Strange Science
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Solution: more than half of Denmark’s crematoriums send the water into municipal heating systems. It was a controversial plan, but the Danish Council of Ethics (a board of scientists and clergy) approved it, as did the International Cremation Federation. The key was that the energy is being donated—if the water were being sold, it would violate a 1937 treaty that bars crematoriums from selling “residue of cremation.” The plan went into effect in 2012, and the idea is spreading to other European nations. A low-income housing project in Paris, for example, is now heated with crematorium water, and a crematorium in England is using its wastewater to heat…itself.
HOW TO CREMATE A BODY
The modern process of cremation uses industrial ovens that can reach temperatures over 2,000°F. A regular oven isn’t hot enough for cremation, but you can DIY with a homemade funeral pyre.
1)On first glance, a pyre may look like just a pile of wood, but it must be constructed a specific way to generate the heat necessary to turn your loved one into ash. Basically, you will be building a Jenga tower, so it’s important that your slats are uniform or your pyre will be lopsided and Uncle Jerry could topple off midway through the burn. Start by placing a metal frame or grate on the ground for a base. This will get the wood up off the ground and allow airflow underneath.
2)Stack your wood on top of the metal grate in layers, each crisscrossing the layer below for stability. Also make each layer of wood slightly smaller than the one below, so the pyre narrows as the stacks grow higher. This will create a chimney effect during the burn, concentrating the heat near the top to reach a maximum temperature of around 800°F. That’s no industrial cremator, but it will get the job done.
3)Lay your loved one atop the pyre and light ’er up. Try to start the fire as centered as possible to encourage an even burn. (The metal frame also allows you to reach underneath the pyre.)
4)You can speed along the burn with an accelerant like kerosene, but if your loved one was an “all-natural” type, this may be against his or her wishes.
5)It will take around five hours for the body to be completely cremated. Body remnants from a pyre burn will be mostly indistinguishable from the wood ashes. So if you do want to collect and spread the ashes somewhere, plan to bring about five one-gallon buckets.
“Space travel
is bunk.”
—SIR HAROLD SPENCER JONES,
ROYAL ASTRONOMER
OF ENGLAND, 1957
(two weeks before the
launch of Sputnik)
DARWIN’S
MYSTERY MOTH
Our Tale of the Missing Proboscis is not a science-fiction-mystery film; it’s the story of an animal whose existence Charles Darwin predicted in 1862. He had been studying the comet orchid of Madagascar, a “moth-loving” flower that is pollinated by moths when they feed on its nectar. The odd thing about this flower is that its nectary—the part that produces nectar—is more than 11 inches long, but the nectar is stored in its base. For a moth to feed on the nectar, it would need a proboscis (tongue) nearly a foot long. Such an insect had never been heard of, but Darwin claimed that if no such creature had evolved a proboscis that could access the nectar, the orchid would not be pollinated and would have gone extinct long ago. He published the theory in 1862…and it would take four decades for the theory to be proven correct.
In 1903 the Morgan’s sphinx moth, with a tongue more than three times the length of its 3-inch-long body, was discovered in Madagascar. It’s known today as the long-tongued night-flying hawk moth, and also the “predicted moth.” In 2004 entomologist Phil de Vries went to Madagascar to film the moth feeding from the flower. Just finding the flower was hard enough, but de Vries did find it, and he set up a night-vision camera… and waited at the base of the tree, keeping his eye on the monitor. At 4:34 a.m., he noticed something—and watched in awe as a large moth flew up to the orchid, uncoiled a very thin, long proboscis, carefully inserted it into the blossom, and shoved it down the 11-inch nectary. The moth then sat there, flapping and drinking away. It was the first time that Darwin’s predicted moth had been captured doing just what Darwin predicted it would do.
Unexplained Weight Gain
Sleep eating, a disorder that affects at least 1 percent of adults, is more than just a case of the munchies. Those who suffer from it have no conscious control over their actions while they raid the fridge. Patients may sleepwalk to the kitchen and prepare food while asleep, often leaving behind a mess as evidence. Dangers abound! One threat is to their waistline; sleep eaters tend to eat high-calorie and sugary foods such as peanut butter, chocolate, and even syrup straight out of the bottle. Their safety is endangered, too. They may cut themselves while chopping food; leave stove burners on; or choke while eating peanut butter by the spoonful, uncooked spaghetti, or frozen foods. Some eat inedible things like coffee grounds, eggshells, or even (in one case) buttered cigarettes. To top it off, medications prescribed for this condition may have pesky side effects, including…excessive drowsiness and restless sleep.
Q: What can you do that an astronaut can’t?
A: Burp. (There’s no gravity to separate the stomach gases from the liquids.)
