Strange Science
Page 3
Famous Fetus
For nine years, John and Lesley Brown of Bristol, England, had been trying to have a child, but Lesley’s Fallopian tubes were blocked, thus preventing a pregnancy. In November 1977, Lesley underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which an egg was extracted from her uterus, placed in a lab dish, and fertilized with John’s sperm. Two and a half days later, after cells of the egg divided to become an eight-celled embryo, the egg was carefully replaced in Lesley’s uterus.
IVF had been tried before, but had never resulted in a pregnancy that lasted more than a few weeks. When Lesley’s pregnancy lasted months, the media went crazy over the possible birth of the first “test-tube baby.” The relentless British press forced the Browns into hiding.
On July 25, 1978, at 11:47 p.m., Louise Joy was born via Cesarean section; she weighed 5 pounds 12 ounces. As the world’s first baby conceived outside of the womb, Louise was a scientific milestone. Religious and ethical controversies over IVF continued to rage, but that didn’t stop infertile couples from turning to the new procedure—especially since the blond, blue-eyed Louise was a normal, healthy baby.
Realistic Robots
It seems only a matter of time before robots are indistinguishable from humans—these machines are resembling more and more the T-800 from the Terminator series.
STRANGE HOTEL
The Henn-na Hotel (translation: “Strange Hotel”) made world headlines when it opened in 2015 in Nagasaki, Japan. Why? Its staff consists of 80 robots that greet hotel guests, carry their bags, and serve food in the café. While the humanoid robot receptionists welcome you with a smile to make you feel at ease, they speak only Japanese. If you want to speak English, you’ll have to approach the less-welcoming Velociraptor robot wearing a bow tie. There are about 10 human employees behind the scenes to make sure everything runs smoothly—so humans aren’t replaceable…yet.
YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME
Pepper is a social robot that is programmed to recognize different facial expressions, gestures, and voices in order to make conversation with humans. All these features make Pepper an ideal companion for the elderly, home-bound patients, or lonely types who live in their mother’s basement.
Strange Movie Science
And by “strange” we mean “wrong.”
The Core (2003) The planet’s core suddenly stops spinning! Oh no! One problem (of several): If the core stopped moving, it wouldn’t take several weeks for the effects to be felt. Quite the opposite—an incredible amount of energy would be released, resulting in a massive worldwide earthquake that would lay waste to everything in a few minutes and wouldn’t stop shaking for years.
Jurassic World (2015) The fi lmmakers of the fourth installment in the series ignored an important scientific discovery—made after 1993’s Jurassic Park—that many smaller dinosaurs had feathers. So instead of depicting Velociraptors as turkey-sized, feathered beasts, they’re still as tall as men and covered in scales.
Interstellar (2014) Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) visits a planet that’s orbiting a black hole, but the planet has heat and light…which usually requires a star.
Star Trek (2009) The old version of Spock (Leonard Nimoy) speaks of a supernova—an exploding star—that would “threaten the galaxy.” Sorry, Spock, but even though supernovas are big on a planetary scale, on a galactic scale—we’re talking hundreds of millions of stars—one star exploding wouldn’t do much damage to anything more than about 50 light-years away.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
What goes on in your body when you’ve been drinking alcohol? Here are some basic facts:
1. When you drink an alcoholic beverage, your body absorbs about 90% of the alcohol in the drink. The rest is exhaled, sweated out, or passed out in urine.
2. On average, a normal liver can process 10 grams of alcohol per hour. That’s the equivalent of one glass of wine, half a pint of beer, or one shot of 80 proof spirits. (Exactly how much depends on a number of things, including your weight and gender.)
3. Alcohol is a depressant, which means that it slows down the activity of your central nervous system by replacing the water around the nerve cells in your body.
4. Alcohol also changes the density of the fluid and tissue in the part of your ears that controls your sense of balance. That’s why it can be difficult to walk, or even stand up, when you’ve had too much to drink.
