When Patricia Yang first saw the image of her feces, she thought it was fake.
Australian cams are the only known animals in the world that produce a cube shaped cube.
"I have studied feces for two to three years and know most categories," said Yang, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which specializes in body fluids. How it happens guest Carol Off.
"We have watery feces, cylindrical feces like humans normally do, and pellets … from some small animals and rodents. [are] really truly unique. "
So she did what a curious scientist would do – she said to Google.
She learned that some biologists theorize wombats using feces to designate their territory, and the square shape makes teeth less likely to be thrown away.
What's more, the dry climate helps the feces keep their edges.
But Yang said there is a lack of information about how their bodies actually produce faeces in a form rarely found in nature.
The dead intestines
"I was skeptical of all the resources I could find online, so I decided I needed something real," she said. "So I hit Tasmania in the work team."
He sent her some of the frozen specimens that were on her way out of her personal collections of stuffed uterine intestines, and she and her colleagues decided how they learned how they worked.
They pulled the intestines out of the balloon to study their elasticity and did the same in comparison with the pig's intestines.
While the pig's intestines had a uniform elasticity, mothers had "periodic stiffness," she said – or hard grooves that help convert feces into cubic shapes.
As the feces move through the intestine, Yang said, it begins to form into more evenly shaped pieces with sharper edges.
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Fluid Dynamics division in the American Physical Society Division in Atlanta.
Yang says he believes the study could have consequences for the production, where the shapes of the dice are usually made by molding or carving.
"This method could inspire us with what is easier, cheaper and more portable [cubes]," she said.
"We learn from wombats."
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Made by Kate Swoger.