Occasionally, I'll stumble across some delectable little factoid that seems like it was cooked up in a lab just for me. To wit: Wombats produce cube-shaped poops. And they're the only species known to do so.
In addition to being an anatomical oddity, research into the cuboid contents of these colons generates tremendous headlines, such as, "Wombats Poop Cubes, and Scientists Finally Got to the Bottom of It" and "Stuffing balloons into dead wombats reveals potential cause of scat shape."
Now, why do these adorable marsupials produce such oddly shaped ordure? Well, according to a report published in Science Magazine:
"In the new study, the researchers dissected two further wombats and tested the guts' layers of muscle and tissue, finding regions of varied thickness and stiffness. They then created a 2D mathematical model to simulate how the regions expand and contract with the rhythms of digestion. The intestinal sections contract over several days, squeezing the poop as the gut pulls nutrients and water out of the feces, the team reports today in the Royal Society of Chemistry's aptly titled journal Soft Matter."
Published in Soft Matter. 10/10, no notes.
Okay, enough about strange animals and their stranger poops. Let's talk trivia.
Round 1 ended in a tie-breaker, for which Drinks 4 Vets and Working on My Night Cheese provided comically incorrect answers, but the Vets were closer to the pin, so they took the round. (Note to all: An olympic-sized swimming pool holds much, much more than 20,000 gallons of water.)
The Vets, who "weren't sure [we'd] do well," did … rather well, snapping up another win in Round 2. That is, until 4 Guys 1 Brain found their mojo and submitted a perfect card, crushing the competition in Round 3. Rounds four and five were tough for every team, but Nic and the Cages outperformed the competition, and they deserved the back-to-back victories. And they really deserved the Round 6 win, besting the brain boys by a single point, just one short of a perfect card.
Maybe it was the weather, or the fact that we were inside again, but this week was on the quieter side, with just five teams competing. Either way, thank you all for coming out. And congratulations to all of this week's winners:
Do not forget to keep checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and right here at pgtrivia.com for bonus point opportunities, #didyouknow spectacularness and more.