Published in Physics World, 23 May 2011
If you are ever unlucky enough to have a snake sink its fangs into your leg, then you might take a second to marvel at the clever mechanism behind its venom delivery. Indeed, according to biophysicists in Germany and the US, many venomous reptiles do not inject their poison, as you might think. Instead, they rely on a toxic mix of surface tension and “tomato ketchup” physics. “Until we did, nobody had ever bothered about the question of why snake envenomation happens the way it does,” says team member Leo van Hemmen of the Technical University of Munich. […]
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