Strange Science
Page 12
Snowboarders also take advantage of the forces of friction, gravity, acceleration, and momentum. A board speeds downhill pulled, of course, by gravity, but it also melts the snow as it goes, so that it actually zips along on a film of water.
Like all other types of board riders, snowboarders position their critical mass and exploit the board’s rotational motion to stay balanced. One side of the board will have more contact with the snow than the other. A rider keeps his center of gravity over whichever edge of the board is in contact with the snow (the riding edge). To end a ride, a snowboarder turns uphill so that the force of friction and the force of gravity drag on the momentum and slow the board to a stop.
Schrödinger Simplified
If you happen to find yourself in a conversation about quantum theory, chances are that Schrödinger’s cat will pop up…which is ironic because its original intention was to illustrate just how absurd quantum theory is.
In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger and fellow Austrian physicist Albert Einstein were discussing quantum superposition, the theory that one subatomic particle can exist in two places at the same time (see page 172 for more). That’s when Schrödinger came up with his famous “thought experiment.” It goes like this: if you seal a cat inside a box along with one vial of hydrocyanic acid, there is a 50–50 chance that an atom will decay. If it does, the acid will release a radioactive substance that will kill the cat.*
Quantum theory says that, because there is no way to know if the cat is alive or dead inside the sealed box, then it is both alive and dead—existing in two states at the same time. But the only way to know the true state of the cat is to open the box. This is called the observer’s paradox: “The observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made.” Schrödinger was trying to point out that scientists can say all they want that one particle can exist in two places at once, but as soon as you observe it, it’s only ever one particle.
However, by the 1950s, the quantum superposition theory had gained such traction in the scientific world that Schrödinger himself wanted to “disown the cat.” But his friend Einstein wrote him a letter of reassurance:
You are the only contemporary physicist…who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established…Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.
* No cats were harmed in the writing of this article.
“That virus
is a pussycat.”
—DR. PETER DUESBERG,
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY PROFESSOR
AT U.C. BERKELEY, 1988
(commenting on HIV)
WHIPWORM THERAPY
Whipworms are a type of helminth—a worm classified as a parasite. Long, thin, and pale, whipworms thrive in places that lack proper sanitation. Their microscopic eggs are accidentally eaten, and then…they hatch. The newly hatched worms migrate to the intestines, attach themselves to the walls, and chow down. Whipworms can cause everything from intense stomach distress to retardation in children. In developed countries, better sanitation has largely wiped out whipworms.
RETURN OF THE WHIPWORM: However, whipworms may now be needed to treat disease. Some doctors now believe it’s possible for people to be too clean. (Huh?) Our immune systems are made to attack outside invaders like bacteria, germs, and parasites. But when invaders are in short supply, a person’s immune system can misfire. The result: an autoimmune disease, which happens when the immune system attacks a person’s own body instead of an invader. People infected with whipworms rarely suffer from autoimmune diseases. Doctors wanted to see if patients’ immune systems could be reeducated to attack whipworms and leave the body alone. Patients slurped down a dose of several hundred whipworm eggs in salty liquid and then let them grow. The little wrigglers did such a good job they may soon be available by prescription.
The Robots Take Over
DROPLET takes the guesswork out of watering your plants; this small robot attaches to a watering hose and is connected to the Internet, so it will hold off on watering if there is a good chance of rain in the forecast. It can be programmed to supply different amounts of water to each plant, so you won’t have to rely on your absentminded neighbors to water your plants when you’re on vacation.
KILOBOTS are the size of a quarter, which doesn’t sound like much—but imagine 1,024 tiny robots working together in a swarm like an army of ants, forming various shapes and adjusting on the fly to explore dangerous places or carry out complex tasks. Developed at Harvard, these tiny bots could one day be deployed for rescue missions…or the technology could grow exponentially and one day we’ll see millions of kilobots rise up against their human oppressors.
EARTH’S
CARETAKERS
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Environment Agency in Britain invited a blue-ribbon panel of ecologists to list its 100 greatest “eco-heroes” of all time. Rachel Carson, American scientist and author of Silent Spring (1962), was number one on the list. The panelists dubbed her “the patron saint of the green movement.” Also included were the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle; Wangari Maathai, known as Africa’s “tree woman”; Siddartha Gautama Buddha, a meditation master who lived in the sixth century B.C.; and St. Francis of Assisi, Catholic patron saint of animals and ecology.
Yuk, yuk
Q: What does a subatomic duck say?
A: “Quark!”
Albert B.,
The Lab Rat
John B. Watson was a behavioral psychologist at Johns Hopkins University when he performed an experiment that still has people guessing at the results. Watson believed that people are the way they are based solely on their environment. In his view, environmental conditioning is what makes a baby brave or fearful; it can also influence him or her to grow up to become virtually anything from a biologist to a burglar, regardless of natural talents or tendencies. In 1920 he set out to prove his theory. The unfortunate subject of his experiment was a nine-month-old known only as “Little Albert” or “Albert B.”