STRANGE STUDY:
The Tetris Effect
Study: Do you have uncontrollable cravings for sex, drugs, and alcohol? Now you can control them with Tetris! So says a 2015 study conducted by researchers from England and Australia. They instructed 31 college students to log their daily cravings. The researchers sent some of the students text messages prompting them to play the block-stacking video game Tetris for three minutes, seven times a day.
Conclusion: “Playing Tetris decreased craving strength for drugs, food, and activities from 70% to 56%,” reported Jackie Andrade from Plymouth University in the United Kingdom. “We think the Tetris effect happens because craving involves imagining the experience of consuming a particular substance or indulging in a particular activity. Playing a visually interesting game like Tetris occupies the mental processes that support that imagery; it is hard to imagine something vividly and play Tetris at the same time.” So that’s good news for drug and sex addicts…but not so good news for video game addicts.
WHEN A GRIZZLY
LOVES A POLAR
A “grolar” is the offspring of a grizzly bear and a polar bear. Until recently, wild grolars were considered a legend. The chances of two such bears meeting, let alone breeding, are very unlikely. Brown bears prefer temperate forests whereas polar bears live in cold climates. Their “bedroom habits” are also different. Brown bears mate on land; polar bears prefer ice floes.
In 2006 an American hunter named Jim Martell teamed up with Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker, for an expedition on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic. Martell shot and killed what he thought was a polar bear. Upon further inspection, he and Kuptana realized what they had on their hands was infinitely more rare. It had brown patches in its white hair and a humped back like a grizzly.
DNA evidence confirmed that their bear was, indeed, the first grolar ever discovered in the wild. Scientists still consider them to be exceptionally rare in nature, but the likelihood of a population boom could increase as grizzlies are driven farther north by civilization and as polar bears are driven farther south by global warming.
SKATEBOARD SCIENCE
In the 1960s, bored surfers started attaching roller-skate wheels to wooden boards so they could sidewalk surf when there were no waves. Several ideas changed skateboarding from a way to get around on pavement into a way to defy gravity and fly through the air.
•One early improvement to the skateboard was the kicktail, the board’s upturned back end. It added a way to brake, a higher level of control, and allowed the skateboarder to lean back more as he rolled along. In the 1970s, shorter boards made of lighter materials and urethane wheels provided a smoother and quieter ride. Soon kids who’d never seen the ocean were zipping down hills and maneuvering around obstacles on skateboards.
•In 1977 a skateboarder named Willi Winkel was riding down a standard quarter pipe (an elevated ramp that led downhill to help a rider pick up speed). Winkel thought that two quarter pipes might be better than one, so he put together a U-shaped ramp or “half-pipe.” He was using the rules of acceleration and velocity to overcome gravity. His total mass (weight) was pulled by gravity down the half-pipe, thus creating speed and giving him the momentum to take him vertically up the other side and even soar out over the lip to “catch some big air” (in surfer-speak).
•In the late 1970s, Alan Gelfand worked on a move he’d learned from friend Jeff Duerr. As Gelfand sped up the vertical incline of a half-pipe, he made a crouching jump while shoving down the kicktail of his board with his back foot, deliberately torqueing the back of his board down and causing the front of
the board to fly up as the back bounced off the ground. First called “due air” after its originator Duerr, it became popularized by Gelfand and later known by his nickname “Ollie.” Remember the seesaw? He had taken advantage of the effects of rotational motion. By itself, the board would simply have flipped over backward toward its axis, but eventually, while the board was in the air, Gelfand learned to slide his front foot forward, which put torque on the front of the board and leveled it out before gravity pulled rider and board back to earth. Spectators were amazed; it looked as if Alan’s skateboard was strapped to his feet—but it wasn’t.
SCIENTIFIC STREETS
Many of the streets in Paris are named for famous scientists. Here are five you might recognize:
1. RUE AMPÈRE. Named for French physicist André-Marie Ampère, who discovered electromagnetism. He initiated a standard system of measurement for electric currents, and the ampere unit of electric current was named for him.
2. RUE COPERNIC. Named for Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who produced a workable model of the solar system with the Sun in the center in the 16th century.
