Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute recorded and carefully observed the mating habits of 60 fruit bats she captured in the wild. To her surprise, she found that, in 70 percent of the sexual encounters, the female bat would lick the shaft of her partner's penis. This makes fruit bats the only known species besides humans to engage in regular fellatio.

So why are these bats so batty for fellatio? Tan has a few theories. For one thing, sexual encounters that involved oral stimulation lasted, on average, 100 seconds longer than those that didn't, something that could be conducive to fertilization. Or the female bat could be occupying her mate for as long as possible so that a rival female doesn't snatch him away. The reasons could also be hygenic, as male bats lick their own penises after sex to clear away bacteria and fungi. Or, she could be looking for chemicals that indicate whether the male is a suitable mate, so that she knows whether to reject his sperm or look for a better partner next time around.

As an example, the researchers kindly provided a rather NSFW video that illustrates their findings, complete with frenetic mood music:

[Science Blogs]

Juan Antonio Martínez and a team of researchers at the University of Alcalá de Henares taught a group of volunteers (and themselves) to make palate clicks similar to those used by dolphins — although at a much slower rate. The series of protocols they developed then called for subjects to learn to aim their own sounds, and then to recognize their echos to identify objects around them.

The scientists promise, though, that you don't need to be blind (like famous echolocaters Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood) to awaken your latent echolocation skills. Martínez tells SINC:

Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you, and within another two weeks you can tell the difference between trees and a pavement.

In fact, the scientists who taught themselves echolocation can now detect far more than just the terrain ahead of them: they can identify bones and even objects hidden in a bag.

They hope that their techniques can be put to use in the future by firefighters, rescue workers, people lost in fog or those lost in bat-filled caves in West Virginia.

Spanish scientists develop echo-location in humans [EurekAlert]

[Image via Weekly World News]

According to Science Daily:

Dr. Richard Behringer describes the significance of his finding as such: "Darwin suggested that "successive slight modifications" would ultimately result in the evolution of diverse limb morphologies, like a hand, wing, or fin. The genetic change we engineered in mice may be one of those "slight modifications" to evolve a mammalian wing."

Molecular Evolution [Science Daily]

The other two insane moments in Pitch: Vin Diesel's drug-addicted parole officer gets impaled and then decapitated by one of the monsters. And then Diesel gets so pissed off he wrestles one of the monsters. He's so angry, his head gets weirdly distorted and elongated. You can see his fury through the monster's weird ghost vision. He punches the monster so hard its organs come flying out. Go Vin. Why is he not the most famous action movie star in America?