Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Of all the poops in the world, only wombats’ are shaped like cubes. 
  
 The varied elasticity of the wombat’s intestines helps the marsupials to sculpt their scat into cubelike nuggets, instead of the round pellets, messy piles or tubular coils made by other mammals, researchers reported November 18 at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Atlanta. 
  
 Wombats mark their territories with small piles of scat. Cuboid poops stack better than rounder ones, and don’t roll away as easily. 
  
 But cubic shapes in nature are very unusual, says mechanical engineer David Hu of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Making and maintaining flat facets and sharp corners takes energy. So it’s surprising that the wombat’s intestines — which look much like those of any other mammal — would create that shape. 
  
 When an Australian colleague sent Hu and his colleague Patricia Yang the intestines from two roadkill wombats collecting frost in his freezer, “we opened those intestines up like it was Christmas,” Hu says. 
  
 The intestines were packed with poop, Yang says. In humans, a poop-filled bit of intestine stretches out slightly. In wombats, the intestine stretches to two to three times its regular width to accommodate all of the feces. 
  
 Yang used skinny balloons — the type that gets sculpted into animals at carnivals — to inflate the intestines and measure their stretchiness in different places. Some regions were more stretchy; some were stiffer. The stiffer regions probably help create the distinct edges on the wombat poops as the waste moves through the gut, Yang proposes. 
  
 Sculpting the poop into cuboid nuggets appears to be a finishing touch for the wombat digestive tract. Over a typical 6-meter-long wombat intestine, the poops take on distinct edges only in the last half a meter or so, Hu says. Up to that point, the waste is gradually solidifying as it moves through the gut. 
  
 The finished turds are especially dry and fibrous, which may help them retain their signature shape when they’re squeezed out, Yang suggests. They can be stacked or rolled like dice, standing up on any of their faces. (She knows. She tried it.) 
  
 In the wild, wombats deposit their droppings on top of rocks or logs as territory markers, sometimes forming small piles. They seem to prefer to poop in elevated spots, Hu says, but they’re also limited by their stubby legs. 
  
 To confirm that the elasticity variation really does form the cubes, Yang and Hu are now trying to model the wombat digestive tract using panty hose. 
  
 Editor’s note: This story was updated on November 28, 2018, to correct the description of a typical wombat’s intestine. It’s 6 meters long (not 30 meters), and the poop takes a cubelike shape in the last half a meter (not the last meter). ||||| Cubical feces in the wombat's intestine. Credit: P. Yang and D. Hu/Georgia Tech Wombats, the chubby and beloved, short-legged marsupials native to Australia, are central to a biological mystery in the animal kingdom: How do they produce cube-shaped poop? Patricia Yang, a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, set out to investigate. 
  
 Yang studies the hydrodynamics of fluids, including blood, processed food and urine, in the bodies of animals. She was curious how the differences in wombats' digestive processes and soft tissue structures might explain their oddly shaped scat. 
  
 During the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 71st Annual Meeting, which will take place Nov. 18-20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, Yang and her co-authors, Scott Carver, David Hu and undergraduate student Miles Chan, will explain their findings from dissecting the alimentary systems, or digestive tracts, of wombats. 
  
 "The first thing that drove me to this is that I have never seen anything this weird in biology. That was a mystery," said Yang. "I didn't even believe it was true at the beginning. I Googled it and saw a lot about cube-shaped wombat poop, but I was skeptical." 
  
 Yang and her co-authors studied the digestive tracts of wombats that had been euthanized following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania, Australia. Carver, the biologist and Australian counterpart to the group of American mechanical engineers, supplied the wombat intestinal specimens. 
  
 Near the end of the intestine, they found that feces changed from liquidlike states to solid states made up of small, separated cubes. The group concluded that the varying elastic properties of wombats' intestinal walls allowed for the cube formation. 
  
 In the built world, cubic structures—sugar cubes, sculptures, and architectural features—are common, and produced by injection molding or extrusion. Cubes, however, are rare in the natural world. Currently, wombats are the only known species capable of producing cubes organically. 
  
 "We currently have only two methods to manufacture cubes: We mold it, or we cut it. Now we have this third method," Yang said. "It would be a cool method to apply to the manufacturing process—how to make a cube with soft tissue instead of just molding it." 
  
 So, why do wombats poop cubes? Wombats pile their feces to mark their home ranges and communicate with one another through scent. They pile their feces in prominent places (e.g., next to burrows, or on logs, rocks and small raises) because they have poor eye sight. The higher and more prominently placed the pile of feces, the more visually distinctive it is to attract other wombats to smell and engage in communication. Therefore, it is important that their droppings do not roll away, and cube-shaped poop solves this problem. 
  