3. RUE PIERRE ET MARIE CURIE. Named for the Nobel Prize–winning couple who pioneered the study of magnetism and radioactivity, and discovered the elements radium and polonium in 1898. (Polonium was named for Marie’s homeland of Poland.)
4. RUE GALILÉE. Named for Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo Galilei, who has been called the “father of modern science.”
5. RUE FOUCAULT. Named for Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, a French mathematician and astronomer who invented the gyroscope and a pendulum that demonstrated that Earth rotates on its axis.
THE MUMMIES RISE
As long as there have been people in Egypt, there have been mummies—not necessarily man-made mummies, but mummies nonetheless. The extreme conditions of the desert environment guaranteed that any corpse exposed to the elements for more than a day or two dried out completely, a process that halted decomposition in its tracks.
The ancient Egyptian culture that arose on the banks of the Nile River believed very strongly in preserving human bodies, which they believed were as necessary a part of the afterlife as they were a part of daily life. The formula was simple: no body, no afterlife—you couldn’t have one without the other. The only problem: As Egyptian civilization advanced and burial tombs became increasingly elaborate, bodies also became more insulated from the very elements—high temperatures and dry air—that made natural preservation possible in the first place.
So a new science emerged: artificial mummification. From 3100 B.C. to A.D. 649, the ancient Egyptians deliberately mummified their dead, using methods that became more sophisticated and successful over time.
For more about mummies, go to page 208.
MANIMALS!
Stanford University professor Irving Weissman and a team of researchers have created mice with brains that are part human. Hoping to learn more about brain cancers, Weissman extracted human embryonic brain stem cells—the kind that go on to become various types of brain cells—and injected them into the brains of adult mice. The cells survived and even traveled to different areas of the brains and matured into different types of brain cells. (The researchers created special markers that allowed them to keep track of the injected human cells.) The tests resulted in mice with brains whose cells were about 1 percent human. The next step: inject human brain stem cells not into adult mice but into fetal mice still in the womb. That, Weissman says, would result in mice that have much higher human brain content…perhaps as much as 100 percent. Before moving ahead, Weissman went to Stanford’s ethics department to make sure he wasn’t crossing any lines. Law professor Henry Greely, chair of the school’s ethics committee, gave the study the go-ahead with one condition: If the mice started showing any humanlike behaviors, they’d have to be destroyed immediately.
AN UNFAMILIAR
FACE
There’s a part of your brain that processes faces. It’s located, according to MIT scientist Nancy Kanwisher, in the area “just behind and underneath, and a bit from your right ear.” It’s called the fusiform gyrus. (The gyrus is a ridge in the brain, and fusiform describes its shape—elongated and tapered at both ends.) Whenever you see someone you know, the fusiform gyrus tells you, “That’s Bob.” It also sends out messages to other parts of the body that add emotions to the information, such as “I like Bob. He’s my friend.” But what happens when an accident, illness, or hereditary gene disconnects the wiring between the fusiform gyrus and other parts of the brain?
There are people who may see a particular person’s face every day of their lives and still not recognize it. They see a nose, teeth, and cheeks, but when the features are put together, they cannot retain a memory of it. The medical term for this condition is prosopagnosia (from the Greek prosopon, for “face,” and agnosia, for “ignorance”), but it’s more commonly called face blindness. Researchers say that as many as 1 in 50 people suffer from some form of the condition.
Jane Goodall, the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, has it. Probably the best known sufferer of prosopagnosia is the neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Oliver Sacks, renowned author of the best-selling books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, which was made into the 1990 Oscar-nominated film starring Robin Williams. A lifelong sufferer of extreme face blindness, Sacks has said that his condition is so severe he often doesn’t recognize his own face.
