Strange Science
Page 14
Verne’s next novel, From the Earth to the Moon, was a pioneering work of both science fiction and foresight. The plot: three wealthy men finance a trip to the Moon. Their ship was launched from a cannon, so Verne got that part wrong, but he was close to the mark on other details—including the rocket’s escape velocity, the Florida launch site (where NASA missions would take place a century later), the three-man crew, and the splashdown in the Pacific. Even more uncanny, Verne’s Moon trip cost $5,446,675 ($12 billion in 1969 money). Cost of the actual Moon mission: $14.4 billion.
STRANGE MEDICAL CONDITION
SUBJECT: A 19-year-old Iranian man
CONDITION: “Hairy eyeball”
STORY: In 2013 researchers from Iran’s Tabriz University of Medical Sciences reported that they had treated a man who was born with a tiny whitish growth on his right eyeball. For many years it hadn’t bothered him, nor had it affected his vision. But it had grown in size, reaching about a quarter-inch in diameter, and it had started to become annoying—especially after several black hairs started to grow out of it. Luckily, those hairs actually helped doctors diagnose the growth: it was a limbal dermoid, a very rare type of tumor that has the bizarre characteristics of being able to grow things like hair, cartilage, bone—and even sweat glands. More good luck: such tumors aren’t cancerous. Doctors successfully removed the tumor from the man’s eye without causing any lasting damage, and the man resumed his life…minus one hairy eyeball.
FROZEN IN TIME
In Petrified Forest National Park, prehistoric fossils and remnants of ancient civilizations reveal what life was like thousands—even millions—of years ago.
In prehistoric times, the area of northeastern Arizona where the Petrified Forest is located was closer to the equator and was not a desert. It was a floodplain, swollen with streams and rivers. Cycads, horsetails, and ferns dominated the landscape. Coniferous trees were plentiful and large—as much as 200 feet tall and nine feet in diameter. When those trees fell, rivers carried them away, and before they could decompose, some were buried under clay, mud, sand, and volcanic ash. Gradually, minerals in the water leeched into the wood, filling the cracks and crevices of the logs and forming the vivid fossilized logs we have today. Different minerals, of course, made different colors: quartz produced white; manganese oxides made blue, purple, black, and brown; and iron oxides turned the wood yellow, orange, and red. As the trees fossilized over hundreds of millions of years, they turned to stone, and today, many of the logs lie where they fell eons ago. They’re better preserved and more colorful than those found anywhere else in the world.
Petrified Forest also includes part of the Painted Desert. It’s 7,500 square miles of cliffs, hills, and hardened sand dunes that are “painted” with bright red, green, and yellow bands; many of the rocks also become red, purple, or blue at sunrise and sunset. The colors are the result of mineral deposits left behind by fossilized trees and animals and shaped by wind and water. As the cliffs erode, the fossils and minerals are exposed, changing the desert’s colors. Southwest historian Charles F. Lummis described the Petrified Forest as “an enchanted spot…to stand on the glass of a gigantic kaleidoscope, over whose sparkling surface the sun breaks in infinite rainbows.”
NAMED AFTER GAME OF THRONES
This HBO series has become so popular that scientists are naming new species after its characters. A sea slug has been named Tritonia khaleesi in honor of the Khaleesi (Daenerys Targaryen), and two species of ants are Pheidole viserion and Pheidole drogon after two of her dragons, Viserion and Drogon.
MORE SCIENCE BEHIND TOYS
PLAY-DOH
Although Hasbro won’t reveal its exact recipe, Play-Doh is essentially wheat starch and warm water with some lubricants and preservatives. The water makes the wheat starch swell and become supple, giving the Play-Doh its moldable quality. (That’s why it gets hard and crumbly if left out: The water evaporates, and the wheat starch shrinks and loses its flexibility.)
SUPER BALL
Polybutadiene is a synthetic rubber that’s brittle when cold and goo when hot, neither of which is useful in a ball. But add sulfur, cook the rubber at 330°F while adding 3,500 pounds of pressure per square inch, and it becomes super-bouncy. Size matters: The Super Ball must be molded to about two inches in diameter, or the heat and pressure process won’t work.
LEGO BRICKS
Giant hoses suck different-colored plastic granules from trucks into three-story-high metal silos. They’re fed into molding machines, heated to 450°F, then fed into hollow LEGO brick molds. The machine applies hundreds of tons of pressure to make sure each brick has the perfect shape. Then the bricks are cooled and ejected. But you have to put them together.
DNAliens
Ever notice how most of the aliens on Star Trek are humanoids? The writers eventually came up with a reason for this (other than budgetary constraints) in a 1993 episode of The Next Generation called “The Chase” about an ancient alien race that seeded hundreds of worlds with humanoid DNA. And the proof is hidden inside our own DNA. Pure sci-fi, right?
