If you're a fan of 30 animals that made a smarter, and I'm sure you are because you're

listening to this podcast right now, you'll know that earlier in this second season,

we took a good long look at camels. In particular, how their ability to stay cool in the desert

has inspired a new way of keeping food and medicines chilled without using an external power

source. If you haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, go on and download it for your

next lesson. It's episode number three and it's a proper good.

Well, in this episode of 30 animals, we're going back to the camels because it turns out

that these ships of the desert have even more to teach us about how we can better adapt

to hot, harsh, stark environments like the desert. As soon as I hear the word desert, I immediately

picture the most beautiful scene, orange rusty red sand dunes as far as the eye can see, shifting

sands and crescent-shaped curves carved out by the wind to rocky outcrops and wide saltpan valleys

baking in the intense sun. The original meaning of the word desert means place abandoned,

which totally makes sense because although these deserts are beautiful landscapes, they're also

notoriously desolate environments. Having said that, did you know that a third of the Earth's

land surface is covered in desert? It's really surprising when we think about it, but perhaps

it shouldn't be because there are all sorts of desert out there, all united by the fact that

they receive very little rainwater, in fact only around 250 milliliters a year. Many of us will be

most familiar with the sand dunes or the Sahara or the Arabian desert, but the majority of deserts

don't actually look like this. Take the mountains and canyons of the Mahavi desert in the United

States, for example, or the Mars-like plains of the high altitude Atacama desert in Chile,

the driest place in the world. Or how about the ice-covered expanse of the Arctic and Antarctic

polar regions? Yeah, that's right. Even though they don't experience extreme heat,

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