Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
3 February 2021
Through the motions
A strange feeling of relief and gratification floods through Feedback as, after years of straining, science finally plops out an answer as to how wombats produce cube-shaped faeces.
Soft Matter. Yang’s previous research record includes finding that all mammals weighing over 3 kilograms clear their bladders in 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds), regardless of body size.
Now, co-opting the massed ranks of the Australian wombat research establishment to supply intestines for dissection and employing some hardcore fluid dynamics modelling, her team concludes that wombat number twos require peristaltic contractions of gut regions varying by a factor of two in thickness and four in stiffness to produce pellets with flat faces and sharp corners.