In 2013 two researchers from Kazakhstan, Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, reported that they discovered something unusual while studying DNA: a “mathematical and semantic message” deeply embedded in our genes. Could it have been placed there by aliens who seeded our world? “This code,” the researchers wrote, “is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature.” They call their finding a “biological SETI” (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and maintain that once our genome is fully charted, we may discover that the proof that there is intelligent life elsewhere may have been hidden inside us this whole time.
HANGOVER “REMEDIES”
You can’t cure a hangover once you’ve got one—it’s that simple. These traditional remedies don’t work, but some are so disgusting that at least they’ll take your mind off of being hungover.
•Swallow six raw owl eggs in quick succession.
•“Hangover Breakfast”—black coffee, two raw eggs, tomato juice, and an aspirin.
•Jackrabbit tea: Take some jackrabbit droppings; add hot water to make strong tea. Strain the tea, then drink. Repeat every 30 minutes until the headache goes away or you run out of droppings.
•Whip yourself until you bleed profusely. The loss of blood won’t cure the hangover, but it will (1) make you groggy, and (2) serve as a distraction.
•Drink the sugary juice from a can of peaches.
•Add a teaspoon of soot to a glass of warm milk (hardwood soot is best). Drink.
•Spike some Pepto-Bismol with Coca-Cola syrup from the drugstore, or with a can of day-old Coke, and down the hatch it goes.
SAFECRACKING
SCIENCE
A safe really can be opened using an ordinary stethoscope, but it’s much more tedious than it’s usually depicted in movies. Modern safes are much quieter than older models, so stethoscopes have given way to electronic listening devices.
So what are safecrackers listening for? If you thought they were trying to hear the tumblers tumbling, think again.
•There’s a piece of hardware in the wheel pack called a drive cam. It, like the wheels in the wheel pack, has a notch in it.
•By turning the dial on the safe, the safecracker can find the location of this notch by listening for two clicks. The first click indicates where the notch begins, and the second indicates where it ends. Let’s say the dial is numbered from 0 to 99: The two clicks might be heard at number 15 and 25 on the dial.
•When the dial is turned a certain way, the spacing between the two clicks will shrink ever so slightly, say from 15 and 25 on the dial to 18 and 22. But—and this is important—the space between the clicks shrinks only when you begin the procedure from certain numbers on the dial. The trick is finding out which numbers, because each one is a number in the combination.
•The only way to find all the numbers in the combinati
on is by repeating the procedure over and over again, using every third number on the dial as a starting point. If the dial is numbered from 0 to 99, for example, you start the procedure at 0, then 3, 6, and so on, until you reach 99 on the dial (that’s 33 times in all).
•This trick doesn’t reveal the order of the numbers in the combination, but in a three-number combination there are only six possibilities. Once the numbers are revealed, opening the safe is easy.
5 Elements That Are Liquid
at Room Temperature
1.Mercury
2.Caesium
3.Francium
4.Gallium
5.Bromine
Canada’s Oddest Museum?
Have you ever dreamed of seeing a gopher dressed as a Mountie? Or maybe you’ve fantasized about gophers working as hairdressers and styling each other’s locks. How about a gopher dressed as a preacher or an angel gopher with a halo and harp floating in the air above his head? At the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta (just north of Calgary), these visions are all on display for you to behold and admire. About the size of a garage, the museum displays 44 dioramas with 71 stuffed gophers (really Richardson’s ground squirrels, to be accurate) elaborately dressed as townspeople doing a wide range of activities, including bank officer, robber, and firefighter. Don’t miss: The gopher smith hammering at his anvil; the clown gopher clutching his balloons; a ’50s-style female gopher showing off her poodle skirt while holding hands with a young male gopher in a leather jacket.
Green City:
REYKJAVIK
POPULATION: 130,000
HOW GREEN IS IT? In the 1970s Iceland relied on imported coal for 75 percent of its energy. Today all of its electricity is produced from hydroelectric and geothermal power. The hydropower source is flowing water from melting ice that turns turbines to make electricity. The geothermal power uses the heat and steam of Iceland’s volcanoes to do the same. The only fossil fuel the city uses is for its cars and fishing fleets.
But Icelanders even consider that to be too much: To get down to zero use of fossil fuels, Reykjavik is working on a changeover to cars and ships fueled mainly by electricity and hydrogen. In 2003 a hydrogen filling station opened in Reykjavik to service hydrogen-powered public buses. By the mid-21st century, Iceland plans to have most of its fishing fleet running on hydrogen and all of its cars and buses powered by alternative fuels.
