Strange Science
Page 9
DNA and fossil evidence suggests that modern Homo sapiens first appeared in northeastern Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. Their descendants began migrating out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, spreading in different directions. Travel then was difficult, so those different groups of travelers didn’t interact for a very long time. The people who would go on to become the Native Americans, for example, wouldn’t interact with the people who went on to become the Europeans for many thousands of years. That long genetic separation resulted in entire groups acquiring DNA mutations that were unique to them. The people who became the Native Americans acquired mutations different from those the Europeans acquired. When means of travel progressed and long-separated groups of peoples did start interacting, and having children together, those mutations started being shared. And now—we can find them.
THAT’S NO BROOMSTICK
Modeled on Harry Potter’s flying broomstick, Mattel decided to add a touch of realism to the Nimbus 2000 by adding a battery-powered motor that made the broomstick “simulate movement”…by vibrating. To recap: That’s a foot-long toy meant to be stuck between the legs that vibrates. The toy was quickly discontinued.
WEIRD DYES
Three thousand years ago, fishermen in the eastern Mediterranean found a sea snail called a murex that had an unusual property: if you squeezed its sluglike body, it oozed a deep, brilliant purple substance that made a beautiful dye. The color became so prized that the area became known as Phoenicia, the “Land of Purple.” The dye was named “Tyrian purple” after Tyre, the capital of Phoenicia.
It took nearly six million snails to make a single pound of dye, and a single ounce of dye cost a pound of gold. Only the wealthy could afford purple clothes, and purple became the royal color of the empires of Egypt, Persia, and Rome.
By the fifth century, the murex snail population was on the verge of extinction. Kings and popes needed alternatives to Tyrian purple. In 1464 the Catholic Church introduced “cardinal’s purple,” a maroon dye made from an insect called a kermes (which gave its name to the new dye’s color, carmine). A hundred years later, the Spanish brought another insect-derived dye—cochineal—back from Mexico and Peru. The Aztec king Montezuma had worn robes dyed in this brilliant red. Cochineal is still used today in food coloring, cosmetics, and more.
JOURNEY INTO SPACE
Journey into Space was a BBC radio show that aired from 1953 to 1958. Unlike most science fiction programs that were complete flights of fancy, this show was grounded in the real physics of spaceflight. In one episode a group of reporters is given a tour of a launchpad on the Moon; the description of the spacecraft is so true to life that the modern listener may forget that the show predated the Apollo Moon landing by 15 years. The realism helped make it one of most listened-to radio series in the history of the BBC, and the last one to attract a larger audience than the television shows that were on at the same time. The episodes are now available on CD.
THINGS TO LISTEN FOR: Lemmy, the clueless Cockney member of the crew. He has presumably spent years training for the first mission to the Moon in episode 1, yet he is surprised to find out that he is weightless in space. Why? In the early 1950s, most listeners had no understanding of spaceflight; having someone explain it to Lemmy was the show’s way of explaining it to the audience.
A VISIT TO THE WITCH DOCTOR
In the Zulu, Swazi, Xhosa, and Ndebele tribal traditions of South Africa, sangoma are healers who call upon dead ancestors to help diagnose and cure patients. Most sangoma cures are made with ingredients such as plants. But cures like the ones below might be a bit harder to swallow.
PROBLEM: Backache
CURE: Eat crocodile fat.
PROBLEM: You want to win a soccer game.
CURE: Eat lion fat.
PROBLEM: Your crops won’t grow.
CURE: Bury a human skull in the field.
PROBLEM: You want to be elected president.
CURE: Eat a slice of brain.
PROBLEM: Stroke
CURE: Eat lizard flesh.
PROBLEM: You feel weak.
CURE: Eat ground-up finger bones.
PROBLEM: You’re sleepy and low on energy.
CURE: Drink human blood.
PROBLEM: Your store needs more customers.
CURE: Bury a human hand under the entrance.
Who Are the Biohackers?
Depending on who you ask, biohackers are either courageous “citizen scientists” who improve the human condition through genetics and technology…or they’re reckless wannabes who lack any respect for the scientific method. Whoever they are, biohackers are into some pretty strange stuff, such as…
UPGRADED FOCUS BRAIN TRAINER: Developed by biohacker Dave Asprey, this “near infrared, hemoencephalogography device feedback system” is a headband that measures the flow of blood going into your brain. When your readings are low, you can do brain exercises to get the blood flowing again.
CRISPR-CAS9: Short for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,” Crispr-Cas9 was developed by Sebastian Cocioba, a 25-year-old college dropout who set up a lab in his parents’ New York apartment. The Cas9 enzyme “acts as a pair of ‘molecular scissors’ that can cut the two strands of DNA at a specific location in the genome so that bits of DNA can then be added or removed.” The implications of this tech could lead to everything from designer babies to genetic weapons of mass destruction.
