mammals |
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American-style cheese was first developed in Switzerland. | |
| Few food products are more quintessentially American than yellow processed cheese. But despite the name, the method for making this dairy treat actually has its roots in Switzerland. And there was a very specific purpose behind it. | |
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| A narwhal's 'horn' is actually a tooth. | |
| By Bennett Kleinman | |
| Some people think of narwhals as the unicorns of the ocean, as their protruding horns are similar to that of the mythical creature. But that distinctive feature isn’t a horn at all, but rather an elongated tooth that pierces its lip and typically grows to anywhere between 5 to 10 feet long. Narwhals use their lengthy tooths to hunt — not to pierce their target, but rather to whack and stun prey, making them easier to catch. Narwhals only have two teeth to begin with, but typically only the left one grows long while the right one stays vestigial. Furthermore, males are often the only ones that have this prominent tooth. That said, there are rare instances in which females develop a long tooth of their own, and other cases — for both males and females —- wherein both teeth grow out to form two lengthy tusks. | |
| Mammals |
Only two countries have names that start with ‘the.’ | |
| We refer to many countries using the definite article “the” — the United States, the Netherlands, the Philippines — but according to the U.S. Department of State and other sources, there are really only two countries in the world whose official names start with the word “the.” Do you know what they are? | |
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