by Unknown
Silvers has been researching cold-induced runny noses since the 1980s, using the slopes of several Colorado ski resorts as his field lab. And his findings on people’s nose habits make intriguing reading. Women tend to be better prepared and often carry tissues, for example. Men prefer their sleeves, or in certain situations (especially in the great outdoors) may even resort to what he refers to as ‘the farmer’s blow’: block one nostril and blow, then repeat for the other side. ‘They blow it out and keep on going,’ said Silvers. Children just ignore it. Wiping may be their parents’ favoured option, but a good old snort to recycle that lovely snot is good enough for the kids. ‘It doesn’t bother them as much,’ he said.
Silver’s fascination with the runny nose doesn’t end there. He could even tell you how common the phenomenon is based on quantifying the usage of tissues by placing boxes of them near ski lifts. The colder it is on the slopes, he found, the faster the tissues disappear.
A few teams around the world have carried out studies of cold-induced rhinitis in animals as well as humans. But the most fiendish snot-inducing experiments have involved people. At Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, for example, volunteers were asked to inhale cold dry air for 45 minutes so that scientists could measure their nasal emissions in search of any hint of why the phenomenon is different from, say, an allergic reaction. There have even been studies in which just one nostril was blasted with chilly air. Surprisingly, both nostrils were equally prolific producers of mucus in this situation.
Of course, plenty of people have their own pet theories as to what causes the problem. The ancient Greeks thought that a runny nose was a sign that the brain was turning into mush. One day, science may reveal just why copious amounts of watery goo end up on our sleeves when we least expect it. Until then, only the nose knows.
And if they can collect whale poo, why not whale snot too?
Thar she blows
What is the strangest thing you could do with a remote-controlled toy helicopter? Strapping on a few Petri dishes and flying it through whale snot must be high on the list. That is how Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a veterinarian and conservation biologist with the Zoological Society of London, has spent much of her time over the past few years.
In 2008, Acevedo-Whitehouse made it possible to study the viruses, fungi and bacteria that hitch a ride in whale lungs for the first time.
Researchers can fairly easily take blood samples from other marine mammals, such as seals and sea lions, but a whale’s sheer bulk means that such a sampling would be fatal. ‘Scientists have always found it difficult to study diseases in whales because of their size,’ explained Acevedo-Whitehouse. But after witnessing the sheer power of whale ‘blows’ in the Gulf of California, she realised that this would be the best way of sampling the insides of a live whale in the ocean.
She first tried tying herself to a research boat and leaning overboard to catch a bit of whale snot in Petri dishes. ‘It worked,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t very safe.’ Her technique became more sophisticated. For species like grey and sperm whales that did not mind being close to a boat, the researchers attached their Petri dishes to a long pole and held them out over the blows.
With the shyer blue whale, they had to resort to miniature helicopters. The Petri dishes were attached beneath the metre-long choppers, which were remotely flown through whale snot. ‘The whales definitely notice the helicopter,’ said Acevedo-Whitehouse, ‘they turn on their sides to look at it. But they don’t seem bothered and we don’t even touch them.’
Fortunately, the researchers are not being forced to study the odour of whale blows. But if they did, they might be able to determine what sex they were. Halitosis has hidden secrets.
Bad breath points to sex
People can correctly guess the sex of fellow humans simply by smelling their breath, according to a study carried out in 1982 at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.
In their experiments, 19 female and 14 male college students acted as odour donors; they were asked to refrain from cleaning their teeth or eating garlic or heavily spiced foods during the five days of the study. The odour judges consisted of five male and five female students.
Odour donors and judges were separated by a screen in a large, well-ventilated room. Each donor exhaled a given amount of breath into a glass tube passing through the screen. On the opposite side, the judges inhaled the breath of a donor and ranked it on a seven-point scale according to its intensity and pleasantness or otherwise. In addition, each judge was asked to guess the sex of the donor.
