The mystery of the cubic dirt of the wombat finally solved

KOMPAS.com – In nature, the shape of the cube is very rare. However, wombat (Vombatus ursinus tasmaniensis) can easily produce dirt in the form of cubes.

Even during the night, a wombat can produce 80 to 100 pieces of cube that he uses to mark a territory, communicate and attract partners. This form of six-sided dirt makes it stackable and does not roll when placed on stones or logs.

This unusual form of dirt is puzzling to many researchers. Until finally, a research team made up of American mechanical engineers and Australian biologists claimed to have resolved it.

The principal investigator of the study is a researcher postdoctoral Patricia Yang, who studied the hydrodynamics of animal body fluids at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was forced to conduct this research as a result of the discovery of dirt photographs of the wombat cube on the Internet.

Read also: Mystery of the human body, Why is the earwax different?

"The first thing that encouraged me to do that is that I've never seen anything so strange in biology." "That (shit wombat) is a mystery," he said. declared.

Even those who suspect that wombats may have a unique soft tissue structure to produce such impurities. Along with his colleagues, he studied the wombat digestive tract that had been disabled after being hit by a vehicle in Tasmania, Australia.

Apparently, the guess is right. The wombate bowel has different elasticities for each part. At the end of the intestine, the stool can pbad from a liquid to a solid consisting of small cubes.

Wombat poo is a form of cube so that they can mark their territory with no one, but how they do their poop # advanced technology pic.twitter.com/fIvMhyRoWS

– Diana S. Fleischman (@sentientist) November 3, 2016

According to Yang, this discovery has not only improved our understanding of soft tissue transport, but has also had major implications for manufacturing.

"At the moment, we only have two methods to create cubes: we can shape them or cut them into cubes.Now we have the third method.This is a very interesting method to apply in the manufacturing process – how to make cubes with soft tissue instead of training them, "he said.

The findings of Yang and his colleagues will be presented at this year's meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society.