DOING SCIENCE IN
THE DARK
In 2015 Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbetts—two biohackers from a California collective called Science for the Masses (SM)—performed the first human trial of a “chlorophyll analog” called Chlorin e6 (Ce6) that they claim gives the user night vision. Tibbetts dropped some in Licina’s eyes, and then he and four control subjects went to a dark forest to see what they could see. According to their (non-peer-reviewed) paper (basically a blog post), SM concluded, “The Ce6 subject consistently recognized symbols that did not seem to be visible to the controls.”
After several media outlets breathlessly reported “Biohackers create night vision superpowers!” several actual scientists called out SM for its unorthodox methods—such as not using double-blind control subjects. “Unfortunately, due to the weak design of this experiment,” wrote Peter Rothman in Humanity+ magazine, “we really cannot conclude anything conclusively about the true effect of Ce6 on night vision.” Rothman pointed out that Ce6 wasn’t even invented by SM; it was patented in 2006 by Dr. Ilyas Washington, who wrote, “This mechanism is shown to enhance vision in a mouse model and perhaps could also do so in humans.”
SM then took it upon themselves to formulate their serum. After a “totally disgusted” commenter complained that “research on human subjects requires FDA and Ethic Committees review,” Licina rebutted that he doesn’t need permission if he himself is the test subject, adding, “We’re terribly sorry that you didn’t find a post doc degree attached to our names which is, I am assuming, the magic pass that allows people to play around in a lab.”
DOUBLE EXTINCTION
Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899) was the first to describe and name the Apatosaurus dinosaur, based on the discovery of a few bones in Colorado. Then one of his teams found an almost complete (and what seemed like a distinctively new) skeleton in Wyoming. Marsh plunked a random head on his headless skeleton and named it Brontosaurus. This conveniently got him credit for two discoveries. Eventually, though, other paleontologists figured out that the two skeletons were from the same dinosaur and that Marsh’s Brontosaurus had just been an adult Apatosaurus. The name Brontosaurus was formally discarded in 1974, thus making the Brontosaurus extinct…again.
Oh, Baby!
Sausage isn’t the healthiest of foods. Pork and beef sausages in particular are often made from the fattiest parts of the animal, and they’re loaded with saturated fat. What if food scientists could create a sausage that was a little bit better for you, in spite of all that fat? They have. Researchers i
n Spain have concocted sausage laden with digestion-friendly probiotics—probiotics harvested from the poop of babies.
Generally, a baby’s digestive tract is clean and healthy, not yet burdened by years of use and poor dietary habits. Scientists at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Research found that microbes in infant poop (who knows what made them think to look there) contained large amounts of two probiotics that are almost nonexistent in adult poop.
Sausage is cured with bacteria naturally present in the animal flesh being used, so the scientists took the baby poop bacteria (harvested from 43 babies no older than six months old) and used that as the fermenting agent instead. Result: baby-poop sausage. Team member Anna Jofré claims that the sausage is good for the lactose intolerant—dairy products are a primary source of probiotics, particularly yogurt. “Probiotic fermented sausages will give an opportunity to consumers who don’t take dairy products the possibility to include probiotic foods to their diet.” Jofré also assured a reporter that the sausages “tasted very good.”
ANALYTICAL ADA
When Annabella Milbanke married the poet Lord Byron in 1815, he was already famous as the creator of the brooding, defiant romantic hero. A year after they were married, Lady Byron went home to her parents, taking baby daughter Ada with her. Taking no chances that her daughter might grow up to be a poet, Lady Byron hired a series of tutors to educate little Ada in mathematics and science, as well as reading and writing. By the time she was 13, Ada knew more about math than her tutors did.
ANALYTICAL ENGINE
At a dinner party one night in 1833, Ada—by then married to the Earl of Lovelace—heard inventor Charles Babbage talk about his calculating machine: the analytical engine. Though neither she nor Babbage would ever see it finished in their lifetimes, they both understood how it could work.
Ada translated an Italian article about it, and added a footnote of her own that discussed the difference between a simple calculating machine and the analytical engine—a difference like that between pocket calculators and computers today. Babbage suggested she add more of her own ideas, which turned out to be three times as long as the original article and was published in 1843 in a serious science journal. Her powerful imagination allowed her to make leaps beyond the available information. Aware that Babbage had based his designs on a weaving loom, she wrote in a letter, “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
CREATING A COMPUTER IN HER MIND
Lady Lovelace described how the engine could produce important number sequences, deal with symbolic sequences (like algebra), have a memory, and how subroutines could be built in for special tasks. She predicted it could compose music and produce graphics. She even considered artificial intelligence, and explained why A.I. wouldn’t work. In fact, her ideas were so good that a lot of people consider her the first computer programmer. (A 1979 U.S. Department of Defense software language was named in honor of her.)
Mixed-Up Earth Science
“Where do clouds go at night?”
—Asked by a high school student
RANDOM ORIGIN
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
In January 1888, thirty-three men (including world-renowned explorers, military officers, academics, bankers, and mapmakers) met at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., to organize a group whose mission was to “increase geographical knowledge.” Two weeks later the National Geographic Society was officially established, and the first issue of National Geographic Magazine was published in September 1888. It was a dry, academic journal, but still attracted readers thanks to photographs from exotic places as well as maps and archaeology reports.
