What birds dig holes? Detailed answer

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What birds dig holes? Detailed answer

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What birds dig holes?

Everyone knows the shore swallows that dig holes in the sandy steep banks of rivers. Are there other birds capable of this?

Among the woodpeckers of Africa and the New World, there are several species that have abandoned the ancient "carpenter profession" and completely switched to the "digger clan". They live in the steppe area and prefer to dig holes in cliffs, but in the absence of such, in exceptional cases, they return to the traditional practice of making hollows for woodpeckers, picking up trees with the softest wood.

The "profession of a digger" was much more widespread among the crustaceans - bee-eaters, momots, rollers, kingfishers. The beak of all these birds, due to the thickening of the bones of the upper jaw, has acquired high strength and therefore, as a spade, is distinguished by excellent working qualities. Kingfishers, for example, when building a nesting hole, dig with their beaks, and rake the earth out of the tunnel with their paws, backing back to the entrance, and so deftly that clay and sand fly out of the hole in a fountain. The finished hole is a narrow tunnel from 30 centimeters to 2,5 meters long, running horizontally or with a slight slope. The entrance of the hole always faces the river, and in its depths there is a rounded nesting chamber no larger than a good orange. This is the nursery, which is quite sufficient in size for the normal growth of five or six chicks.

But the best "diggers" of the world of birds should rightfully be considered puffins - sea birds, representatives of the auk family. Underground puffin towns are located on the flat tops of coastal cliffs covered with a thick layer of peat. With strong beaks, birds dig nesting burrows in it, reaching a depth of up to 1 meter and reaching a length of 15 meters. Quite often the tunnels of neighboring burrows connect with each other, open into common vestibules, or even are located on two or three floors.

Author: Cellarius E.Yu.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What is the course of a sailing ship relative to the wind called?

Usually the course of the ship is determined by the angle between the plane of the meridian and the centreline of the ship, measured in degrees from the northern part of the meridian in a clockwise direction (from 0 to 360 degrees). However, on sailing ships, in addition to the usual, the determination of the course relative to the wind is used according to the angle between the direction of the wind and the centreline of the ship. Depending on the value of this angle, the ship's course receives various names: sidewind, gulfwind, backstay and jibe.

Badewind - the course of the ship, at which the angle between its diametral plane and the direction of the wind is 10-80 degrees starboard or port. There are close-hauled (angle 10-45 degrees) and full-hauled (angle 45-80 degrees).

A Gulfwind is a course at which the diametrical plane of the vessel makes a right angle or close to a right angle with the direction of the wind. About a ship sailing in Gulfwind, they say that it "goes at half wind."

Backstay - a course at which the angle between the diametrical plane of the vessel and the wind line is 90-180 degrees to starboard or port. There are a steep backstay (angle 90-135 degrees) and a full backstay (angle 135-180 degrees).

A jibe is the course of a ship that is in line with the direction of the wind. Sometimes a gybe is called a full wind, and a ship sailing in a gybe is said to be "going with full wind".

The name of the course of a sailing ship, in which the wind blows right in its nose, is not mentioned in marine dictionaries and encyclopedias, but this gap in marine terminology was filled by Captain Khristofor Bonifatievich Vrungel (the hero of Andrei Nekrasov’s story, beloved by many children), who proposed the name "vmorduwind".

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Molecule from photons 13.10.2013

For the first time, it was possible to combine photons into a molecule - until now, even theorizing on this topic has caused fierce debate in the scientific community. Physicists Professor Mikhail Lukin of Harvard and Professor Vladan Vuletic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have actually been able to create a new form of matter from particles of light. The discovery of scientists contradicts decades of conventional wisdom about the nature of light. It has long been believed that photons are massless particles that do not interact with each other. Simply put, two beams of light simply pass through each other. However, the "photonic molecules" created by scientists behave very differently and, in theory, make hitherto unbelievable things possible, such as the lightsaber from Star Wars.

“Most of the properties of light that we know are related to the lack of mass of photons and the fact that they do not interact with each other,” explains Mikhail Lukin. “We have created a special type of medium. In it, photons interact with each other so strongly that "they start acting like they have mass. As a result, the photons are bound together to form molecules. This type of bound photon state has been suggested by theorists for quite some time, but has not yet been observed."

When photons interact, they push against each other and deflect each other. That is, the lightsaber of the Jedi, a solid light pillar, in the light of the discovery of scientists, no longer looks like a stupid notion of science fiction. To force "normal" massless photons to bind to each other, Lukin and his colleagues pumped rubidium atoms into a vacuum chamber and then cooled them with a laser to a temperature several degrees above absolute zero. After that, using extremely weak laser pulses, single photons were sent into a cloud of rubitium atoms.

As the photon enters the cloud of cold atoms, its energy excites the atoms in its path, causing the photon to slow down significantly. The energy of the photon is transferred from atom to atom and the photon loses it, but in the end, it flies out of the cloud, remaining the same light pulse as before entering the cloud.

When a photon exits the cloud, its identity is preserved, as happens with a beam of light in a glass of water. In the case of rubidium atoms, this process is a bit more extreme - the light slows down significantly and loses a lot more energy. However, scientists were surprised by something else: photons came out of the cloud of rubidium atoms together, as one molecule. How are these "molecules" formed and why has no one seen such molecules yet?

The effect by which photons are converted into a special form of matter is called Rydberg blockade. It is based on the fact that when an atom is excited, neighboring atoms cannot be excited to the same degree. In practice, this means that when two photons fly into a cloud of atoms, the first photon excites the atom and is forced to move forward before the second photon excites another nearby atom. Simply put, photons either pull or push each other, that is, they interact with each other like molecules, albeit indirectly (through rubidium atoms). However, when the photons exit the cloud, they exit together, not as single photons.

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