by Cody Cassidy
*This is why CPR is important after lightning strikes. The brain stem can unscramble itself and you can start breathing again, but it needs time and that’s time you won’t have unless someone helps you breathe.
*Another bad idea? Lying in a ditch. The electricity traveling along the ground will arc through your body and to the other side of the ditch. Standing in a shallow cave isn’t great either because of the arcing problem. Find a car and get into it.
*Even a regular lightning bolt can pass through your skin, heating and rupturing capillaries and creating etched patterns called “lightning flowers” or “skin feathering.”
*The failure was spectacular. The electrical energy of a small city was accidentally dumped into the metal around the joint, instantly vaporizing it, and the resulting explosion moved a ten-ton magnet more than a meter.
*Why does your body recognize only CO2 and not O2? Detecting O2 levels is a difficult bit of chemistry. But CO2 in your blood raises its acidity and detecting acidity is easy, whether in your body or in chemistry class—so evolution probably just took the easy way out.
*It’s too bad about the whole freezing-to-death thing, because if it weren’t for that, liquid helium’s super-low friction would make it great for slip-and-slides.
*Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t stop at any one point; it just gets thinner and thinner the higher you go. At 62 miles (100 kilometers) there’s still some atmosphere, but at this altitude an aircraft has to be going at orbital speed to stay aloft—and that seems to be as good a definition as any for space.
*Which means if Columbus were right and Earth were flat you could never orbit it. Also, 5 miles per second is faster than any bullet, but on the moon you would need to go only 0.7 miles per second to orbit it, which is slower than a bullet from a Swift rifle. So if you fired the Swift rifle on the moon, the bullet could circle around and hit you in the back of the head.
*There is a great demonstration of this on YouTube.
*Falling foam that protects the shuttle’s supercooled fuel tank fell off on lift-off and put a hole in the heat shield. When the new space transportation system is introduced, it will no longer have the fuel tank higher than the shuttle in order to mitigate this issue.
*Sorry, we don’t think any part of you would remain. Ice blocks falling to Earth weighing more than two tons are completely burned up in the atmosphere, and you don’t have much more durability than ice.
*Other issues with life in this low-oxygen environment: If you cut yourself on your trip it wouldn’t heal because your body needs energy to heal itself, and without sufficient oxygen you can’t produce enough energy to fix your wounds, and giving birth is impossible because there isn’t enough oxygen for a pregnant woman to share with her baby.
*The trees that didn’t rot now make up the coal we burn for electricity, so the CO2 that wasn’t released earlier—and caused an ice age—is now being put into the atmosphere and causing global warming.
*Insects take in oxygen through their skin (aka their cuticle), so the ratio between their surface area and volume cannot be too small. With more oxygen that ratio can get smaller, and the result is dog-size scorpions.
*We know this because in 1692 in Colonial America, Giles Corey was accused of witchcraft and pressed to death with four hundred pounds of stones on his chest. It took him two days to suffocate. His last words? “More weight.”
*In medieval times this was known as drawing and quartering, and they used horses in place of trains. But horses are not as strong as black holes, and sometimes were incapable of pulling a man apart—needing assistance from the headsman’s ax.
*Here’s where things get really complicated. We said earlier that you can’t escape a black hole unless you go faster than the speed of light. And that’s true. Thanks to Einstein, we also know that nothing with mass can go faster than the speed of light. So now we have a contradiction. How is it that you’re able to escape the black hole as radiation? The answer: the same way you get a file off a flash drive. Electrons in the flash drive are stored in energy wells; they enter and leave the wells by a quantum mechanical process called tunneling, in which they vanish from inside the well and appear outside it without passing through the space in between. In the same way, particles can vanish from inside a black hole and reappear outside without crossing the event horizon. So the bad news is if you jump through a black hole, your atoms will be shredded apart. The good news? You will learn to teleport.
*A first-class ticket on this voyage, though pricey (almost two thousand dollars today), was worth it on this trip: 97 percent of the women and 32 percent of the men in first class lived.
*That’s not true for all books, however. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary weighs 172 pounds, and if it was dropped from the Empire State Building its terminal velocity would be 190 miles per hour. That would crack your skull and snap your neck.
*While the average potato cannon is powered by burning hair spray, the greatest potato cannon ever made is also known as the Bernalillo underground nuclear test, which occurred in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1957. The U.S. military set off a smallish nuclear bomb underground and had a high-speed camera trained on a large manhole cover that covered the well leading all the way down to the bomb. The camera took 160 photos per second, yet caught only one shot of the cover before it disappeared out of frame—meaning it was traveling at an absolute minimum of 41 miles per second.
*Note that 1 food calorie is equal in energy to 1,000 theromodynamic calories, but in this chapter we’re referring exclusively to the food version.
*This is illegal, incidentally, as is any firework weighing more than 3 grams of gunpowder. Which means that legally the most of ATYD you’re allowed to grind up and explode is this page.
*What is antimatter? It’s complicated, but suffice it to say that every atom of matter has an “evil twin” of antimatter, and when a particle of matter touches its antiparticle, both vanish and are converted into energy according to Einstein’s equation E=mc2.
*According to Road & Track magazine you could hear this car rust if you stood close enough.
*We know a version of the reliability theory is how hearing works. Inside your ear you have little hairs to detect vibrations, along with many backup hairs. Loud music snaps them off, which isn’t a problem when you’re young, but as you age, the hairs die off naturally, and because rock music has already taken your backups, your hearing goes.
*Microlives are similar to the micromort, a concept introduced by researcher Ronald Howard—see p. 145–46 for details. A microprobability is the one-in-a-million chance of a given event occurring.