Albert showed no fear when he was allowed to play with a white rat—until Watson’s experiment. Every time Albert touched the rat, Watson or his assistant made a loud clanging noise that scared the baby and made him cry. Albert learned to associate the scary sound with the rat, and eventually, even without the sound, he was afraid of the rat. This fear carried over to any furry creature that reminded Albert of the rat. Success! Watson had just conditioned a phobic toddler.
It’s still not known if Albert’s mother (a single woman employed as a wet nurse) knew every single detail of the experiment, or where she took her little boy, but take him away she did—before Watson could reverse his conditioning—if he planned to.
Watson’s findings created an uproar: How could he have preyed on an innocent child—and would Little Albert ever recover from his ordeal? Decades later, researchers discovered that Little Albert’s real name was Douglas Merritte. But we’ll never know if Douglas continued to live in fear of furry animals—he died of an illness when he was six years old.
VANISHING
LAKES MYSTERY
In 2015 oceanographers from MIT announced that they had solved a decades-old mystery: How did the large lakes that form during the summer on top of Greenland’s ice sheets vanish in less than 24 hours? And where did the water go?
•The appearance of summertime lakes, known as supraglacial or meltwater lakes, has increased in recent years, as has their size. Thousands of them, some covering up to a few square miles, show up each summer. And many of them do the baffling disappearing act. Where could so much water go so quickly?
•The answer came when oceanographers placed seismic instruments around Greenland’s North Lake in 2011, 2012, and 2013…and waited. The lake covered 2.2 square mi
les and was as deep as 40 feet in some places, giving it in the neighborhood of 11.6 billion gallons of water. The team was able to record 90% of the lake’s water disappearing in 90 minutes. It had drained through massive cracks that the weight of the water had made in the ice. That explanation had been considered before, but such cracks would have to reach the bottom of the ice sheet to allow all the water to disappear, and that had been deemed impossible. It wasn’t. The cracks opened up to a depth of more than 3,200 feet—all the way to where the glacier sits on bedrock and slowly makes its way to the ocean. That allowed the millions of tons of water to drain almost at once—with more force than Niagara Falls—to the bedrock underneath the ice, which actually caused a huge section of the ice to rise some 20 feet as the water surged beneath it.
“All of the biggest technological inventions created by man—the airplane, the automobile, the computer—says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.”
–Mark Kennedy (politician)
EXPENDABLE ORGANS
TONSILS
Every year about 530,000 kids under the age of 15 have their tonsils removed. It’s one of the most common organ removals, and probably the oldest. A Hindi medical guide from about 1000 B.C. holds the first known instructions for doing a tonsillectomy: “When troublesome, they are to be seized between the blades of a forceps, drawn forward, and with a semicircular knife, a third of the swelled part is removed.” Roman doctors in the first century A.D. also debated whether full or partial removal was best.
WHAT THEY’RE FOR: Tonsils are specialized lymph nodes that help filter bacteria and viruses out of the blood.
WHY WE CRN DO WITHOUT THEM: When they get infected, tonsils can cause sore throats and apnea, but if they’re removed, other lymph nodes take over their function.
SIDE EFFECTS OF REMOVAL? About one in 15,000 patients dies from bleeding, reactions to anesthesia, or airway obstruction. In a few patients, throat problems get worse. A review of 7,765 research papers in 2009 found that the positive effects in kids were generally modest and short-lived.
ADENOIDS
In a way, the adenoids are sort of the tonsils of the nose—they rest in the base of the nose and trap germs. When infected, they can impair nose breathing and increase chronic infections and earaches. They are often removed at the same time as the tonsils.
WHAT THEY’RE FOR: Filtering bacteria and viruses.
WHY WE CRN DO WITHOUT THEM: For babies under one year of age, the adenoids are an important part of the immune system, but after that age, they become increasingly irrelevant.
SIDE EFFECTS OF REMOVAL? See tonsillectomy on the previous page. Recent studies have also called into question the effectiveness of adenoid removal for preventing respiratory infections. Even for the condition most helped by an adenoidectomy—snoring and near-suffocation caused by sleep apnea—some patients saw no improvement afterward.
MYTHUNDERSTANDINGS
MORSE CODE
MYTH: The dot-dash code for telegraphs is named after the code’s creator, Samuel Morse.
THE TRUTH: The code is named after Morse—actually, he named it after himself. But many historians think his collaborator, Alfred Vail, actually created it. Morse’s original notes from 1832 suggest that he was planning a code that assigned each word in the dictionary a number. But six years later, someone came up with an alphabet code, using dots and dashes to signify letters. An apprentice, William Baxter, said it was Vail’s innovation. But Morse insisted he’d done it, and history books simply take his word for it.
