QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  One form of cyanobacteria, spirulina, yields twenty times more protein per acre than soya beans. It consists of 70 per cent protein (compared with beef’s 22 per cent), 5 per cent fat, no cholesterol and an impressive array of vitamins and minerals. Hence the increasing popularity of the spirulina smoothie.

  It also boosts the immune system, particularly the production of protein interferons, the body’s front-line defence against viruses and tumour cells.

  The nutritional and health benefits of spirulina were recognised centuries ago by the Aztecs, sub-Saharan Africans and flamingos.

  Its significance for the future may be that algae can be grown on land that isn’t fertile, using (and recycling) brackish water. It’s a crop that doesn’t cause soil erosion, requires no fertilisers or pesticides and refreshes the atmosphere more than anything else that grows.

  ALAN I’ve got it [algae] in my pond. I get rid of it.

  STEPHEN Think how many people you’ll kill by doing that. You might just as well go around with a pillow and clamp them to old ladies’ faces.

  What were First World War German uniforms made from?

  Nettles.

  During the First World War, both Germany and Austria ran short on supplies of cotton.

  In search of a suitable replacement, scientists chanced upon an ingenious solution: mixing very small quantities of cotton with nettles – specifically, the hardy fibres of the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica).

  Without any form of systematic production, the Germans cultivated 1.3 million kg of this material in 1915, and a further 2.7 million kg the following year.

  After a brief struggle, the British captured two German overalls in 1917, and their construction was analysed with some surprise.

  Nettles have many advantages over cotton for agriculture – cotton needs a lot of watering, it only grows in a warm climate, and requires a lot of pesticide treatment if it is to be grown economically.

  There’s no danger of being stung by a ‘full nettle jacket’ either, as the stinging hairs – little hypodermic syringes made of silica and filled with poison – are not used in production. The long fibres in the stems are all that are useful.

  The Germans were by no means the first to stumble across this plant’s many uses. Archaeological remains from around Europe reveal that it’s been used for tens of thousands of years for fishing nets, twine and cloth.

  The Bottle Inn, a pub in Marshwood, Dorset, England, holds an annual World Stinging Nettle Eating Championship. Rules are strict: no gloves, no mouth-numbing drugs (other than beer) and no regurgitation.

  The trick appears to be to fold the top of the nettle leaf towards you and push it past your lips before swigging it down with ale. A dry mouth, they say, is a sore mouth. The winner is the one who has the longest set of bare stalks at the end of an hour.

  The current record is 14.6 m (48 feet) for men, and about 8 m (26 feet) for women.

  What sophisticated mechanism enabled the first successful landing on an aircraft carrier at sea?

  The human hand: the crew of the carrier simply reached up and pulled the plane down out of the air.

  The world’s first landing by an aeroplane on to a ship under way at sea was made on 2 August 1917 by Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning, DSC, RN, in a Sopwith Pup on to the hanger roof of the converted battlecruiser HMS Furious.

  Dunning worked out that by combining the 40-knot stalling speed of the plane, the 21-knot top speed of the ship and a 19-knot wind he could hover relative to the ship. So, while Furious steamed into the wind, Dunning flew past it as close as possible, drifted round the bridge until he arrived over the roof of the hanger, side-slipped and pulled back on the throttle, allowing the plane to sink towards the deck. At this, a party of officers and men rushed out and grabbed the specially prepared ropes dangling from the plane and pulled it down on to the roof.

  Dunning completed a second landing in this way before deciding it was not a practical procedure. Five days later, he took off again, having given instructions that his plane was not to be touched until it had come to a complete standstill. But this time, when he arrived over the hanger, something went horribly wrong. Either he touched down and one of his tyres burst or he pulled back too hard on the throttle and the plane stalled. At any rate it swerved, the wind blew the aircraft over the side and the pilot was knocked unconscious and drowned.

  HMS Furious was one of a trio of battle cruisers built during World War I, the other two being the Courageous and the Glorious. Said to be the most ludicrous warships ever built for the Royal Navy, they were known throughout the Fleet as the Spurious, the Outrageous and the Uproarious. Furious was designed with two 46-cm (18-inch) gun turrets fore and aft. At the time, these were the largest guns in the world.

  The reference to the human hand as a ‘sophisticated mechanism’ is not intended to be sarcastic. In How The Mind Works, Stephen Pinker (noting that it was first pointed out by the Roman physician Galen 2,000 years ago) shows what an astonishing piece of engineering the human hand represents. Each one does the job of at least ten different tools. He names a hook grip (to lift a bucket); a scissor grip (to hold a cigarette); a five-jaw chuck (to lift a coaster); a three-jaw chuck (to hold a pencil); a two-jaw pad-to-pad chuck (to thread a needle); a two-jaw pad-to-side chuck (to turn a key); a squeeze grip (to hold a hammer); a disc grip (to open a jar); and a spherical grip (to hold a ball). Numerous other tools could be cited including a screwdriver, a weighing machine and a surface sensor.

  How many muscles do you have in your fingers?

  Amazingly, the answer is none at all.