 Yang hopes that the group's research on wombats will contribute to current understandings of soft tissue transportation, or how the gut moves. She also emphasized that the group's research involved mechanical engineering and biology, and their findings are valuable to both fields. "We can learn from wombats and hopefully apply this novel method to our manufacturing process," Yang said. "We can understand how to move this stuff in a very efficient way." 
  
 Carver added, "There is much general interest from the public, both in Australia and internationally, about how and why wombats create cube-shaped feces. Many ideas, some more entertaining than others, have been put forward to explain this, but until this study nobody had ever investigated the cause. This has been a fantastic collaboration which shows the value of interdisciplinary research for making new scientific discoveries." 
  
 Explore further: Breeding benefits when love bites wombats on the butt 
  
 More information: Presentation E19.1, "How do wombats make cubed poo?" by Patricia J. Yang, Miles Chan, Scott Carver and David L. Hu, will be Sunday, Nov. 18, 5:10 p.m. in Room B306 of the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Abstract: meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DFD18/Session/E19.1 
  
  ||||| (CNN) A team of scientists claims to have unraveled one of the animal kingdom's more peculiar mysteries: why wombat poop is cube-shaped. 
  
 The wombat, native to Australia, produces about 80 to 100 cubes of poop each night. It is known to deposit piles of dung outside burrows and on top of rocks and logs, most likely to communicate with other wombats, researchers believe. 
  
 "Wombats have really strong sense of smell that they use probably for communication," said University of Tasmania wildlife ecologist Scott Carver, who co-authored the study. "We don't know what that information they're sharing is, but it might be something about mating, it might be something about general advertising about who's in the area." 
  
 It is thought that the cubed shape of the poop means it is less likely that it will roll away, and is prominent for other individuals to notice and smell, Carver added. 
  
 But how the wombat produces the cubed shapes is a phenomenon that has puzzled many observers of the furry marsupial. 
  
 Read More ||||| 71st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Sunday–Tuesday, November 18–20, 2018; Atlanta, Georgia 
  
 5:10 PM–6:28 PM, Sunday, November 18, 2018 
  
 Georgia World Congress Center Room: B306 
  
  
  
 Chair: David Saintillan, University of California, San Diego 
  
  
  
 5:10 PM–5:23 PM 
  
  
  
 Abstract 
  
 Patricia J Yang 
  
 (Georgia Inst of Tech) 
  
 Patricia J Yang 
  
 (Georgia Inst of Tech) 
  
 Miles Chan 
  
 (Georgia Inst of Tech) 
  
 Scott Carver 
  
 (University of Tasmania, Australia) 
  
 David L Hu 
  
 (Georgia Inst of Tech) 
  
 Wombats are fossorial herbivorous Australian marsupials with the distinctive feature of producing cubic feces, which is unique in the animal kingdom. In the built world, cubic structures are created by extrusion or injection molding, but there are few examples of this feat in nature. We investigate how wombats produce cubic feces, through investigation of the structure and mechanics of two dissected alimentary systems of wombats--derived from veterinary euthanized individuals following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania, Australia. In the final 8 percent of the intestine, feces changed from a liquid-like state into a solid state composed of separated cubes of length 2 cm. This shape change was due to the azimuthally varying elastic properties of the intestinal wall. By emptying the intestine and inflating it with a long balloon, we found that the local strain varies from 20 percent at the cube's corners to 75 percent at its edges. Thus, the intestine stretches preferentially at the walls to facilitate cube formation. This study addresses the long-standing mystery of cubic scat formation and provides insight into new manufacturing techniques for non-axisymmetric structures using soft tissues. |||||
A:
Poop comes in all shapes and sizes, but one kind of marsupial produces oddly symmetrical, six-sided feces that have had scientists scratching their heads. Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineering fellow at Georgia Tech, decided she needed to get to the bottom of why wombats expel poop cubes—the only known species to do this organically—and so she and her team set out to study the Australian marsupial's digestive system to try to solve the mystery, Phys.org reports. Yang presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, explaining that the researchers examined the insides of two wombats that had been euthanized after being hit by cars in Tasmania. "We opened those intestines up like it was Christmas," study co-author David Hu says, per Science News. The "gift" they found inside, per CNN, was the discovery that as the feces of the wombat—which can produce up to 100 poop cubes each night—moves into the last 8% of the animal's intestine, it shifts from a liquidy state to a solid, morphing into cubes about three-quarters of an inch in length. The scientists then inflated a balloon inside the intestine to find that the soft tissue of the wombat's intestinal walls were quite elastic, allowing the cubes to form. The reason that perhaps underlies the blocky excrement? Wombats, which don't see so well, stack their stinky poop to mark their turf and let other wombats know where they are. If the poop specimens are shaped like cubes, they won't roll away. (An Aussie pol used his vacation time to help wombats.)