MOVIE MAD SCIENTISTS
FRANKENSTEIN
There’s the classic 1931 version starring Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein and Boris Karloff as the grunting, rivet-necked monster, or the not-so-classic 1994 version with Kenneth Branagh as the good doctor and Robert De Niro as the monster (which certainly puts a new spin on the classic De Niro line, “You lookin’ at me?”). The 1931 version is indelibly printed onto our cultural memory—the collective image of the Frankenstein monster is Boris Karloff’s—but on the other hand, the 1994 version is more faithful to the original 19th century novel by Mary Shelley. And it’s in color! And don’t forget Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’s dazzling send-up of Frankenstein and classic horror films—a classic in its own right.
HOLLOW MAN
Kevin Bacon turns invisible, and no, this is not an assessment of his movie career. In Hollow Man he plays an unethical scientist who uses his own untested process to become invisible. Then, as he must in a movie like this, he goes completely insane and starts sneaking into hot girls’ apartments and killing off colleagues. Watch this for the special effects; the story is a bit…transparent.
MUTTON AND
A LITTLE LIVER
In March 2007, Professor Esmail Zanjani of the University of Nevada at Reno announced that he had successfully injected sheep fetuses with human stem cells. The result: sheep that grew organs that were part human. Some had livers, for example, that were made up of as much as 40% human liver cells. Zanjani hopes the research may one day lead to sheep being raised only for the human organs in their bodies—which could be transplanted into humans who need them. The scientists could conceivably create sheep that are tailor-made for specific people. For example, a sheep could be injected with your bone marrow in order to grow organs suitable just for you. Zanjani insists that the work is ethical and medically necessary, and that the sheep are not monsters. “We haven’t seen them act as anything but sheep,” he says.
WHISKER SCIENCE, Part I
A cat’s whiskers are a marvel of form and function.
•The scientific name for whiskers is vibrissae, and they’re specialized sensory organs on a cat’s body (mostly on the cheeks). On average, cats have 24 cheek whiskers.
•Each whisker is double the thickness of an ordinary hair and is rooted in the cat’s upper lip. Every root connects to 200 or more nerve endings that transmit information directly to the cat’s brain.
•Air currents create a tiny breeze as they move around an object. Cats feel this change with their whiskers and avoid objects in their path.
•Whiskers direct hunting cats to a successful pounce. In one experiment, a blindfolded cat was placed in an enclosure with a live mouse. When the cat’s whiskers touched the mouse, the cat grabbed his prey and delivered a killing bite in one-tenth of a second.
•Once the prey is in the cat’s mouth, facial muscles allow the whiskers to curl forward and sense any movement that might mean the animal is still alive and possibly dangerous.
NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT
Real ideas about time travel start with Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The theory says that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. If you hop a plane from New York to London, traveling at, say, 500 mph, by the time you get home, you’d be about 30 nanoseconds younger than the friend you left behind. Neither of you would notice, of course. But if you could travel through space at the speed of light for 10 years, by the time you returned, hundreds of years would have passed, and everyone you knew would be long dead. Your “present” and your friend’s “present” would now be…1,000 years apart.
Einstein’s second theory—on general relativity—says that space-time can be bent. One point in time can be bent to touch any other long-past or far-future moment. Think about placing a heavy object on an outstretched piece of elasticized fabric. The fabric sags until it eventually curls in on itself and its ends touch. If the past can touch the present, is it still the past or is it now the present?
Tesla’s Theory of Relativity
Did Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) come up with a better theory of relativity than Einstein? He argued that Einstein’s idea of curved space is bunk:
I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.
So where is Tesla’s theory of relativity? His work is shrouded in mystery, and conspiracy theories abound. He did say that he came up with one that would “put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space,” but no one has been able to find it in any of his writings. Or…it’s been classified.
BLOODSTREAM
•A pumping human heart can squirt blood as far as 30 feet.
•You can lose up to a third of your blood and still survive.
•The human body has about 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
•In the time it takes to turn a page, you’ll lose 3 million blood cells and make 3 million more.
•Red blood cells live four months. In that time they make 75,000 trips to the lungs and back.
•The most nutritious “food” in the world is blood.
•The Rh factor in blood occurs much more frequently (40–45 percent) in Europeans and people of largely European ancestry.
•Blood is thicker than water: blood has a specific gravity of 1.06; water’s is 1.00.
•Identical twins always have the same blood type.
•The average number of industrial compounds and pollutants found in an American’s blood and urine: 91.
SURFING SCIENCE
Surfing is hundreds of years old. Ancient Hawaiians surfed on big, heavy, wooden boards. In the 1950s the sport caught on in Southern California, where new engineering techniques and materials like fiberglass allowed for lightweight, smaller boards that still supported the mass of the surfer on the water. Spectators flocked to the amazing sight of swimmers standing on seemingly flimsy surfboards while cresting the tops of breaking waves. Most did not know they were watching some excellent feats of rotational motion and physics.
