April 17, 2016 at 02:01AM

Today I Learned: 1) Here's a (questionably) useful random order-of-magnitude number: Cambodia has exactly three airports with regularly-scheduled international flights, and approximately ten other airports that don't. 2) For some reason, it turns out that bacterial mass (cell size) increases roughly exponentially with growth rate. That is, faster-growing cells are also consistently bigger. This result, as far as I know, only holds within-species, so if you take a bunch of bacteria from the same species and sort them by size and growth rate, the fastest-growing ones are also the biggest. 3) From Science Friday, via Mengsha Gong: There's a thing called an orchid mantis, and it's possibly the most beautiful land animal. Juvenile orchid mantises *look like orchids* -- they hide in plain sight around orchids and other flowers, and wait for insects to come check them out. To a human eye, they're pretty obviously insects, but they look like praying mantises *made out of orchids*, which I find a really moving sight. Perhaps surprisingly, orchid mantises don't seem to emulate any actual species of orchid -- they just look generically orchid-like.