Sufferers of face blindness must develop alternate ways of identifying coworkers, friends, and family, so they remember single features—a mole, a specific style of clothing, or an extra toothy smile. Says Jane Goodall, “I usually make up for it by pretending to recognize everybody. And then, if they say, ‘But we haven’t met before,’ I say, ‘Well, you look just like somebody I know.’ ”
4 DIRTY-SOUNDING SCIENCE WORDS
1.Mastication (chewing)
2.Coccyx (tailbone)
3.Hyperprosexia (a preoccupation with, or ability to concentrate on, only one thing)
4.Vomitus (yes, this is what it sounds like—the technical term for the stuff you vomit up)
YOU MUST REMEMBER
These memory tricks (or mnemonic devices) will help you remember scientific facts.
THREE SEGMENTS OF AN INSECT’S BODY:
Picture a bug wearing a hat—head, abdomen, thorax.
BIOLOGICAL GROUPINGS:
Kind pigs care only for good slop.
(kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species)
TYPES OF CAMELS:
Bactrian (two humps), with a back that looks like a B turned on its side. The one-humped dromedary’s back looks like a D.
8 PLANETS IN EARTH’S SOLAR SYSTEM
(from the closest to the farthest from the Sun):
Many very evil Martians just showed up naked.
(Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
WORLD’S LONGEST RIVERS:
Just say nay! (Nile, Amazon, Yangtze)
THE WORLD’S LARGEST DESERTS:
Deserts make me sag. (Sahara, Arabian, Gobi)
THE 7 CONTINENTS:
Eat an aspirin after a nasty sandwich. (Europe, Antarctica, Asia, Africa, Australia, North America, South America)
TRADITIONAL DIET FOR TREATING DIARRHEA:
BRAT (bananas, rice, apples, toast)
DIRECTIONS OF THE COMPASS, CLOCKWISE:
Never eat soggy wheat (north, east, south, west)
GUITAR STRINGS, FROM THICK TO THIN:
Elephants and donkeys grow big ears. (E, A, D, G, B, E)
COLORS OF THE RAINBOW:
Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)
5 KNOWN DWARF PLANETS IN EARTH’S SOLAR SYSTEM:
Pluto can’t make Eris Hot.
(Pluto, Ceres, Makemake, Eris, Haumea)
THE MOHS SCALE OF MINERAL HARDNESS, FROM SOFTEST TO HARDEST:
Toronto girls can flirt and only quit
to chase dwarves.
(talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite, apatite, orthoclase, quartz, topaz, corundum, diamond)
ORDERS OF COLOR ON A TV TEST PATTERN:
When you catch German measles remain between blankets.
(white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, blue, black)
•Seat belts were originally designed not for cars, but to secure workmen and window-washers to their equipment when scaling tall buildings.
•The first waterbed was developed more than 3,000 years ago, when Persians filled goat skins with water, sealed them with tar, and warmed them in the sun.
•After NASA developed a coating to protect its cameras from the sun’s radiation, scientists at the California Institute of Technology used it to create radiation-blocking sunglasses. Most famous brand: Blu Blocker.
•When Frank Etscorn, a psychologist studying addiction, spilled liquid nicotine on his arm, he caught a buzz. He realized smokers trying to quit could be given nicotine through the skin. His nicotine patch hit the market in 1992.
•Early contacts were made from wax molds—by pouring wax over the eyes. The lenses were glass, and caused so much pain that patients were prescribed an anesthetic with cocaine.
NANO-GOLD
How tiny is a nanometer? It’s one-billionth of a meter. Nanometers are the units of measurement for the world’s smallest particles—atoms and molecules. Amazingly, scientists are now finding practical uses for particles of gold that measure in mere nanometers.
HOW TO CATCH GOLDFINGER
Despite advances in DNA evidence, forensic investigators still favor an old-fashioned method of crime-scene detection: fingerprints. These are obtained by applying chemicals that react with the amino acids in sweat that was left behind in the print. But prints last for only about three hours on nonporous surfaces, and people with very dry skin don’t always leave clear fingerprints. Modern science has a solution: nano-gold. Researchers in Sydney, Australia, have found that mixing gold nanoparticles into those chemicals gives much sharper detail, no matter how old the prints are or what surface they’re on. This is an important step toward the “holy grail” of forensic science: recovering prints from a crime victim’s skin—even from corpses.