Both male and female judges correctly guessed the sex of the donors in 95 per cent of tests. Female judges were better at identifying males and male judges slightly better at identifying females. On average, male odours were more intense and less pleasant than female odours. Circumstantial evidence points to hormonal differences.
Real slow food
The next time you mourn a forgotten morsel that’s slipped past its use-by date, remember that things could always be worse. Take the case of Fidelia Bates of Tecumseh, Michigan. After baking a fruit cake for Thanksgiving in November 1877, the unfortunate Mrs Bates promptly expired. This presented a rather delicate question at the family farmhouse: who would be the first to eat a piece of the dead woman’s cake?
As it turned out, nobody would. Mrs Bates’s family has resisted temptation for over 130 years, and counting. ‘It’s hard, it’s crystallised, it’s fossilised,’ said her 86-year-old great-grandson Morgan Ford. ‘Nobody wanted to eat it after she passed away, and so now I have it.’ Kept under a glass lid and stored high up in a cupboard for 75 years, the cake has stayed there ever since, save for the occasional appearance on TV or at Morgan’s grandchildren’s school show-and-tell.
The fruit cake has attracted a few daredevil gourmands over the years. ‘My uncle was the first to try a tiny piece off it, about 25 years ago,’ said Ford. ‘And I did lift the lid off when it turned 100 and for a moment we could smell rum.’
Such wizened leftovers have long been a staple of local newspaper reports. In 1951, Mrs E. Burt Phillips of West Hanover, Massachusetts, returned a 56-year-old can of clams to the manufacturer (‘still edible’, the press duly reported). A year later a 70-year-old crock of butter (‘still white and sweet’) was retrieved from an abandoned well in Illinois. In 1968, Sylvia Rapson of Cowley, UK, found a loaf of bread baked in 1896, still edible, tightly wrapped in table linen in an attic trunk (‘I’m keeping it for sentimental reasons,’ she informed The Times), and when a house in Grimsby was razed to the ground in 1970, the ruins miraculously yielded up a 1928 packet of breakfast cereal—a find that was declared, inevitably, ‘still edible’.
More unusual is an original owner of ancient grub who’s actually willing to eat it. In 1969, one George Lambert turned up at the New Mexico state fair wearing his uniform from the 1898 Spanish-American war. Inside his mess kit he found a piece of hard tack and to the crowd’s awe he bit a piece off and ate it. ‘Tastes just like it did then,’ the grizzled veteran announced. ‘Wasn’t any good then and it isn’t now.’
Oscar Pike, a food scientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, would probably not have been surprised. ‘Food quality is always declining,’ he said. Just how quickly it declines, though, remained anecdotal until Pike and colleagues put out a call to local households: bring us your tired, your stale, your undusted masses of tins and sacks. In short, empty those basement pantries.
Having conducted taste and odour tests on everything from 30-year-old dried milk to oatmeal, Pike announced his results in 2006: the oatmeal wasn’t all that good, but not all that bad either. It helped that the fats in quick-cooking oats do not readily oxidise into hexanal, the unpleasant-smelling fatty acid that serves as an off-putting indicator of rancidity. When Pike was asked which old food he would eat himself he said ‘30-year-old wheat. Baked into wholewheat bread it has practically the same sensory quality as bread made from freshly grown wheat.’
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nbsp; Grains are known for their longevity. Every decade uncovers more US civil defence caches of vitamin-fortified survival crackers, a legacy of the Cold War. Though they are veritable museum pieces now, in the 1970s local governments struggled to decide what to do with their vast stores of still-edible crackers. Most cities eventually tossed them out. But in March 2006 another 352,000 crackers turned up in a forgotten vault below the Brooklyn Bridge. A New York bridge inspector, sampling one, charitably described it as having ‘a unique flavour’.
