Strange Science
Page 6
It made for bad medicine. In theory, eating the proper foods would encourage production of a particular humour—but rather than topping off one humour, medieval physicians preferred to correct imbalances by draining any excess of the others. If there wasn’t enough blood in your mix, for instance, enemas would be prescribed to reduce your black bile, along with induced vomiting to bring up yellow bile. A rubdown with blistering agents would release phlegm in the form of weeping pus. If too much blood was your problem, there was bloodletting, sometimes accomplished by leeches. If treatments were ever effective, it was pretty much by accident. Why did this system remain popular for hundreds of years, until it was finally displaced by the scientific method? Perhaps because it gave a framework of order to a chaotic universe and placed humankind at the center of it. This theory was very comforting to the medieval mind—even if it wasn’t true.
3 FACTS ABOUT BEES
1.Bees have different dialects. A German bee cannot understand an Italian bee.
2.Honey never spoils.
3.Bees use ultraviolet vision to see which flowers have the most nectar.
MAGGOT THERAPY
It sounds like something from a horror film—fat, cream-colored maggots eating their way through infected sores and wounds. It’s not. It’s medicine. Since ancient times, doctors have used maggots to prevent wounds from getting infected. In the 1940s, antibiotics replaced maggots. But bacteria adapted and started to become resistant to antibiotics.
RETURN OF THE MAGGOTS: Maggots work by secreting digestive enzymes that feed on dead tissue. Those enzymes also kill bacteria in a wound and speed up healing. Doctors place between 200 to 300 maggots on a wound, then cover it—maggots and all—with mesh. Beneath the mesh, the maggots feed for 48 to 72 hours. When they’re done, the doctors remove them. Wounds that haven’t healed for months, even years, often respond quickly to maggot medicine.
3-D Printing
a New You
A printer that can replicate the human body? Sure, why not. One day, advanced 3-D scanners will scan you, and then organic ink and special plastics will “bioprint” made-to-order body parts. So far, skulls, eyes, skin, noses, ears, bones, and limbs have all been reproduced by 3-D printers. A 22-year-old woman in the Netherlands suffered from a condition that thickened the bone structure of her skull, causing headaches and loss of vision, and threatened to impair brain function. So in 2014, doctors were able to duplicate and replace her damaged skull with a 3-D printed plastic version. According to the lead doctor, brain surgeon Dr. Bon Verweij, it was a resounding success. The patient regained her vision, was back to work, and “there are almost no traces that she had any surgery at all.”
“Everyone’s always
asking me when Apple
will come out with a cell
phone. My answer is,
probably never.”
—TECH COLUMNIST DAVID
POGUE, 2006
THE MONSTER STUDY
In 1939 Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist at the University of Iowa, directed graduate student Mary Tudor in an experiment on six children, aged 5 to 15. For six months Tudor visited the kids (who lived in a nearby orphanage) and conducted classes with them—and whenever they spoke she told them they had terrible speaking voices. She did this again and again. Why? To see if she could turn the kids—all of whom had perfectly normal speaking voices—into stutterers, thereby proving Johnson’s hypothesis that stuttering is caused by conditioning rather than congenital defect. None of the kids became stutterers, but according to Tudor’s own notes, all of them became afraid and ashamed to speak. When the experiment was over, Tudor simply left. The children were never told anything. Johnson’s peers were aghast when they heard what he’d done and dubbed his work “The Monster Study.”
UPDATE: The results were concealed for decades, but in 2001 they were discovered by a journalist. Later that year the University of Iowa issued a formal apology for the experiment. In 2007 three of the test subjects, along with the estates of the other three, were awarded $925,000 by the State of Iowa for what all described as the lifelong scars they suffered as a result of the “Monster Study.”
THE PERFECT
FIRESTORM
A fire tornado is a rare occurrence that results when a fire is whipped into a burning frenzy by intense winds. Here’s how this phenomenon works: First, a strong updraft of hot air hits a wildfire. As the hot air rises, it makes room for outside air to flow in. As that air whips in, it can form a whirlwind that picks up the flames and becomes a swirling column of fire nicknamed a “fire devil” or a “whirl.” Fire devils often range from 30 to 200 feet high and usually last a few minutes. Like regular tornadoes, though, they can reach more than half a mile high with winds of 100 miles per hour…and they can be just as deadly. The worst fire devil occurred after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Tokyo, when 38,000 people were killed in 15 minutes.
TREK*NOLOGY
Star Trek premiered on TV in 1966. Though we thought it would be centuries before humans developed technology to match Star Trek’s, some innovative thinkers are already turning “Trek*nology” into everyday technology.
PHASER
Trek*nology: When exploring an alien planet, the crew of the Enterprise had to be ready for anything. Their best defense? The phaser—a handheld ray gun. Set on “stun,” a phaser would merely immobilize the enemy; set on “maximum,” it would vaporize him.
