I didn’t know the answer to this so I sent the question to Pete Makovicky, our Associate Curator of Dinosaurs, and this is what he said:
All living reptiles including birds (phylogenetic definition of reptiles) excrete uric acid – the white part of bird ‘poo’ – from their kidneys as a product of protein metabolism. The uric acid is excreted from the cloaca together with the feces as noted by galavanting-grandly. Since dinosaurs slot next to crocs on the tree and include birds, they too would have had uric acid excretion and likely excreted the same way. The advantage to uric acid is that it can be excreted as dry crystals – we mammals excreting urea that needs to be dissolved in water and thus have a far worse water balance than reptiles.
another person on facebook was having trouble getting their family to understand the spoon theory because they couldn’t wrap their head around the metaphor so I wrote up a detailed version of my battery post I made ages ago inspired by my macbook, might as well post it here too.
I’ve never been a big fan of the spoon theory because it’s kind of
abstract and confusing to explain unless you print out and carry the
thing with you and make people read it because it makes NO SENSE out of
context so I made one that most people will be able to understand
easier. (might not help with elderly people but generally they will get
it because their battery might not be defective, but all batteries stop
holding charge when they get old so they are more likely to Get It without a metaphor)
When you get an electronic device, like a laptop or cell phone it comes
with an rechargeable battery. Some people are unlucky and get a dud. Or
maybe there is a recall and the entire line of the product due to a defect.
My battery isn’t any good.
When I’m all charged up I and it says it’s ok to unplug the charger,
I’m not at 100%. I haven’t been able to charge that far up for years. I
am already basically in the yellow when I start my day. If you only have
a half hour of battery life just browsing the internet, how are you
expected to load a flash video to watch that takes up way more juice?
You can maybe do it with the right help, such as a portable charger
(here representing accessibility devices like wheelchairs, or treatment/medication). Sometimes the percentage amount is also inaccurate
to. It says you have 20% battery and 20 minutes left and then your
computer just -shuts off- out of nowhere. Surprise! you crashed! I hope
you were anticipating that risk and saved your work!
In addition
my charger doesn’t always work.
I can plug it in and it just says “not
charging”. So sometimes you leave the computer overnight to charge and
wake up, wait, 30% battery when my 100% is a normal person’s
60%????!!!?? not fair! This is what happens when you combine in the
restfulness or inadequate sleep.
The combination means you are
really working at rationing what you can do with your device. Should I
turn it off most of the day in case I need it later? How many people can
I talk to on my phone for how long before it runs out of juice. How
much work can I get done on my laptop before the battery dies, possibly
taking the work with it?
That’s how are bodies are. We have to
carefully monitor how much energy we (think) we have, what amount of
stuff we should be able to do with it, what must be sacrificed, as well
as try and keep track of charging stations, battery packs etc. to rescue
us if we miscalculate. And if we do we could lose something important
in the power outage.
But batteries aren’t user replaceable and
we don’t have a warranty, we can’t get it fixed, just have to deal with
it as well as we can. The battery does not define us but it effects every part of our lives effecting everything we do and every decision because while most people haven’t experienced a energy crash, they have probably experienced the hell that is the computer shutting down and destroying hours of effort you’ve put into something as punishment for taking that risk.
So can I just point out that there is an entire scene in Macbeth where a character basically stands alone onstage and tells knock-knock jokes??
And then, for the second half of their scene onstage they tell penis jokes.
hamilton: rises exponentially from poverty to become a hero and a scholar, has a loving family and a glowing career
hamilton: says the word macbeth once
hamilton: has affair, gets blackmailed, marriage falls apart, career falters, accidentally causes son’s death, incurrs wrath of former friend, gets shot, dies
Yes, of course I’ve heard what the superstitious locals say: “Stay out of the mountains! There’s no shelter on those harsh peaks, and every last combe and glen is infested with killer spiders!”. They say there’s no way to safely cross that mountain range – anyone trying to rest high up on the peaks will die of exposure, lashed by cruel icy winds. Better that, though, than to risk seeking shelter in the forested vales.
The Crawling Death, they call it. Great glossy black eight-legged fiends, some small enough to creep between the rings of your maille, some large as a splayed hand and quick as a cat, and some – so they say – the size of dogs. Or swine. Or cart-horses. The tales have been exaggerated in the telling, of course, since hardly anyone dares venture far into the gullies and ravines that lace between the majestic peaks (most certainly not at night, when the Crawling Death make their appearance, silent as a shadow).
Even if they’re not quite as large as people say, they’re certainly no less deadly. The king’s physicians, who had the unenviable task of tending to the survivors of the last failed expedition, wrote down in stomach-turning detail the precise symptoms of that merciless venom. Erupting blisters the size of a hen’s egg. Flesh blackening, rotting, and sloughing away from the bone. Sweating, drooling, trembling, nausea, vomiting, ranting and raving and spasming like a creature possessed until death seems like a mercy. Others were gripped with a pain unmatched by any wound of war, paired (curiously) with an erection hard as any standing stone.
And yet, in spite of all this, I’m planning an expedition into the mountains. It’s true, I haven’t the equipment with me to safely shelter from the bitter cold above the tree-line, out of the reach of skittering legs and poison-slick fangs. I have no blessing from the gods, and no miracle of alchemy intended to keep the Crawling Death at bay. What I do have, though, is a map. A map from a past age, a more enlightened age, where the cartographers had a decent understanding of the sciences, rather than the encyclopaedic knowledge of rumour and superstition that seems to be the requirement for a mapmaker these days. And from this map – and the journals that I found with it – I have deduced one particularly salient fact, that I am convinced will allow me to make the journey through the supposedly arachnid-infested ravines in perfect safety.
The superstitious peasants might say every last one of those valleys is crawling with deadly poisonous creatures, but in fact, most of them are utterly empty and safe! However, my map has revealed the source of this rumour: Spiders Gorge, which contains over ten thousand spiders, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
Kimchi and Justice 