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Showing posts from April, 2021

Why is bird poop white?

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  Have you ever wonder why bird poop is white? Actually, the white part is not poop but pee. Unlike human, birds do not have separate exits for solid and liquid waste. Both urine and feces are eliminated through an organ called cloaca. Our body excretes urea in the form of urine, while birds convert nitrogenous waste into uric acid. The benefit of peeing uric acid instead of urine is that it minimizes water loss. However, that is also why bird droppings are white and sticky! Have you been the unlucky one who got bird droppings on the windshield of your car? A study in England found that red cars are more likely to be the targets of bird poop and green cars are less favourable. Maybe the easiest way to avoid it is not to park under a big tree!

Coming out of the closet

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  According to the Cambridge Dictionary, "come out of the closet" is a phrase used to tell people that you are gay after previously keeping this secret. But where does this phrase actually come from?  Some said it is related to the idiom "skeleton in the closet", which means someone hidding a human body (a secret) in the closet so long that the it had decomposed to the bone. Thus, skeleton out of the closet means revealing the secret that you hid for a long time and it slowly evolved into the term "come out of the closet". It carriers a negative narrative that a homosexual/bisexual person is not accepted by the mainstream value and he/she has to hide the sexual orientation from the outside world. Surprisingly, according to wikipedia, the expression "coming out" is way more positive with empowering. Instead of saying "coming out of the closet", it was rather "coming into" a homosexual society that is not so small, isolated, nor...