Technology: We don’t have phasers yet, but several companies are trying to design them. Though the Star Trek phasers fit in the palm of your hand, most prototypes are much larger—one is parked on top of a 20-foot shipping container! The energy sources being explored range from lasers to microwave radiation, and uses include stunning (or immobilizing) an opponent or even frying the electronic components of a drone. When this technology is perfected, it will be reserved for military and police use.
COMMUNICATORS
Trek*nology: These small portable communication devices could be used anywhere, anytime, and also worked for remote tracking and locating. No operators. No phone booth. No cord. Sweet!
Technology: The first cellular phone call was made in April 1973, but it wasn’t until 1983 that cell phones became available to the public—17 years after the first Star Trek episode. Today, cell phones not only act as communications devices, they can also log on to the Internet or offer navigation. And they are even smaller than the communicators Spock and Kirk used.
TRANSPORTER
Trek*nology: “Beam me up, Scotty!” Within seconds, Captain Kirk and his landing party would vanish from a planet’s surface and reappear in the transporter room on the Enterprise. Teleportation was a means of transporting people from one place to another by converting them into pure energy, then changing them back into people again at the other end.
Technology: Scientists haven’t been able to teleport a person (or even an object) from one place to another, but in 1998 they did succeed in teleporting a laser beam. When it’s perfected, this technology will most likely be used for moving information—called quantum computing—and will allow people to move huge blocks of digital data at the speed of light. No more twiddling your thumbs while you download a game. But you’ll have to wait a little longer before you can say “Beam me up, Scotty.”
The Great Shakespeare Hoax
The “Flower Portrait” is probably the best-known painting of William Shakespeare. The familiar portrait, showing the Bard wearing a wide white collar pressed tight up to his chin, has been reproduced countless times. (It is often printed on the cover of programs for Shakespeare plays.) It was named for one of its owners, Sir Desmond Flower, who donated it to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1911. According to the date on the reverse side of the picture, it was painted in 1609—while Shakespeare was still alive.
Here’s how science exposed the truth: In 2004 experts at London’s National Portrait Gallery conducted a four-month study of the painting, using X-rays, ultraviolet light, paint sampling, and micropho
tography. Their conclusion: It’s a fake. It was painted between 1814 and 1840, 200 years after Shakespeare’s death. They have no idea who painted it.
IT’S SEXY TIME
Science and the news intersex…er, intersect.
A WORLD OF LOVERS
Are you one to kiss and tell? If you are, go to JustMadeLove.com—and tell the world about it. The site, which uses the Google Maps program, allows you to zoom in to your exact location and enter your information, and it shows up as a marker on a map on the JustMadeLove.com site. You can even leave a comment about how “it” went. A sample, from Greenland: “böyle bişi yokk doymuyor istıyor en son kanattımm onu pes etti yarım saat sonar bı daha ıstıyor hep ısıyor.” (We hope that’s not dirty.)
LOVE-BOT
David Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence, theorizes in his book Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships that by the year 2025 humans will be able to engage in realistic romantic situations with robots. Levy believes that intimate relations with ultrarealistic, humanoid-looking robots will be commonplace by then, perfect for anyone who might have difficulties attracting a mate.
Lighting Up the Dark
How many galaxies have you examined? Probably not as many as Vera Rubin, who studied hundreds of them. Of course, in the late 1940s, when she tried to enroll in the graduate program at Princeton (after being the only astronomy major at Vassar Women’s College), she was told that women weren’t allowed, so she “settled” for Cornell.
Then she made one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in the history of astronomy. While working with a large telescope in the 1970s, Rubin noticed that galaxies rotated much faster than previous astronomers had predicted they would. Newtonian physics said they should “fly apart,” but something was holding them together. “This unexpected result,” wrote Rubin, “indicates that the falloff in luminous mass with distance from the center is balanced by an increase in nonluminous mass.” Another way to describe “nonluminous mass”: dark matter. Rubin had provided the first real evidence that dark matter exists—a mystery since Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn coined the term in 1922. After Rubin died in 2016, the New York Times described her contribution as “a Copernican-scale change in cosmic consciousness.”
Would you pay to watch married couples bicker?
A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health observed 82 married couples to determine what factors make them happy. The conclusion? “The marriages that were the happiest were the ones in which the wives were able to calm down quickly during marital conflict.”
Cost to taxpayers: $325,525
MYTHUNDERSTANDINGS
HIPPOCRATES
MYTH: Hippocrates was the father of modern medicine.
THE TRUTH: Thanks to the Hippocratic oath, which is still administered during the graduation ceremonies of many medical schools, the name of the ancient Greek physician has become virtually synonymous with the practice of medicine. He may have tried to heal people, but like all doctors of his era, Hippocrates knew virtually nothing about the workings of the human body. And almost all of what he did believe—for example “that veins carried air, not blood, and illness was caused by vapor secreted by undigested food from unsuitable diets”—was dead wrong.