Vintage food discoveries may also become widely known thanks to the web. In 1997 Tony Rogers, a former employee at a Wisconsin-based chemical company, cleaned out his office desk to discover a Dolly Madison apple pie he had purchased at a gas station 8 years earlier. ‘I did pick up a piece of the pie, and I actually ate some of it. It was somewhat caramelised and chewy. But…it was the same taste.’ In recent years Rogers has also occasionally sampled ready meals of scalloped potatoes and ham he bought in 1994: ‘They still look, smell and taste exactly as they did,’ he said. ‘I honestly think that if my pie was put back on a shelf in a gas station, someone would purchase it, consume it and not ask any questions.’
If they did eat it, though, wouldn’t they get sick? Rogers didn’t, and in the case of dried foods the answer generally seems to be no. ‘When stored at room temperature in an oxygen-free atmosphere, there is no reason to believe dried food would not be safe,’ said Pike. ‘Microbiologically, low-moisture food that is safe when packaged is still safe after storage.’ Who could disagree? Plenty of people seemed to have lived to tell the tale.
It’s time to move outside the human body. They’ve been around for a long time. The oldest head-louse egg to be discovered was found attached to a 10,000-year-old human hair at an archaeological site in north-east Brazil, and we are still developing new ways to bump them off.
Spot the louse
A shampoo developed in the US in the year 2000 provided an innovative weapon to help parents battle infestations of lice in their children’s heads. The product caused lice eggs, or nits, to glow under ultraviolet light, making them much easier to spot and remove by hand.
Sydney Spiesel, a paediatrics professor at Yale University School of Medicine, formulated the shampoo after he was forced to manually remove pesticide-resistant lice and their eggs from a child’s head. ‘The child had thick, blonde hair. It took me an hour to go through this kid’s head,’ he said.
Every year about 14 million children get head lice in the US alone. For years, shampoos containing permethrin were used to keep the bugs at bay. But studies—and experience in schools and day nurseries—showed that lice had become resistant to this and other common pesticides. This left parents literally nit-picking, using special fine-toothed combs bought at pharmacies. But the tiny eggs, at less than a millimetre across, are hard to see—and they stick tenaciously to the hair. If even a few eggs are missed, the child can quickly become re-infested.
Knowing that lice eggs contain chitin—the polysaccharide from which the exoskeletons of arthropods are made—Spiesel took a commercial organic dye he knew would bind to chitin and added it to an over-the-counter shampoo. The dye was ‘delightfully cheap and delightfully non-toxic’, he said. The dye bound to the chitin in the eggs, but not to the hair or scalp. When Spiesel shone a ‘black’ (UV) light on the eggs he saw a ‘brilliant glow’ which made them easy to remove.
Grossology—pretty lousy, eh?
4 Death, doctors and the human body
It’s time to visit the doctor, and we hope you are paying attention. Many people don’t, it seems, which leads to problems. Health research from the US reveals an unexpected medical risk factor: living too close to the doctor. The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota was worried that after an appointment many patients either forget what their doctor told them or ignored the doctor’s advice anyway.
To find out, researchers monitored 556 people on visits to their GP, noted what the doctor told each patient, then followed the patient home and asked what they had heard. The patients ‘did not mention 68 per cent of the health problems diagnosed,’ the study found, ‘including 54 per cent of the most important problems’. The study suggested that ‘denial’ and ‘selective listening’ were the main techniques used by the patients to ignore medical advice. But the survey concluded that ‘patients who travelled a considerable distance for their care were most likely to remember and follow what their doctor had discussed with them’.
If you don’t pay attention to the offering of extraordinary medical research contained in this chapter you’ll miss out on Robert E. Cornish, the doctor who reckons he can reverse death, the researchers who made their subject swallow a balloon full of cold water as a means of cooling the human body, and what it feels like to die (once you’ve found out you’ll need to book an appointment with Dr Cornish).
If you keep reading you’ll also learn about two of this book’s heroes, Stubbins Ffirth and Barry Marshall. Stubbins drank infected vomit and Barry is a Nobel prizewinner who swallowed something else.
