lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

“50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet. 10,000 years ago, there’s, like, two million people on the planet. Now there’s between five and six billion people on the planet, right? Now, if we all have our own, like, individual, unique soul, right, where do they all come from? You know, are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls? ‘Cause if they are, that represents a 5,000 to 1 split of each soul in the last 50,000 years, which is, like, a blip in the Earth’s time. You know, so at best we’re like these tiny fractions of people, you know, walking… I mean, is that why we’re so scattered? You know, is that why we’re all so specialized?”

Lens of Time: Velvet Worms—Secret of the Slime 

Physics and biology meet to create one of the world’s strangest weapons: the slime cannon. 

With their chubby bodies, soft, padded feet, and slow-motion gait, South American velvet worms appear pretty harmless. Unless they’re hungry, and you’re an insect.

Over millennia, these ancient creatures have evolved a pair of hunting weapons unlike any other in nature: dual high-speed canons capable of jetting viscous slime onto their prey from up to two feet away. Delivered with such power and speed, the velvet worm’s slime canon takes the element of surprise to new levels. And because the goo is delivered through narrow, flexible tubes and expelled with such tremendous force, it can cover a vast area in a matter of milliseconds.

Until recently, biologists still didn’t know exactly how these slime canons work. But then Andres Concha, a Chilean physicist who studies the physical mechanisms in biological systems, turned his attention to velvet worms. Concha and his team used high-speed cameras to film slime canons in action.