Once in a great while, people are forced to seek cover from a storm that drops not just rain, but…live animals. It happened in England in the 1800s, when jellyfish fell from the clouds. In the 1930s, frogs followed suit. In 2010 a remote town in Australia experienced showers of hundreds of spangled perch two days in a row. The kicker? The town was more than 200 miles from the nearest body of water. This phenomenon is truly a mystery. Some scientists theorize that massive evaporation, a strong updraft, or a tornado picks up aquatic life along with water, blows it 70,000 feet high, and carries it many miles before the winds die down and the animals fall with the rain. However, this doesn’t explain the situations in which only a single species rains at once (like the perch in Australia), instead of a mixture of different animals. People in Honduras have a legend to explain this phenomena.
Every summer in Yoro, Honduras, fish rain down during thunderstorms. The Hondurans believe it’s an answered prayer. Long ago, a Catholic priest prayed for food for the starving natives. Supposedly, that’s when the fish rains began. Today, some of the fish fall into waterways and swim off. What do villagers do with the rest? Cook and eat them, of course. Waste not, want not.
Pop (Culture) Science
These science facts sound like they’re straight out of a movie…
A WALKING TANK
Looking like something that Tony “Iron Man” Stark might wear, the TALOS, or Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, is the U.S. Army’s newest toy. The suit’s liquid body armor will transform into a hard surface when struck by a bullet or shrapnel. It will even have sensors that will monitor the soldier’s vital signs. The army hopes to have the suits in the field by 2018. (No flight capabilities are included. Yet.)
FACE THE FUTURE
Remember that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise walks into a store and a computer knows who he is? That’s a real thing now. Retail giant Tesco has installed facial recognition scanners at its gas stations around the UK: When a customer pays, his or her face is scanned to identify age and gender. Then an advertisement plays, specifically targeted to sell to the customer’s demographic. Expect to see the scanners everywhere in the near future…unless they see you first.
Green City:
VANCOUVER
POPULATION: 630,000
HOW GREEN IS IT? Often called the greenest city in Canada, Vancouver has more than 200 parks in a region that’s surrounded by spectacular beaches, forests, and mountains. The city leads the world in the production of hydropower, which supplies 90 percent of its electricity. And one of Vancouver’s most famous innovations is the use of solar-powered trash-compactor bins on public sidewalks: The bins can hold five times the amount of conventional trash cans, so they need to be emptied only once a week instead of every night, which saves on the need to use the city’s gas-powered fleet of garbage trucks.
Vancouver has also been adding new streetcar lines and bike lanes, and it has constructed nearly 250 miles of “greenways,” special corridors for pedestrians and cyclists that connect parks, nature reserves, historic sites, neighborhoods, and shopping areas. And 40 percent of commuter and tourist day trips in Vancouver involve walking, biking, or using public transportation.
DOCTOR STRANGE, LOVE
BUSTED
A German plastic surgeon cheated out of payments from four women upon whom he had performed breast enhancement surgery took his complaint to police…along with photos of the women’s enhanced breasts. “They registered under fake names,” Dr. Michael Koenig told reporters. “And then after the operations, they just ran away.” Each surgery cost nearly $14,000. Police made posters of the enhanced-breast photos and distributed them to the public; the German newspaper Bild even printed one of the shots. “It’s probably the most unusual wanted poster ever,” Bild wrote.
GOTTA HAND IT TO HER
A doctor in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was arrested in September 2006 after stealing a hand from a cadaver and giving it to an exotic dancer as a gift. She kept it in a jar of formaldehyde. It was discovered when police were called to the woman’s apartment because of a suicidal roommate. Friends said she had named the hand “Freddy.”
“There is practically no
chance communications space
satellites will be used to provide
better telephone, telegraph,
television, or radio service
inside the United States.”
—T. A. M. CRAVEN, FCC COMMI
SSIONER, 1961
THE FIVE MAJOR
EXTINCTIONS
The National Wildlife Federation estimates that nearly 30,000 species per year—about three per hour—go extinct, many from man-made causes. Many biologists believe this could be the “sixth extinction,” the latest in a series of mass disappearances of species and ecosystems. Here are the first five in Earth’s past:
1. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction (440 million years ago) was a result of climate change caused by sudden global cooling, particularly in the tropical oceans. There was little or no life on land at the time, but nearly 85 percent of marine species disappeared.
2. The Late Devonian Extinction (370 million years ago) may have been caused by asteroid collisions that triggered volcanic lava floods, or environmental changes due to tectonic plate movements in the early formation of the continents. Another theory: the “Devonian Plant Hypothesis,” which claims that the expansion of plant life on land caused the death of 75 percent of animal species in the oceans.
3. The Permian-Triassic Extinction (250 million years ago) was the deadliest mass extinction. Paleontologists once believed that this took millions of years to occur, but many now think it took between 8,000 and 100,000 years. The impact and explosion of a large meteor might have accelerated the climate change that was already taking place as a result of greenhouse gases released by volcanic lava floods and tectonic plate shifts. In all, 95 percent of existing species were wiped out.