Death also features to a worrying degree in this chapter. We have stories about execution, and what it’s like to drown or bleed to death. OK, we’ve changed our minds: pay no attention at all to this chapter and feel a whole lot better about yourself—no visit to the doctor required.
It’s always been a matter of debate whether you should read the last page of a book first, just to check that it’s worth your while bothering with the earlier bits. Under normal circumstances we’d decline, but we’re not talking about books here, we’re talking about life. And we’ve decided that, in this case, the end is a very good place to start. So, to set the scene, let’s establish just what life, or its absence, is exactly.
When is a person dead?
In 1962, R. S. Schwa, a neurologist at Harvard University, stated that death in humans is certain if an electroencephalogram (a measure of electrical activity in the brain) showed continuous flat lines without any rhythm for an hour or more, even if the heart was beating. The electroencephalogram would also show a resistance of over 50,000 ohms and would not register a discharge even if a loud noise was made next to the patient. In addition spontaneous respiration should have ceased for an hour.
There are more sophisticated means of determining death these days, but we like the idea that you’re dead if you haven’t breathed for an hour and a loud noise doesn’t wake you up. And when death finally happens—as it will to each and every one of us —what does it actually feel like? Do we really know? In 2007, New Scientist decided to find out more.
How does it feel to die?
Is it distressing to experience consciousness slipping away or something people can accept with equanimity? Are there any surprises in store as our existence draws to a close? These are questions that have plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries, and chances are you’ve pondered them too occasionally.
None of us can know the answers for sure until our own time comes, but the few individuals who have had their brush with death interrupted by a last-minute reprieve can offer some intriguing insights. Advances in medical science, too, have led to a better understanding of what goes on as the body gives up the ghost.
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people ultimately die because their neurons are deprived of oxygen, leading to cessation of electrical activity in the brain—the modern definition of biological death.
If the flow of freshly oxygenated blood to the brain is stopped, through whatever mechanism, people tend to have about ten seconds before losing consciousness. They may take many more minutes to die, though, with the exact mode of death affecting the subtleties of the final experience. Read on for a brief guide to a few of the many and varied ways death can suddenly strike.
Drowning
Suffocating to death in water is neither pretty nor painless, though
it can be surprisingly swift. Just how fast people drown depends on several factors, including swimming ability and water temperature. In the UK, where the water is generally cold, 55 per cent of open-water drownings occur within 3 metres of safety. Two-thirds of victims are good swimmers, suggesting that people can get into difficulties within seconds, said Mike Tipton, a physiologist and expert in marine survival at the University of Portsmouth in the UK.
Typically, when a victim realises that they cannot keep their head above water they tend to panic, leading to the classic ‘surface struggle’. They gasp for air at the surface and hold their breath as they bob beneath, says Tipton. Struggling to breathe, they can’t call for help. Their bodies are upright, arms weakly grasping, as if trying to climb a non-existent ladder from the sea. Studies with New York lifeguards in the 1950s and 1960s found that this stage lasts just 20 to 60 seconds.
When victims eventually submerge, they hold their breath for as long as possible, typically 30 to 90 seconds. After that, they inhale some water, splutter, cough and inhale more. Water in the lungs blocks gas exchange in delicate tissues, while inhaling water also triggers the airway to seal shut—a reflex called a laryngospasm. ‘There is a feeling of tearing and a burning sensation in the chest as water goes down into the airway. Then that sort of slips into a feeling of calmness and tranquillity,’ said Tipton, describing reports from survivors.
That calmness represents the beginnings of the loss of consciousness from oxygen deprivation, which eventually results in the heart stopping and brain death.
Bleeding to death
The speed of exsanguination, as bleeding to death is known, depends on the source of the bleed, according to John Kortbeek at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and chair of Advanced Trauma Life Support for the American College of Surgeons. People can bleed to death in seconds if the aorta, the major blood vessel leading from the heart, is completely severed, for example, after a severe fall or car accident.