Snake Island of Brazil

Alex

The good news: Tired of overcrowded cities? A pristine and uninhabited tropical island is still available.

The bad news: It's filled with snakes.

Atlas Obscura has more on the intriguing Snake Island of Brazil:

Off the shore of Brazil, almost due south of the heart of São Paulo, is a Ilha de Queimada Grande. The island is untouched by human developers, and for very good reason. Researchers estimate that on the island live between one and five snakes per square meter. The snakes live on the many migratory birds (enough to keep the snake density remarkably high) that use the island as a resting point.

That figure might not be so terrible if the snakes were, say, 2 inches long and nonvenomous. The snakes on Queimada Grande, however, are a unique species of pit viper, the golden lancehead. The lancehead genus of snakes is responsible for 90% of Brazilian snakebite-related fatalities. The golden lanceheads that occupy Snake Island grow to well over half a meter long, and they possess a powerful fast-acting poison that melts the flesh around their bites. Golden lanceheads are so dangerous that, with the exception of some scientific outfits, the Brazilian Navy has expressly forbidden anyone from landing on the island.

http://atlasobscura.com/place/snake-island-ilha-de-queimada-grande


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Only on the internet can you read a blog article which is a reprint of a magazine article which is a summary of a television episode.

The meta, it hurts!
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Um, apologies for picking on your spelling, but I think you meant to use the word 'dexterous' (or 'dextrous'; both spellings are okay). That is, unless 'dexterious' is some terrible new hybrid word that people are using.
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One thing to remember about McGyver is that the producers and writers tried to make everything that was explosive or potentially dangerous -not- work if tried in reality. When McGyver would create a chemical mixture to explode out of this or that trap, at least one component would always be off so that kids couldn't blow up their bedrooms at home.

:D
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I think it was in the pilot episode of the A-Team, they escaped a prison with "traaaash baaaaygs" attached to chairs, inflated with frickin' hair dryers! It was an amazing bit of TV.
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My dad told me about an incident in the 1950's on an aircraft carrier where a disgruntled sailor flushed a pound of sodium metal down the toilets and blew them up, disabling them. Needless to say, the sailor was court-martialed, and my dad had a seat on the court. It seems that the key part of getting a major reaction from sodium metal and water is to constrain the reaction, much like the way that gunpowder will burn when unconstrained but explode when constrained.

The problem with Mythbusters is that they often don't think through how to really reproduce a situation and have terrible experimental procedures, such as when they used a bolt-action rifle to test the effects of blocking the barrel of a gun, rather than testing on a semi-automatic like a Colt .45 pistol (which was the original of the myth that they were trying to bust), or when they were testing whether on gets better fuel economy to driving with the windows down on a car or with the air conditioning on - they changed the conditions of the experiment halfway through on that one.
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