  The muscles that control your fingers are all in your arm. Your fingers are moved like puppets on a string, the strings being the tendons controlled by the muscles of the forearm.

  Try drumming your fingers and watch the skin on your forearm ripple. Or place your hand on the table as if you were doing an impression of a spider with straight legs, tuck your middle finger under your hand and then try to lift each finger in turn. You’ll find that you can’t lift your ring finger, because the tendons in your fingers are all independent of each other, except for the one controlling the middle and ring fingers, which is shared between the two.

  An extreme pedant might point out that there are actually thousands of muscles in each finger, if you count the tiny retractors that cause your hairs to stand up or your blood vessels to contract, but these don’t move the fingers.

  A commonly repeated factoid is that the tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body. This is plain wrong, not least because the tongue comprises sixteen separate muscles, not one, but even taken together they aren’t the strongest, no matter which definition of strength one uses. The strongest muscle is either the largest (here the contenders are the gluteus maximus that makes up most of your buttocks or the quadriceps in your thigh) or the one that can exert most pressure on an object (which is your jaw muscle).

  However, probably the strongest ‘pound for pound’ muscle is the uterus: it weighs around 2 pounds (just under a kilogram) but during childbirth can exert a downward force of 400 Newtons, which is one hundred times as strong as gravity and equivalent to the power in a fully extended modern longbow.

  Who discovered penicillin?

  Sir Alexander Fleming is a long way down the list.

  Bedouin tribesmen in North Africa have made a healing ointment from the mould on donkey harnesses for over a thousand years.

  In 1897, a young French army doctor called Ernest Duchesne rediscovered this by observing how Arab stable boys used the mould from damp saddles to treat saddle sores.

  He conducted thorough research identifying the mould as Penicillium glaucum, used it to cure typhoid in guinea pigs and noted its destructive effect on E. coli bacteria. It was the first clinically tested use of what came to be called penicillin.

  He sent in the research as his doctoral thesis, urging further study, but the Institut Pasteur didn’t even acknowledge receipt of his work, perhaps because he was
only twenty-three and a completely unknown student.

  Army duties intervened and he died in obscurity in 1912 of tuberculosis – a disease his own discovery would later help to cure.

  Duchesne was posthumously honoured in 1949, five years after Sir Alexander Fleming had received his Nobel Prize for his re-rediscovery of the antibiotic effect of penicillin.

  Fleming coined the word ‘penicillin’ in 1929. He accidentally noticed the antibiotic properties of a mould which he identified as Penicillium rubrum. In fact, he got the species wrong. It was correctly identified many years later by Charles Thom as Penicillium notatum.

  The mould was originally named Penicillium because, under a microscope, its spore-bearing arms were thought to look like tiny paintbrushes. The Latin for a writer’s paintbrush is penicillum, the same word from which ‘pencil’ comes. In fact, what the mould cells of Penicillium notatum much more closely and spookily resemble is the hand-bones of a human skeleton. There is a picture of it here:

  http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/Toms_fungi/nov2003.html

  Stilton, Roquefort, Danish Blue, Gorgonzola, Camembert, Limburger and Brie all contain penicillin.

  Is a virus a germ?

  Yes, ‘germ’ is an informal term for any biological agent that causes illness to its host and so covers both viruses and bacteria.

  Viruses and bacteria are quite different. Viruses are microscopic parasites too small to have cells or even their own metabolism. Their growth is entirely dependent on their host. Each infected host cell becomes a factory capable of producing thousands of copies of the invading virus. The common cold, smallpox, AIDS and herpes are viral infections and can be treated by vaccination but not antibiotics.

  Bacteria are simple but cellular, the most abundant of all organisms. There are approximately 10,000 species living in or on the human body: a healthy human will be carrying ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells, and they account for about 10 per cent of dry body weight. The vast majority are benign, and many are beneficial. Bacterial illnesses include tetanus, typhoid fever, pneumonia, syphilis, cholera, food poisoning, leprosy, and tuberculosis and they are treatable with antibiotics.

  The word ‘germ’ comes from the Latin germen meaning sprout or bud. It was first used to describe a harmful microorganism in 1871 but it wasn’t until 1875 that Robert Koch finally demonstrated that anthrax was caused by a particular species of bacteria.

  Thirty-five years earlier, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor had set up the first hygienic hospital ward in Vienna General Hospital. He noticed that the death rate of poor women attended by the nurse midwives was three times less than that of the wealthier women attended by the doctors. He concluded that this was a matter of cleanliness – the doctors used to go directly from the morgue to the obstetrics ward without washing their hands. When he presented his findings, his fellow doctors rejected his theory, unable to believe in what they could not see.

  In recent years, however, the hygiene itself has come under scrutiny. There seems to be evidence that indiscriminate use of anti-bacterial agents might have damaging side effects, allowing those bacteria that do survive to mutate into even more virulent strains. Also, our immune system, deprived of bacteria and parasites that it has struggled against for thousands of years, has a tendency to overreact leading to a sharp upswing in allergic diseases such asthma, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

  Despite this, infectious diseases still kill more people than anything else and 80 per cent of those diseases are transmitted by touch.

