by John Lloyd
We don’t know what he looked like, as no authentic portrait survives, but his son claimed he was blond until the age of thirty, whereupon his hair turned completely white.
We don’t even know where he is buried. We do know his corpse had its flesh removed, as was the style for the great and the good in the sixteenth century, and that his bones were interred first in Valladolid, then in the Carthusian monastery in Seville, then in Santa Domingo, Cuba, then Havana, then, and apparently finally, in Seville Cathedral in 1898.
However, a casket with his name on remains in Santa Domingo and now Genoa and Pavia have also made competing claims to hold bits of him. DNA tests are under way, but it seems likely that the final resting place of Columbus – or Columbo, or Colón (as he preferred) – will remain as contentious as the rest of his life and achievements.
What shape did medieval people think the Earth was?
Not what you think.
Since around the fourth century BC, almost no one, anywhere, has believed that the earth is flat. However, if you did want to show the earth as a flat disc, you’d end up with something very similar to the United Nations flag.
Belief in a flat Earth may not even have actually originated until the nineteenth century. The guilty text was Washington Irving’s semi-fictional The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) which, incorrectly, suggests that Columbus’s voyage was made to prove the world was round.
The idea of a flat earth was first seriously put forward in 1838 by the eccentric Englishman Samuel Birley Rowbotham who published a sixteen-page paper entitled: ‘Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments which Prove that the Surface of the Sea Is a Perfect Plane and that the Earth Is Not a Globe’ (‘Zetetic’ derives from the Greek zetein, meaning ‘to search, or inquire’).
More than a century later, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society and devout Christian called Samuel Shenton re-branded the Universal Zetetic Society as the International Flat Earth Society.
The NASA space programme of the 1960s, culminating in the lunar landings, should have buried the issue. But Shenton was undeterred. Looking at photographs of a spherical earth taken from space, he commented: ‘It’s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.’ The Apollo landings were, apparently, a Hollywood hoax, scripted by Arthur C. Clarke. Membership shot up.
Shenton died in 1971 but not before choosing his successor as President of the Society. The odd but charismatic Charles K. Johnson took over and made the Society a rallying point for a heroic, homespun ‘anti-Big Science’ movement. By the early 1990s, membership had surged to over 3,500.
Johnson, who lived and worked in the vast flatness of the Mojave desert, proposed a world in which we live on a disc, with the North Pole at its centre, surrounded by a 150-foot-high perimeter wall of ice. The sun and moon are both 32 miles in diameter, and the stars are ‘about as far away as San Francisco is from Boston’.
Johnson’s desert hideaway burnt down in 1995, destroying all the Society’s archives and membership lists. Johnson died in 2001, by which time the Society had shrunk to a few hundred members. It exists today solely as a web forum, www.theflatearthsociety.org, with around 800 registered users.
ALAN Are all the stars round?
STEPHEN I can’t answer that. Erm … I think, probably, most of them –
ALAN [doubtfully] And yet you know what people thought 500 years ago.
STEPHEN Can I read books? Yes. Have I visited every star in the universe? No. Is that something that you find difficult to understand?
Who first discovered that the world was round?
Not who, what. Bees worked it out first.
Honeybees have evolved a complex language to tell each other where the best nectar is, using the sun as a reference point. Amazingly, they can also do this on overcast days and at night, by calculating the position of the sun on the other side of the world. This means they can actually learn and store information, despite having a brain 1.5 million times smaller than our own.
A bee’s brain has about 950,000 neurons. A human brain has between 100 and 200 billion.
Honeybees have an in-built ‘map’ of the sun’s movements across the sky over twenty-four hours and can modify this map to fit local conditions very quickly – all decisions about where to fly are made within five seconds.
The honeybee is also more sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field than any other creature. They use this for navigation and for making the honeycomb panels of their hives. If a strong magnet is put next to a hive under construction, a strange cylindrical comb results, unlike anything found in nature.
The temperature of a beehive is the same as that of a human body.
Bees evolved about 150 million years ago in the Cretaceous period, roughly at the same time as flowering plants. The honeybee family, Apis, didn’t appear until 25 million years ago. They are really a form of vegetarian wasp.
Bees smell with their antennae. Queen honeybees give off a chemical called ‘queen-substance’ which prevents worker bees developing ovaries.
It takes the entire lifetimes of twelve bees to make enough honey to fill a teaspoon. Bees will travel as much as 12 km (7.5 miles) per trip, several times a day. A single bee would have to travel about 75,000 km (46,600 miles) to make a pound of honey (or less than half a kilo), which is almost twice round the world.
Why do bees buzz?
To communicate.
Bees use their buzzing much as they use their movements, or ‘dancing’: to pass on information. Ten distinct sounds have been identified and some have been linked to specific activities.
