Strange Science
Page 7
HANGOVER SCIENCE
What causes a hangover? Read on.
•Your liver processes alcohol into a toxic chemical called acetaldehyde. Just as the alcohol made you feel good (or at least drunk), the acetaldehyde makes you feel bad. It’s the accumulation of this chemical in your body, more than the alcohol itself, that causes hangover symptoms. (That’s why the hangover comes after you’ve been drinking—the alcohol has been changed into acetaldehyde.) Specifically, acetaldehyde causes your blood vessels to dilate, which makes you feel warm, and can give you a headache.
•Meanwhile, the alcohol that’s still in your system is raising both your pulse and blood pressure, which makes the headache even worse.
•And then there’s the effect on your kidneys. When you’re sober, your kidneys use a chemical called vasopressin to recycle the water in your body. But alcohol reduces the level of vasopressin in your body—which, in turn, reduces your kidneys’ ability to function. So instead of recycling water, you urinate it out. That makes you dehydrated, which can make your hangover worse.
•It’s also possible that what you’re experiencing in a hangover is a minor case of alcohol withdrawal syndrome—the same thing that chronic alcoholics experience when they stop drinking. “Your brain becomes somewhat tolerant over the course of an evening of heavy drinking,” says Dr. Anne Geller, who runs the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment Center in New York City. “The next morning, as the alcohol is coming out of your system, you experience a ‘rebound.’ You might feel nauseous, maybe you’ll have some diarrhea, maybe you’ll feel a little flushed. Your tongue is dry, your head is aching and you’re feeling a little bit anxious or jittery.”
PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE
There are a few things you can do before you start drinking that may prevent the worst excesses of a hangover:
• Eat a substantial meal or at least have a glass of milk before you start drinking. It will help protect your stomach lining.
• Avoid champagne and dark-colored drinks, especially red wines. They contain byproducts of fermentation that may make the hangover worse.
• Drink a pint of water before you go to bed. The water will help minimize dehydration.
• The next morning, eat eggs. Studies suggest that eggs help stabilize blood sugar levels and replenish depleted B vitamins. A protein found in eggs, cysteine, is believed to help break down the acetaldehyde that’s causing the hangover.
MEAD’S CREED
Margaret Mead, perhaps the most famous anthropologist in the world, helped shape our understanding of human behavior.
“The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.”
“No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.”
“The only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”
“Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.”
“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”
“Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”
“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.”
“Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put ourselves in an impossible situation.”
“Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.”
“Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.”
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa, holds the title of “World’s Longest Hiccuper.” It started in 1922, hiccuping as often as 40 times per minute. Sometimes he hiccuped so hard his false teeth fell out. In 1987—nearly 70 years later—the hiccups stopped.
•Gold is so rare that all of the pure gold produced in the last 500 years would fit inside a 60-foot-square cube.
•Most minerals are luminescent. When they’re exposed to radiation (like UV light from sunlight), they absorb and store it. When the mineral is then heated to at least 500°F, such as in a kiln, it releases that stored energy as light, and it glows.
•The diamond is the hardest natural mineral—four times harder than the next hardest, sapphire and ruby.
•When a body (human or otherwise) is buried, its bones absorb minerals, like fluorine, from groundwater. A technique called fluorine dating is used to approximate the age of skeletal remains.
•The element uranium was first uncovered in 1798 from inside a mineral called pitchblende.
QUANTUM
MECHANICS 101
What’s a book about strange science if we didn’t attempt
to explain quantum theory in two short pages?
The name sounds intimidating, but it can be broken down like this: A quantum is the tiniest bit of energy inside an atom. And mechanics is the study of motion. So quantum mechanics is the study of the motion of particles inside atoms. An electron, for example, is one such particle that orbits an atom’s nucleus. But it doesn’t move like a planet orbiting the Sun. Experiments have shown electrons can behave like waves. Trying to predict where one will be at any moment is a guessing game because electrons can instantly jump from one orbit to another—making quantum leaps.
It gets weirder. Two quanta (the plural of quantum) can share a mysterious link, even if they’re far apart. In one experiment in 2012, scientists took a connected pair of photons (quanta of light) and separated them. Photon 1 was then altered, and amazingly, Photon 2, on an island 88 miles away (143 km), was instantly altered as well. The two were entangled, a strange connection between quanta that no one can explain.
Scientists have managed to create useful inventions using quantum mechanics—one of the first was the transistor, in 1947. This world-changing device replaced vacuum tubes, which were big, breakable, and needed a lot of electricity. Transistors made the computers of today possible, as well as digital cameras, CD and DVD players, cell phones, ATMs, and lasers. Still, there’s much about quantum mechanics that scientists can’t explain. Even Richard Feynman, a quantum physicist, once said, “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.”
