Welcome to our daily Bitachon class. We are now talking about the wonders of Sha'ar Habechina and we're up to the camel. Now let's not look at a camel as just a regular old animal but as a high-tech biological machine engineered specifically for the most hostile environment on Earth. While we carry a water bottle that eventually runs dry, the camel is the water bottle and here's how it works. In humans our round blood cells are shaped like little red donuts if you ever took a science class and saw what they looked like under a microscope. If we get dehydrated our blood gets thick like syrup. Those round donuts get stuck in the pipes which are our veins causing a traffic jam that leads to organ failure and that's why people can lo aleinu die from dehydration. Camel blood cells are shaped like footballs. They're oval so even when the blood gets thick and sludgy from heat these footballs can slide through narrow passages more easily than round discs. Another interesting aspect is that when a camel finally finds water and drinks 30 gallons in one sitting its blood volume expands rapidly. A human's round cells would pop like overfilled water balloons. However the camel's oval cells are incredibly stretchy. They can swell up to two and a half times their original size to soak up the water without bursting. So that's why A they can last long without water and when they finally do drink they could store more water. Now every time you exhale on a cold day you see a cloud. That cloud is actually water leaving your body and it becomes gas for a moment and then disappears. That is not a very good thing in the desert to lose water. So the camel has a cooling sponge inside its nose. It's packed with bone and tissue that act like a massive sponge. As the camel breathes out this tissue steals the heat from the breath and because cold air can't hold as much moisture as warm air the water vapor turns back into liquid. It condenses right there in the nose and instead of breathing out the water into the desert air the camel's nose traps and sends it back into the bloodstream so it's essentially recycling its own breath to stay hydrated. Now another interesting fact is the hump. Of course the hump is not filled with water but the hump is fat and here's the genius of God's design. When the body burns the fat for energy it produces water as a chemical byproduct. It's like a backup battery that creates a tiny bit of juice as it drains and that's what's happening over here. The camel is built in a way to survive on less water. Next we'll talk about the cheetah which is the fastest on land animal that can go to a speed of 70 miles an hour. How does that work? Now what really's working is that the cheetah is a living slingshot we'll explain in a moment what that means. To contrast it to the camel where God built the camel for endurance and saving the cheetah's built for a single violent burst of energy. It's all about acceleration. Most animals use their legs like pistons in an engine. They push and the body moves. A cheetah uses its legs of course but it uses its spine as a second motor. Imagine a metal slinky. When you compress it it stores energy. When you let go it snaps open. When the cheetah runs its spine curves upward like a bow bringing its back legs past its front legs. Imagine that. The back legs are going in front of the front legs because the spine bends up. When the spine snaps straight again it flings the body forward. This allows the cheetah to cover 23 feet in a single leap. Because the spine is doing so much work the cheetah actually spends about half its sprint flying. It only touches the ground to reload the spring for the next jump. So that's the first aspect is that speed. Now it's chasing something. It has to make turns. If you try to turn a car at 60 miles an hour on a dirt track you spin and flip. So a cheetah has the same problem so what did Hashem do for it? He created a counterweight. The tail is surprisingly heavy and muscular so when the cheetah needs to make a sharp left turn to follow its prey it whips its tail hard to the right. This tail whip shifts the cheetah's center of gravity and creates a counterforce that pulls it back to the middle and saves it from this wreck. Other cats like lions and house cats have claws that can go in and go out. The cheetah cannot retract its claws. As they stay out all the time, acting like a track spike to provide permanent grip on the dirt. Now, you need to take in a lot of oxygen to give that energy. So its nasal passages are massive to suck in huge amounts of oxygen. Now, again, these are all very important things that don't have time and millions of years to mutate and then come back and all together. So you have to have that spring, because you need the speed, but if you had that speed and you didn't have the oxygen, you wouldn't make it. So you've got these two things working together nicely. It would have crashed into the wall without that heavy tail. So we've got the heavy tail, we have the spring, we have the turbo intake. But interestingly enough, it's a sprinter, not a marathon runner, because it can only hold this speed for 20 to 30 seconds because it's so fast, its brain would start to cook. So it knows to stop after that first burst and hopefully catches its prey on that one. So here we have two unbelievably engineered mammals, our camel and our cheetah.