The most obvious of these uses is ‘fanning’ to cool the hive. It is loud and steady at about 250 beats per second, and is amplified by the hive itself. Bees also buzz more loudly to signal danger (anyone who has approached a hive will have noticed the change in tone) followed by a sequence of 500 beats per second pulses to sound the ‘all clear’ and calm the hive.
The queen bee has a particularly rich range of sounds. When a new queen hatches she makes a high-pitched chirrup called ‘piping’ or ‘tooting’. Her sisters (still curled up inside their cells) answer with a croak-like call called ‘quarking’. This is a big mistake: there can only be one queen. Using the ‘quarks’ as a guide, the hatched queen picks each off in turn, tearing open their cells and either stinging them to death or ripping their heads off.
Bees use their legs to hear: sound ‘messages’ in the hive are communicated through the intensity of the vibration. However, recent research into bees’ antennae suggest that as well as the chemical receptors they use to ‘smell’, the antennae are covered in eardrum-like plates, which might be ‘ears’.
This would explain why other workers touch the dancing bee’s thorax with their antennae rather than the ‘waggling’ abdomen during the ‘waggle dance’ – they are hearing the directions to the nectar rather than seeing them. After all, it’s dark in a hive.
How bees buzz is more controversial. Until recently, the main theory was that they used the fourteen breathing holes along their sides (called ‘spiracles’) rather as a trumpeter controls the sound of his instrument with his lips.
Entomologists at the University of California have ruled out this theory by carefully blocking the spiracles. The bees still buzzed.
The latest hypothesis is that buzzing is partly caused by the vibration of the wings, with some amplification from the thorax. Clipping a bee’s wings doesn’t stop the buzzing, though it does change its timbre and intensity.
What has the largest brain in comparison to its size?
a) Elephants
b) Dolphins
c) Ants
d) Humans
The ant.
An ant’s brain is about 6 per cent of its total body weight – if we were to apply the same percentage to humans, our heads would have to be nearly three times as large, making us all look rather like the Mekon or Morrissey.
An average human brain weighs 1.6 kg
(3.5 lb), which is a little over 2 per cent of body weight. An ant’s brain weighs approximately 0.3 mg.
Although an ant’s brain has only a fraction of the neurons of a human brain, a colony of ants is a super-organism. An average-sized nest of 40,000 ants has about the same number of brain cells as a person.
Ants have been around for 130 million years and there are about 10,000 trillion of them at large as we speak. The total mass of ants on the planet is slightly heavier than the total mass of human beings.
There are about 8,000 known species of ant. Ants account for about 1 per cent of all the insects on earth. The total number of insects in the world has been calculated at one quintillion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Ants sleep for only a few minutes a day and can survive for nineteen days under water. A wood ant can manage for twenty-four days without its head. A single ant cannot live alone outside the colony, head on or not.
Ants appear to have photographic memories to help them navigate. They seem to take a series of snapshots of landmarks. Scientists do not understand how ants’ tiny brains can store so much information.
Ants are not stronger than people. Though ants can lift many times their own weight, this is only because they are small. The smaller an animal is, the stronger its muscles are in relation to its body mass. If people were the same size as ants, they would be equally strong.
ALAN I had an ant’s nest in my flat, once.
STEPHEN Did you? What did you do?
ALAN Well, I was fairly stupid about it because I saw an ant. I thought, ‘There’s an ant in the flat!’
STEPHEN Ah.
ALAN And the next day, I saw an ant and thought, ‘Oh … there he is.’
How much of our brains do we use?
One hundred per cent.
Or 3 per cent.
It’s commonly said we only use 10 per cent of our brain. This usually leads to discussions of what we might do if only we could harness the other 90 per cent.
In fact, all of the human brain is used at one time or another. On the other hand, a recent paper by Peter Lennie of the New York University Center for Neural Science indicates that the brain should ideally have no more than 3 per cent of neurons firing at any one time, otherwise the energy needed to ‘reset’ each neuron after it fires becomes too much for the brain to handle.
The central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord and is made of two kinds of cells: neurons and glia.
Neurons are the basic information processors, receiving input and sending output between each other. Input arrives through the neuron’s branch-like dendrites; output leaves through the cable-like axons.
Each neuron may have as many as 10,000 dendrites but only has one axon. The axon may be thousands of times longer than the tiny cell body of the neuron itself. The largest axon in a giraffe is 4.5 metres (15 feet) long.
Synapses are the junctions between axons and dendrites, where electrical impulses are turned into chemical signals. The synapses are like switches, linking neurons to one another and making the brain into a network.
Glia cells provide the structural framework of the brain, they manage the neurons and provide a housekeeping function, removing debris after neurons die. There are fifty times more glia than neurons in the brain.
There are nearly five million km (about three million miles) of axons, one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) synapses, and up to 200 billion neurons in a single human brain. If the neurons were spread out side by side they would cover 25,000 square metres (nearly 30,000 square yards): the size of four football fields.