*The Royal Navy was among the first to discover the link between vitamin C and scurvy, so it gave their sailors limes to eat on their voyages—bestowing on them both a significant military advantage and a nickname: Limeys.
*If you have a soda, you should drink it. It has some salt so it’s not as hydrating as water, but it still does more good than harm.
*Maggots get a bad rap. They are sometimes used in medicine to clean out wounds, because they eat only rotting flesh and leave behind anything still alive.
*Your bones are piezoelectric, which means they generate electricity when stressed (just like the crystal rock in your barbecue lighter). No bone stress means no electrical signals, which means no rebuilding and results in bone disintegration.
*Wandering extracellular fluids are why astronauts returning from the space station have puffy faces.
*Because the atmospheric pressure would be squeezing your airspaces down, you would be denser inside Earth than you are right now, and so would sink farther than you might expect. You still wouldn’t make it to the other side, though.
*A better way to dehydrate a human is the freeze-dry method, where a person is frozen solid and then allowed to dry in an arid environment.
The five-thousand-year-old Ötzi iceman is an example of this occurring naturally. A glacier covered Ötzi shortly after his death and his body was so perfectly preserved, scientists were able to determine how he died (murder—an arrow severed the artery in his shoulder), what he ate as his last meal (grain, roots, and fruit), and perform a blood analysis (he was lactose intolerant).
*This ignores the risk of your dropping the gun and crushing yourself. A million-chamber Smith & Wesson would weigh around 250,000 pounds. A bullet to the head would be the least of your concerns.
*Micromort is a conjunction of “microprobability” (the one-in-a-million chance of something occurring) and “mortality” (your dying).
*The most common cause of death from running is heart attack, usually the result of an underlying heart condition. Another issue is an otherwise rare condition called hyponatremia. When your body sweats you lose not only water but salt. If you replace the water but not the salt, sodium levels in your blood drop and water rushes into your brain cells and inflates your brain. Not good. As it swells it presses against your skull, causing nausea and short-term memory loss, and it is fatal if left untreated.
*This acceleration would kill you if you did it in a rocket ship because the back of your seat would push its way through your organs. But in a space suit on Jupiter you would be fine (for now) because when gravity is doing the accelerating, everything in your body accelerates at the same speed, so no organ pileup.
*A quick primer on VX: It was developed as a pesticide until people realized it was far too toxic for that. The military took notice of its toxicity, however, and turned it into a chemical weapon.
Here’s how it works: Your nerves spit out chemicals that tell your muscles to contract and relax. VX gas disables the “relax” chemical, so your muscles clench up but don’t unclench. Unable to relax, your muscles quickly tire and stop working. This is a problem, particularly for your diaphragm. Once exposed to VX your diaphragm seizes up, tires, and you die of asphyxiation. The entire process takes only a few minutes.
Unlike in The Rock, VX gas does not have any effect on your skin and the antidote is injected into your thigh, not your heart.
*Patients of the more common forms of botulism—for which there exists an antiserum—can lie in bed for months paralyzed from head to toe but with fully functional minds. The antiserum stops the progression of botulinum toxin, but nerves already blocked are dead forever and patients have to wait months or years to grow new ones.
*Global rice production would drop 21 percent, corn output would decrease by 10 percent, and soybeans would decrease by 7 percent, according to an analysis by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
*If you can prove you have scientific intentions, the government will give you confiscated diamonds.
*If you’re comparing the speed to a major league pitch, it’s actually equivalent to catching a 103-miles-per-hour fastball because radar guns measure the speed of the ball when it leaves the pitcher’s hand. By the time it gets to the batter, a 95-miles-per-hour pitch has slowed to 87 miles per hour.
*Yes, the same as the pen—190 miles per hour is the maximum amount that Earth’s gravity can accelerate anything from the height of the Empire State Building.
*Small technicality: We’re cheating a little bit here. The pressure and heat created inside a nuclear bomb do not last long enough to force hydrogen together. To make an H-bomb, physicists use isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) made in nuclear fission reactors and then place those isotopes inside a nuclear bomb. The only way to do that to you and your friend’s hands would be to process you both in a fission reactor or have you shake hands inside a star. However, the logistics of both are complicated, so for the sake of convenience we’re skipping that step.
*How small is the singularity and what does it look like? Because of the nature of black holes, where no light can escape, there is no way for physicists to confirm any theories regarding the inside of black holes. So we don’t know.
*We are convinced it would be totally harmless and volunteer to go first.
*The next time you’re at the beach, keep an eye out for a hard, smelly, cream-yellow or dark brown “rock” that looks like a giant piece of earwax. It could make you rich.
*What if their window had cracked all the way through? The force of the ocean pushing the water through their window would have created a stream powerful enough to cut through both of them and the other side of their sub. And then they would have been crushed.
*It would also be quite chilly. Even though on the surface above the Mariana Trench you would be comfortable in a bathing suit, cold water is denser than warm water, so it sinks. Stepping outside the sub you would face 34-degree water (which would kill you in around 45 minutes), but because your face would also be smashed in we don’t think you would care about the temperature.
*It’s not fuel efficient but it’s still quite green because you’re removing those fossil fuels from Earth entirely. So your spaceship is better for the environment than any hybrid.
*The sun doesn’t have a surface; it’s all gas, like Jupiter, but it has a layer of ionized gas too thick to see through—so that’s what we are referring to as the sun’s surface.
*People with binge-purge disorders are at particular risk for this injury because their bodies have become accustomed to overfilled stomachs and their gag reflex has been suppressed. A fashion model in London once ate nineteen pounds of food in one sitting—the equivalent of eighty cookies—and died from a stomach rupture.
*Do not search Google Images for this term.
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