CYBER COWBOYS
The term “hacker” dates back to 1960, when students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent long hours “hacking” away at their keyboards in their Artificial Intelligence class, trying to make the computer do something it hadn’t been programmed to do. Over the years, as hackers discovered they could break into all sorts of systems, they had a choice to make: Should they hack for the good of others…or for themselves? Like cowboys in Western movies, they had to choose whether they’d wear the black hat or the white hat.
BLACK HATS are the “bad guys” who break into corporate computer systems, stealing credit card numbers, bank accounts, identities, and e-mail addresses. They either use them for their own benefit or to sell or trade to other Black Hat hackers. Because of the criminal nature of their activities, the ethical hackers often call them crackers.
WHITE HATS are the “good guys”—security experts hired to protect companies from the Black Hats. White Hat teams find a hole in a company’s security system and show the company how to fix it. In the White Hat community, there’s an ethical code: They are loyal to their employers and sneer at the greed, theft, and vandalism of Black Hats.
BLUE HATS are an offshoot of the White Hats. They’re ethical hackers, but they operate outside of computer security firms and are often contracted to test a system for bugs before it launches. The concept was created by Microsoft to find vulnerabilities in Windows.
GRAY HATS follow their own code of ethics; they are a little bit white and a little bit black. They don’t actually steal assets—they find a hole or a bug in a company’s security system (through illegal means), but often report their findings to the company and offer to fix it…for a hefty fee.
PATENTLY WEIRD:
Initiation Apparatus, 1906
Before fraternities relied heavily on alcohol to enhance the initiation process, this electric shock treatment helped spark the fun. The apparatus, described as “entirely harmless in its action and results,” was specifically “designed for use in lodges and secret societies.” Two metal rails about an inch wide are laid down as tracks and hooked up to a battery or generator. The victim—pledge or inductee—then walks down the track wearing a pair of shoes with metallic soles, heels, and interior contact plates. Every time the subject takes a step, the electric circuit is opened and closed, continuously shocking whoever dons the metal slippers.
STONE MAN SYNDROME
Technically known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, this is a particularly perverse disease because it’s the result of a malfunction of the body’s own repair system. When nonaffected people injure fibrous tissue—things like muscles and tendons—their bodies jump into gear to fix the problem. But in the case of people with this disease, their bodies go too far and cause the injured tissue to ossify…or turn into bone. Real, actual bone. That means if you injure your wrist, your body responds by turning all the tendons, ligaments, and muscles in your wrist to bone, with the obvious result that you can’t move your wrist anymore. In the most extreme cases, the victim can be rendered completely immobile, hence the “stone man” name. There is no cure, and there’s not even any effective treatment; surgery to fix the ossified tissue just results in the body rushing to add more bone to the area.
THE GREAT GPS TREASURE HUNT
Have you ever wanted to go on a treasure hunt? Does trying to reach a random location sound like a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon? Then you may want to try geocaching. The concept is simple. After jotting down coordinates via a website or logging onto an app with their smartphones, geocachers attempt to reach a certain location and uncover a logbook. If they’re successful, they add their name to it and confirm online that they found it.
To make finding a geocache more exciting, participants also sometimes add “trackables” to the stash: small objects like dog tags or coins that can be tracked as they make their way around a country.
A geocache is typically placed in a public park, but many are located in libraries, underwater, and even on mountaintops. Finding the trickier ones can involve answering riddles or visiting multiple locations before determining the correct spot. Tracking down other challenging geocaches often requires climbing trees or digging them up with a shovel.
But all that searching around can look…odd. Many participants have been questioned by authorities for “behaving suspiciously.” Several geocachers have also died while searching, and a family in Rochester, New York, had to be rescued after looking for a geocache in a cave in 2012. As a result of these incidents, several government agencies have cracked down on geocaching.
“Scientific” Theory:
ICE MOON
Hanns Hörbiger was a successful and wealth
y Austrian engineer who had lots of time to gaze at the sky through his telescope and develop weird theories about things. In 1913 the weirdness peaked when he published Welteislehre, or the “cosmic ice theory.” Hörbiger explained that while staring at the moon one night, he theorized it was made of ice. But wait, there’s more! That was followed by a vision in which Hörbiger learned great truths regarding the formation of the universe…and it all had to do with ice. Hörbiger promoted his theory relentlessly, and even though most serious scientists dismissed it, by the late 1920s the cosmic ice theory was very popular in Germany—largely because many Nazis had taken it up. (Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler’s commanders, became a major supporter of the theory, based on the idea that the “ice” somehow related to the Nazi fantasy of the “white Nordic race,” which purportedly originated in icy regions of northern Europe.) Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory remained popular and retained supporters right through World War II…until Germany’s defeat and the war’s end, when it quietly melted away.