The number of ways information is exchangeable in the brain is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. With such astonishing potential, whatever percentage of our brains we use, we could all, clearly, do a little better.
What colour is your brain?
So long as you’re alive, it’s pink. The colour comes from the blood vessels. Without fresh oxygenated blood (as when it’s removed from the body) the human brain appears grey.
To confuse things, about 40 per cent of the living brain is made of so-called ‘grey matter’ and 60 per cent of ‘white matter’. These terms are not accurate descriptions of the colours you see, but thinly sliced, and in section, they are clearly two different kinds of brain tissue.
Using brain scans, we have begun to understand what functions they each perform. Grey matter contains the cells where the actual ‘processing’ of information is done. It consumes about 94 per cent of the oxygen used by the brain.
The white matter is a fatty protein called myelin which sheathes and insulates the dendrites and axons that extend out from the cells. It is the brain’s communication network, linking different parts of the grey matter together and linking the grey matter to the rest of the body.
A good analogy is the computer. The grey matter is a processor, the white matter is the wiring. What we call intelligence requires both to work together at high speed.
Now it gets even more interesting. Recent studies at the Universities of California and New Mexico scanned the brains of men and women with identical IQs. The results were surprising: the men had six and a half times more grey matter than women, and women had nearly ten times more white matter than men.
The women’s white matter was found in a high concentration in the frontal lobes, whereas the men had none. This is significant, as the frontal lobes are believed to play a key role in emotional control, personality and judgement.
So, all the various ‘Mars and Venus’ theories of gender difference might find soon find a physiological justification. Men’s and women’s brains do seem to be differently wired and configured. The output (intelligence) is the same, but the way it is produced is very different.
What effect does alcohol have on brain cells?
Good news. Alcohol doesn’t ‘kill’ brain cells. It just makes new cells grow less quickly.
The idea that alcohol destroys brain cells dates back at least as far as the temperance campaigners of the early nineteenth century, who wanted all alcoholic drinks banned. It has no basis in scientific fact.
Samples from alcoholics and non-alcoholics show no significant difference in either the overall number or the density of neurons between the two groups. Many other studies have shown that moderate drinking can in fact help cognition. A study in Sweden showed that more brain cells are grown in mice that are given alcohol.
Alcohol abuse does causes serious damage, not least to the brain, but there is no evidence that these problems are to do with the death of cells – it’s more likely that alcohol interferes with the working processes of the brain.
A hangover comes from the brain shrinking due to dehydration, causing the brain to tug on its covering membrane. It’s the membrane which is sore. The brain itself feels nothing, even if you stick a knife in it.
The philtrum is the vertical groove on your upper lip that nobody knows the word for. It allows you to drink beer from the bottle by letting the air in.
If you were to open a beer can in zero gravity all the beer would come out at once and float around in spherical droplets.
Astronomers have recently discovered a massive amount of alcohol in our region of the Milky Way. The giant cloud of methanol measures 463 billion km (288 billion miles) across. Although the alcohol we like to drink is grain alcohol (otherwise known as ethyl alcohol or ethanol) and methanol would poison us, the discovery goes some way to supporting the theory that the universe is here so that we can drink it.
PHILL Stephen doesn’t have beer goggles; he has Madeira pince-nez!
What do dolphins drink?
They don’t drink at all.
Dolphins are like animals in a desert, without any access to fresh water. They get liquid from their food (which is mainly fish and squid) and by burning their body fat, which releases water.
Dolphins are whales – the killer whale is the largest member of the dolphin family. Their name is a reversal of the original Spanish, asesina-ballenas,
meaning ‘whale killer’. They were so called because packs of them sometimes hunt and kill much larger whales.
Pliny the Elder didn’t help their reputation. According to him, an orca ‘cannot be properly depicted or described except as an enormous mass of flesh armed with savage teeth’.
Dolphins have up to 260 teeth, more than any other mammal. Despite this, they swallow fish whole. Their teeth are used solely to grasp prey. Dolphins sleep by shutting down one half of their brain
and the opposite eye at a time. The other half of the brain stays awake, while the other eye watches out for predators and obstacles, and remembers to go to the surface to breathe. Two hours later, the sides flip. This procedure is called ‘logging’.
Dolphins have been working for the US Navy since the Vietnam War, where they saw extensive service. The US Navy currently employs about a hundred dolphins and thirty other assorted sea mammals. Six sea lions have recently been posted to join the Task Force in Iraq.
After Hurricane Katrina, a story circulated that thirty-six US Navy-trained attack dolphins had escaped and were roaming the sea armed with toxic dart guns. The story seems to have been a hoax; apart from anything else, ‘military’ dolphins aren’t trained for attack, only for finding things.
RONNI A lot of people say that they are, in fact, smarter than people, but if they were, wouldn’t they be saying that?
What was James Bond’s favourite drink?