  Most hygienists recommend that washing our hands regularly with good old-fashioned soap and water is the best and safest way to stay healthy.

  What causes stomach ulcers?

  It’s not stress or spicy food

  Contrary to decades of medical advice to the contrary, it turns out that stomach and intestinal ulcers are not caused by stress or lifestyle but by bacteria.

  Ulcers are still relatively common, afflicting one in ten people. They are painful and potentially lethal. Napoleon and James Joyce both died from complications connected with stomach ulcers.

  In the early 1980s, two Australian pathologists, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, noticed that a previously unidentified bacterium colonised the bottom part of the stomachs of people who suffered from gastritis or ulcers. They cultivated it, gave it a name (Helicobacter pylori), and began to run trials. They found that when the bacteria were eliminated, the ulcers healed.

  Even today, most people still think that ulcers are caused by stress. The medical explanation was that stress diverted blood from the stomach, which reduced the production of its protective mucus lining. This gradually left the tissue beneath vulnerable to stomach acid and the result was an ulcer.

  What Marshall and Warren were proposing – that a common physiological condition, akin to a blister or a bruise, might actually be an infectious disease – was unprecedented in modern medicine.

  Marshall decided to become his own experiment. He drank a Petri dish full of the bacteria, and soon came down with a severe case of gastritis. He tested himself for the bacteria – his stomach was teeming with them – and then cured himself with a course of antibiotics. The medical establishment had been proved wrong.

  In 2005, Marshall and Warren were rewarded for their tenacity and vision, winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

  Helicobacter pylori is present in half the human population, and in almost everyone in developing countries. It is usually contracted in early childhood and can stay in the stomach for life. It only leads to ulcers in 10 to 15 per cent of those infected.

  We still don’t know why this should be, but we do know how to treat it.

  JOHNNY VEGAS I refused the treatment, because I preferred to think that I’ve got sea monkeys living in me stomach.

  STEPHEN Ah. Yes. Did you get a Nobel Prize for that thought?

  What does your appendix do?

  Not nothing.

  It’s not as useless as you’ve been led to believe.

  The appendix is thought to be a remnant from the time when early humans ate grass. In other primates, such as gorillas and orang utans, the equivalent organ, known as the cecum or caecum (from the Latin for ‘blind’, as in ‘blind alley’ or dead end) is much larger and is used to digest the cellulose from the grass and leaves they eat.

  But the human appendix has other more practical uses. Lymphoid tissue (which helps protect the body from bacteria and other foreign invaders) begins to accumulate in the appendix shortly after you’re born and peaks in early adulthood. There is some evidence that the appendix also ‘trains’ our immune system by producing small amounts of dangerous antigens, which stimulate the production of protective antibodies. More recent research also points to it being a storage centre for helpful bacteria. Given the widespread prevalence of diarrhoea in the developing world (there are an estimated 1.4 billion cases a year), some researchers think its very shape and size make the appendix an ideal reservoir for repopulating the gut with essential bacteria after the disease has flushed the rest of the intestines clean.

  The appendix can also act as a backup in reconstructive surgery. It has been shown to be useful if a patient needs reconstruction of the bladder; it can be used as a substitute sphincter muscle or fashioned into a replacement ureter (the organ that connects the bladder to the kidneys). For all these reasons, it is no longer standard practice for the appendix to be removed during abdominal surgery.

  In anatomy, the term ‘appendix’ can refer to any section at the end of an organ. The correct name for the one we know colloquially as ‘the’ appendix is the vermiform (or ‘wormlike’) appendix.

  STEPHEN What does your appendix do?

  JIMMY Does it contain details about me that aren’t needed in the main body?

  What does your appendix do?

  Not nothing.

  It’s not as useless as you’ve been led to believe.

  The appendix is thought to be a remnant from the time when early humans ate
grass. In other primates, such as gorillas and orang utans, the equivalent organ, known as the cecum or caecum (from the Latin for ‘blind’, as in ‘blind alley’ or dead end) is much larger and is used to digest the cellulose from the grass and leaves they eat.

  But the human appendix has other more practical uses. Lymphoid tissue (which helps protect the body from bacteria and other foreign invaders) begins to accumulate in the appendix shortly after you’re born and peaks in early adulthood. There is some evidence that the appendix also ‘trains’ our immune system by producing small amounts of dangerous antigens, which stimulate the production of protective antibodies. More recent research also points to it being a storage centre for helpful bacteria. Given the widespread prevalence of diarrhoea in the developing world (there are an estimated 1.4 billion cases a year), some researchers think its very shape and size make the appendix an ideal reservoir for repopulating the gut with essential bacteria after the disease has flushed the rest of the intestines clean.

  The appendix can also act as a backup in reconstructive surgery. It has been shown to be useful if a patient needs reconstruction of the bladder; it can be used as a substitute sphincter muscle or fashioned into a replacement ureter (the organ that connects the bladder to the kidneys). For all these reasons, it is no longer standard practice for the appendix to be removed during abdominal surgery.

  In anatomy, the term ‘appendix’ can refer to any section at the end of an organ. The correct name for the one we know colloquially as ‘the’ appendix is the vermiform (or ‘wormlike’) appendix.