ALL IN GOOD FUN
Nikola Tesla was close friends with Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. When Tesla made an X-ray gun, he shot it at Twain’s head to capture several images of his skull on film.
Heart to Heart
In 1996 renowned English heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub operated on two-year-old Hannah Clark of Mountain Ash, Wales. She had cardiomyopathy, which had caused her heart to become badly inflamed, so Yacoub put in a new one. Hannah and her new heart were doing well…until the heart started showing signs of rejection 10 years later. In 2006 Yacoub came out of retirement and operated on Hannah, now 12, again. He reconnected her original heart…which had been left inside her body (surprisingly, not an unusual practice). It had apparently healed itself while it wasn’t being used and began working immediately when it was reattached. Hannah was back home within five days. It was the first time that such an operation had ever been performed.
VIRGIN BIRTH
Some insects and other invertebrates don’t need to mate to reproduce, but for vertebrates, reproducing that way is rare—less than 0.1 percent have done it. Here is one.
WHO? A boa constrictor snake
WHERE? At a pet store in Tennessee
WHAT? Although she had given birth naturally years before, this female boa delivered twice more in 2009 and 2010 under different circumstances. DNA testing determined that none of the male snakes she lived with were the father of her 22 (only female) babies. It turned out that all of them were “
half-clones” (two eggs fused together) of their mama and had no dad. This marked the first time a boa had ever reproduced asexually.
WHY? No one seems to know. Interestingly, the boa mom did apparently need to be around males before she could become pregnant, though, even if she didn’t breed with them. Geneticist Warren Booth points out, “Only in years that she was housed with males has she produced offspring. It appears that some interaction with a male is required. However, why she does not utilize his sperm is at present unknown.”
DREAM DISCOVERY:
INSULIN
On occasion, scientific discoveries and inventions have resulted directly from a dream. Here is one.
Frederick Banting, a Canadian doctor, had been doing research into the cause of diabetes, but had not come close to a cure. One night in 1920, he had a strange dream. When he awoke, he quickly wrote down a few words that he remembered: “Tie up the duct of the pancreas of a dog…wait for the glands to shrivel up…then cut it out, wash it… and filter the precipitation.” This new approach to extracting the substance led to the isolation of the hormone now known as insulin, which has saved the lives of millions of diabetics (sadly, at the cost of some dogs’ lives). Banting was knighted for his discovery.
HOLLYWOOD PHYSICS
You’ve seen these things happen in the movies, but can you tell the science from the fiction?
FICTION:After falling off a cliff, a car will burst into flames on impact.
SCIENCE:A car will only burst into flames if the gas tank is severely damaged, the gasoline has been vaporized, and there is a source of ignition…like a lit match.
FICTION:Stray bullets give off a spark or a flash of light when they strike a surface.
SCIENCE:Most handgun bullets are made of copper-lead or lead alloys, which don’t spark when they strike a surface, even if the surface is made of steel.
FICTION:Automatic weapons can fire off thousands of rounds for several minutes at a time without being reloaded.
SCIENCE:It’s true that automatic weapons can fire off thousands of bullets—but only for a few seconds at a time. Sustaining a ten-minute gun battle would not only require tens of thousands of bullets, it would also overheat the guns and cause them to malfunction.
How Color
Vision Works
The cones in our eyes allow us to see in color. Here’s how color vision works:
•Seeing means seeing light that is reflected off objects. That light enters our eyeballs, goes through the lenses, and hits the retinas. There it affects specialized cells called photoreceptors, which send neural signals to the brain’s visual center.
•There are two main types of photoreceptors in the retina: rods and cones (so called because of their shape). Rods detect different amounts of light (bright to dark), and cones detect different wavelengths of light—meaning different colors.
•Humans have three types of cone cells, which give us trichromatic (three-color) vision. One type of cone cell responds to short-wavelength light (the blue part of the spectrum), another to medium-wavelength light (the green part), and the third to long-wavelength light (the reds).
“Television won’t be able
to hold on to any market it
captures after the first six
months. People will soon get
tired of staring at a plywood
box every night.”
—FILM PRODUCER DARRYL ZANUCK, 1946
OLD HISTORY, NEW THEORY
THE EVENT: The Black Death, which wiped out about a third of the population of Europe in the mid-1300s
WHAT THE HISTORY BOOKS SAY: The Black Death was caused by an outbreak of bubonic plague, spread by rats.
NEW THEORY: Dr. James Wood, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, used computer analysis of church records and other documents to map out how the plague spread across Europe. If the epidemic really had been caused by bubonic plague, it would have spread differently than this one did.
