This is the Yes or BS blog, where you can play the game for yourself. Either pick a random story from the pictures below, or choose your specialist subject from the categories listed here. Just read the story through and decide whether, YES, you think it’s true, or no, you think it’s total B.S—then click you answer in the box at the bottom of each post to see if you’re correct.
A desert moonrise. Wasn’t that a Fleetwood Mac album? (Pixabay) Everyone knows about hibernation, where animals go into a state of deep sleep during the meagre winter months, before emerging in the spring to enjoy the relative time of plenty in the warmer weather. Hey, sounds like a plan to me. Hibernation’s little-known cousin is estivation, where the opposite is true: animals go into a deep sleep during the summer months, before awakening in the autumn to live it up during
It’s a rainy afternoon, there’s absolutely nothing to watch on Netflix, and all your friends are busy. So what are you going to do to alleviate the boredom? Research a new hobby? Get to all those odd jobs around the house? Or how about putting tiny stilts on ants as a scientific experiment? Well, no prizes for guessing that it was the latter of those suggestions that Matthias Wittlinger and his team of biologists from the University of Ulm in southern Germany decided to parta
A pufferfish. Dolphin with the munchies just out of shot (Pixabay) Puffer fish are weird. I mean, what a defence mechanism to evolve: whenever danger is nearby, you incapacitatingly inflate yourself far beyond your natural size and wait for the problem to resolve itself. Pity the poor X-Man who evolves that. But luckily that’s not all the puffer fish does. Some species also release a powerful nerve toxin when they puff themselves up. And recently it was discovered that some g
Manateeny: Size isn’t everything in the Everglades (Wix) The oceans cover some 71% of the surface of the planet, while the Earth’s waters provide some 99% of all the world’s liveable space. But despite all that empty marine real estate, things can get pretty congested beneath the waves. So it’s good to know at least that when things get a little too bumper-to-bumper in the waters in and around Florida’s Everglades, there is apparently an improvised underwater highway code in
This is an elephant shrew: (Pixabay) All twenty or so species of elephant shrew are native to Africa, and all of them are small, furry, insectivorous and relatively long-legged. They also all have very prominent and very mobile elephant-like noses, hence their name. But here’s the thing: despite that name, elephant shrews aren’t true shrews. In fact, we now know that they’re more closely related to—well, elephants. Originally, elephant shrews were considered a member of the s
“Just hook it up to my veins!”: Bean there, done that (Wix) There‘s an old wives’ tale that would have you believe there’s more caffeine in tea than in coffee. Pound for pound, that’s actually true: a hundredweight of tea contains more caffeine than a hundredweight of coffee. But because you don’t need as much tea to brew up a cup as you do coffee, a single cup of tea contains considerably less caffeine that a single cup of coffee. Myth, as they say, busted. But if you’re sti