Balance is obviously an important part of surfing. How does a surfer stay stationary (balanced) on a board that’s cresting a wave? Along the lengthwise center of the board and slightly toward its tail, where there’s extra mass, lies the center of the board’s gravity. This point is the board’s axis—like the fulcrum at the center of a seesaw. Where the surfer stands in relation to the axis controls his or her board’s rotational motion exactly like the up-and-down rotational motion of a seesaw. If the rider’s weight moves too far toward the nose of the board, the board tips (or torques) forward and the nose sinks. Too far back and the tail sinks. A good surfer straddles the center of gravity with one foot toward the tail and one toward the nose. The two torques cancel each other out, and the surfer is balanced.
But it takes more than an understanding of rotational motion to make a brilliant surfer. Our surfer needs a thorough (even if intuitive) understanding of the development of potential energy and how it can be turned into kinetic energy. A surfer arrives at the top of a wave just before it breaks. By taking up this position, she has gained potential energy. Potential energy is the potential product of you and your equipment’s weight or mass, and the vertical distance you’re about to fall. Our surfer converts this potential energy to kinetic energy when she drops off the top of the wave down toward the flat of the wave. This conversion into energy gives her the power to propel herself along despite the friction of the water currents. The surfer can now ride the wave.
In 1929 the Nazis drew up plans to put a giant mirror in space to reflect the sun’s light as a weapon. If they had succeeded, their “Sun Gun” could have destroyed entire cities.
The Smartypants Family
Marie Curie was the first female scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize. She actually won it twice, first in 1903 for Physics, and then in 1911 for Chemistry (for her discovery of radium and polonium), making her not just the only woman to win two Nobels, but the only scientist—male or female—to win it in two different sciences. It turns out Curie’s scientific prowess is a family trait:
•Marie’s husband, Pierre Curie, was also awarded the 1903 Nobel prize for their combined work in using radioactive isotopes to treat tumors.
•Marie’s daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (along with her husband) for discovering artificial radioactivity.
•Marie’s grandaughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, is a famous nuclear physicist.
•Marie’s grandson, Pierre Joliot-Curie, is a well-known biologist.
•Marie’s great-grandson, Yves Langevin, is an astrophysicist.
In all, the Curie family has won a record five Nobel Prizes…so far.
ROBOTS IN THE NEWS
THINK-BOT Computer scientists at the University of Washington have figured out a way to control a robot’s actions. What’s so unique about this new programming technique? The scientists control the robots with their minds. They gave a humanoid robot a special cap outfitted with 32 electrodes. On the other end of the electrode cap was a human subject in a similar cap who, just by thinking about telling the robot to move forward or grab an object, was able to do so via the power of brain waves.
VOTE-BOT In 2006 the British government released a report called Robo-rights: Utopian Dream or Rise of the Machines? It outlined possible major social problems that could result in England one day should robots develop artificial intelligence and become independent. The report says the government may have to provide robots with housing, health care, and the right to vote. Robots, meanwhile, would be expected to pay taxes and serve in the military.
IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE
“It’s not rocket science” is a vaguely insulting phrase people say to somebody struggling to solve a problem. It means “it’s not that hard,” bringing up a mock parallel with rocket science, which involves difficult math, chemistry, and mechanical engineering.
The phrase entered the lexicon in the 1940s. That was about when rocket science, or the world of aerospace, began in earnest. Some of the German scientists responsible for making the Nazis’ V-2 rockets, including Wernher von Braun, surrendered to Allied troops in 1945. They were then recruited to work for the United States, and the world of rockets kicked into high gear. It was especially true after the end of World War II, when rocket science could be used for space exploration rather than weaponry. By 1950 rocket science, considered science fiction only a decade earlier, was very real but stil
l so exotic that it was synonymous with “incredibly difficult.” It was a common slang term, but print references didn’t appear until the 1980s.
Before these brave new frontiers of science were crossed, however, how were people dismissive of others trying to do something hard? They used phrases like “as easy as pie”or “as easy as falling off a log.”
A HUMOUROUS STORY
Doctors in ancient Greece and Rome believed the human body is filled with various fluids, which they called “humours.” They identified four fundamental humours: black bile, blood, yellow bile, and phlegm. The human body is entirely composed of these four substances, they decided, and good health depended on their being in proper balance.
Each humour became associated with a particular organ (gallbladder, liver, spleen, or the brain and lungs, respectively), then with one of the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Each element, and each humour, was defined as either cold or warm, and either moist or dry. Blood, for instance, was identified with air, with warm and moist qualities, while black bile was associated with earth, cold and dry. The system encompassed the entire physical world. Each humour was identified with one of the seasons, with a particular time of day, with certain plants, animals, and minerals. Every planet, constellation, and astrological sign had a corresponding humour. Even human psychology was explained by four basic personality types—melancholy, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic—all defined by a dominant humour.