Rat-borne bubonic plague has to reach epidemic levels in the rat population before it can cause an epidemic in humans, Wood says. The Black Death seems to have spread faster among humans than it could possibly have spread among rats. And there’s little evidence of a rat epidemic in the historical record. “There are no reports of dead rats in the streets in the 1300s,” he says.
Also, symptoms of bubonic plague are stark and unmistakable: high fever, bad breath, body odor, coughing, and vomiting of blood, followed by swollen lymph nodes and red bruising on the skin that turns purple and then black. Yet, Wood says, 14th-century descriptions of the Black Death are vague. They’re “usually too non-specific to be a reliable basis for diagnosis,” he says.
IN CONCLUSION: So what really caused the Black Death? Climate change, according to Wood and co-researcher Sharon DeWitt. A global warming period ended about 1300, followed by a cooling period called the Little Ice Age. During that time, rain and bad winters prevailed, and crops began to die in 1315. As people started to starve, malnutrition caused their immunities to drop. DeWitt said, “The pattern we observed, of the Black Death targeting the weak but also killing people who were otherwise healthy, is consistent with an emerging disease striking a population with no immunity.” Lack of immunity to disease combined with poor sanitation led to the fast spread of disease and the huge number of deaths.
Mixed-Up Geography
11TH GRADE STUDENT: “Egypt really exists?
I thought it was just some place from
Jimmy Neutron [a cartoon series].”
ANOTHER STUDENT: “What do you mean place?
I thought Egypt was a religion.”
ROBO JELLYFISH
Out of the millions of animals in the world, the jellyfish is among the weirdest. But their odd, alienlike anatomy and elegant movement through water are exactly why they became the basis for an aquatic drone.
Engineers at Virginia Tech built Cyro, a 170-pound robotic jellyfish, with $5 million in funding from the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research. The navy hopes that this project will one day lead to autonomous underwater robots that are capable of underwater surveillance of both the environment and potential armed threats.
Cyro is equipped with a silicone cover over its metallic frame, which gives it its jellyfish camouflage. It also comes equipped with a rechargeable battery that gives it four hours of life, and a computer system that allows it to be programmed to perform individual missions. So if you bump into a jellyfish while swimming, check to make sure you got stung by a real jellyfish before asking someone to pee on you.
LIFE ON MARS?
For centuries, humans have looked up at our closest planetary neighbor and wondered if we would ever live there. Today, scientists are working on making this a reality. NASA has even announced a date for the first manned mission to the Red Planet: 2031.
The bad news: It may be closer to the year 3031 before a human can take a stroll around Mars wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. As it stands right now, Mars’s average temperature is –81°F, its atmosphere is extremely thin, and it contains almost no oxygen. To fix all three of these problems would be, by far, the largest and boldest undertaking in human history.
The good news: Mars possesses many of the basic elements necessary for life to develop, the most crucial being water. The planet also has a promising atmospheric makeup: 95.9 percent carbon dioxide, 1.9 percent nitrogen, and 0.15 percent oxygen. While that’s far below the 20 percent oxygen in our atmosphere, it’s encouraging because four billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere was nearly the same as Mars’s is today. So, to make Mars earthlike—or terraformed—it needs heat, more water, a thicker atmosphere, and lots and lots of oxygen. But how do you do it in less than four billion years? One theory is on the next page…
SOLAR SAILING
TO MARS
One of the ways that NASA may send humans to Mars is on a ship powered by “solar sails,” giant mirrors that harness the sun’s energy to propel t
he ship forward. This same principle could be used to heat Mars by reflecting sunlight to the surface. However, the mirrors would need to be about 150 miles wide to heat enough land to make it worthwhile. Mirrors that large couldn’t be assembled on Earth, so the alternative would be to assemble them in orbit out of “space junk”—floating debris from previous space missions, jettisoned fuel tanks, and old satellites (now that’s recycling). Once installed 300,000 miles above the Martian surface, they’d be trained on the frozen polar caps and begin melting the ice. This process would release CO2 into the atmosphere, theoretically triggering the greenhouse effect: CO2 absorbs the sun’s radiation, and having more of it would warm the planet and thicken the atmosphere.
The moving gases from the melting ice caps would also generate planet-wide dust storms, increasing the temperature even more. Eventually, Mars would be warm enough for liquid water to develop (but not freeze) at the poles. At this point, rockets filled with algae spores would be sent to this new ocean. The new algae would thrive in the water, causing photosynthesis, a by-product of which is oxygen. Humans would still need to wear air tanks for a few millennia, but the amount of oxygen would increase as the temperature slowly rose.
Go to page 357 for another possible way humans could colonize Mars.
“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”