It didn’t become the magazine it is today until Alexander Graham Bell was named president of the society in 1897. Among Bell’s innovations: He had the magazine printed on thick paper so it felt more like a book, devised the yellow-trimmed photographic cover, and solicited rollicking firsthand accounts from explorers like Robert Peary and Ernest Shackleton. He also realized that the magazine’s strength was showcasing photos. By 1908 photos took up half of the magazine, and even more than that after National Geographic ran color images in the early 1930s. By 1950 it was one of the top 10 most-read magazines in the world. It now reaches more than 50 million readers every month.
DREAM DISCOVERY:
LEAD SHOT
British plumber William Watts came up with the process for making lead shot used in shotguns. This process was revealed to him in a dream. At the time, making the shot was costly and unpredictable—the lead was rolled into sheets by hand, then chopped into bits. Watt had the same dream each night for a week: He was walking along in a heavy rainstorm—but instead of rain, he was being showered with tiny pellets of lead, which he could see rolling around his feet. The dream haunted him; did it mean that molten lead falling through the air would harden into round pellets? He decided to experiment. He melted a few pounds of lead and tossed it out of the tower of a church that had a water-filled moat at its base. When he removed the lead from the water, he found that it had hardened into tiny globules. To this day, lead shot is made by being dropped from a height into water.
WEIRD ENERGY:
SOLAR WIND
As long as the Sun shines, solar power may be an infinitely renewable resource. But the Sun provides another source of potential usable power in the form of solar wind. Solar wind is a high-powered stream of charged particles constantly shooting out of the Sun. Brooks Harrop and Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University are the leading researchers on the idea, and they believe that a Sun-orbiting satellite could be used to capture those beams of energy. Using solar-powered batteries to run an electric charge through a copper wire, the satellite would generate a magnetic field that would in turn attract solar wind particles. The energy could then be zapped to a receiver on Earth via an infrared laser. While all this sounds like science fiction, the principles are scientifically sound. The main problem Harrop and Schulze-Makuch are trying to solve is how to aim and shoot a laser beam from the Sun to the Earth—a distance of nearly 100 million miles—without losing much energy. Harrop and Schulze-Makuch think their technology could at least be used to beam solar wind energy to other satellites and spacecraft. How much energy could solar wind ultimately provide? One hundred billion times the planet’s current power needs.
The Great Moon Hoax
Perpetrator: The New York Sun newspaper
Story: The paper printed its first issue in 1833, and by 1835, it was looking for a circulation boost. So to drum up interest, editors announced the upcoming publication of six articles covering renowned British astronomer Sir John Herschel’s fantastic new “discoveries” of life on the Moon: forests and seas, cranes and pelicans, herds of bison and goats, flocks of blue unicorns, sapphire temples with 70-foot pillars—even a race of batlike humanoid creatures. According to the Sun, the articles would be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The day the first article appeared, Sun sales were 15,000; by the sixth day, they were over 19,000, the highest of any New York paper at the time. Other newspapers, racing to catch up, claimed to have the “original” Edinburgh Journal articles too, but they actually just reprinted the Sun’s stories.
Exposed: There were no Edinburgh Journal articles. In fact, that journal had gone out of business several years earlier. And Herschel, perhaps the most eminent astronomer of his time, was totally ignorant of the hoax (and then amused by it until he got sick of answering questions about Moon men). The articles were reportedly written by Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke. The Sun never formally admitted the deception, but it did publish a column speculating that a hoax was “possible.” Regardless, the paper got what it wanted and circulation remained high.
•Italian doctor Gabriele Falloppio conducted the first clinical trial of condoms in 1546. He made them himself out of linen, and they were meant to prevent syphilis, not pregnancy.
•In the 1920s, Swedish zoolog
ist Sten Bergman discovered a subspecies of bear in northeast Russia that was much larger and darker than common brown bears. But Bergman never actually spotted one; he saw only a hide and tracks. No one has ever seen what is known as Bergman’s bear.
•A study in Spain determined that rats can tell the difference between the Dutch language and Japanese.
•Japanese researchers found that tiny snails eaten by birds can pass through their gut and come out alive. According to National Geographic Daily News, “One snail even gave birth shortly after emerging—apparently unfazed by its incredible journey.”
•In 2015, an astrophysicist at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia discovered the source of strange signals that had mystified her peers for 17 years. It was a microwave in the facility’s kitchen.
HOW AN X-RAY
MACHINE WORKS
An X-ray machine is basically a camera, but it creates its own “light” in the form of X-rays. An electric current is sent to the vacuum tube that houses a cathode at one end and an anode at the other. The cathode is a filament, like in lightbulbs. When the current passes through it, it heats up and emits electrons—negatively charged atomic particles—into the vacuum tube. The anode is positively charged, so it acts as a magnet and pulls those negatively charged electrons toward it. Embedded in the anode is a metal disk, usually made of tungsten. When one of those incoming electrons collides with a tungsten atom, that atom loses one of its own electrons—so another electron in the atom jumps in to fill it.