We’re gonna need a bigger spoon:
It’s estimated that a teaspoonful of a neutron star
would weigh upwards of six billion tons.
A “Scientific” Documentary
In the feature-length film Ingagi (1930), an intrepid British explorer in the jungles of the Congo comes across a tribe of people who sacrifice their “naked ape-women” to gorillas. And the “naked ape-women” have sex with said gorillas. The film even showed a child with tufts of curly hair taped to his body who was supposed to be the progeny of such an encounter. Ingagi was marketed as a straight documentary by RKO Radio Pictures, one of the most respected film companies of the day, and it smashed several box office records for a few months before it was revealed as a fraud and theaters stopped showing it. One scene showed the discovery an entirely new species of animal called a “tortadillo.” It was later revealed to be a turtle with wings, scales, and a tail glued to it.
The film was a precursor to RKO’s megasmash hit of 1933—King Kong. And it was one of the first documentaries with sound—which was just becoming common in films—in the form of the now ubiquitous documentary narrator.
RUBIK’S CUBE
ROBOT
The Rubik’s Cube became an international phenomenon in the 1980s, but it hasn’t entirely faded. “Speedcubing” became so popular that the World Cube Association was founded in 2003 in order to stage competitions and document speed records. But our puny human hands can’t come close to competing with robots that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than a second.
•The first of these robots is an unnamed creation that requires a specially built Rubik’s Cube for scanning and spinning purposes. First, the cube is scanned on all six sides via camera. Then the custom cube is put into a glass-and-steel contraption that spins the cube into its finished stage. While the spinning itself takes less than a second, the scanning takes much longer.
•Designer Mike Dobson created a robot that analyzes and solves the cube in about three seconds. The CubeStormer 3, made almost entirely out of Legos, uses a smartphone to analyze and solve the cube at the same time.
THE GRIFTERS
In 1582 scientist John Dee (see page 129) started a partnership with Edward Kelley, a medium who claimed he could contact angels and spirits by gazing into a crystal ball. Kelley was also a failed lawyer who had been convicted for fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting. Kelley conned Dee into thinking he could help him in his quest to talk to the spirit world, and an unusual partnership was born.
Together, Kelley and Dee became the Siegfried and Roy of their day. Dee supplied the magical knowledge, while Kelley played the charismatic front man. They claimed they were able to contact angels, especially one divine being called Uriel, and they dubbed their system Enochian Magick, after the biblical character Enoch. They toured as far afield as Poland and Bohemia, performing for princes and kings. It was only when Kelley told Dee that Uriel recommended that they indulge in wife swapping that Dee recognized his colleague as a con artist. Their partnership ended in 1589, by which time Kelley had made a fortune and earned a knighthood. Dee, on the other hand, hadn’t made a penny.
Dee’s final years were spent in near-poverty and obscurity until he died in 1608. His contemporary William Shakespeare modeled the philosopher-magician character of Prospero in The Tempest on John Dee.
“This ‘telephone’ has too many
shortcomings to be seriously
considered as a means of
communication. The device is
inherently of no value to us.”
—WESTERN UNION INTERNAL MEMO, 1876
(after Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell
them the rights to the telephone)
MORE FRANKENFOODS
ARCTIC APPLES won’t turn brown. The apples, which are produced by Okanagan Specialty Fruits, have been bioengineered so that the enzyme that causes the browning is turned off. They’re currently being used by many fast-food companies, and are expected to hit retail stores in the near future.
ATLANTIC SALMON grow faster and larger than ever before. According to the watchdog group GreenAmerica, the fish are “engineered with a growth-hormone-regulating gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon and a growth promoter from an ocean pout [an eel-like fish] to make it grow to a larger size at a faster rate.”
CLONED BEEF. Has any of the milk or beef you’ve consumed come from the offspring of a cloned animal? According to Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ), “Food products from [cloned animals’] offspring are almost certainly in the food supply.” Are they safe? According to FSANZ, “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, European Food Safety Authority, and Japan Food Safety Commission…have concluded that food products from cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as food products from conventionally bred animals.”
PESTICIDE-RESISTANT WHEAT, developed by Monsanto and Bayer, also has GreenAmerica concerned because “GMOs focused on pest- and weed-resistance have started to fail, as the pests are adapting to GMOs and related chemicals, evolving into superbugs and superweeds.”
RAINBOW PAPAYAS. After the ringspot virus severely damaged Hawaii’s papaya crop in the 1990s, a plant pathologist named Dennis Gonsalves inserted the ringspot’s genetic material into the papayas to create a ringspot-resistant fruit. Good news: it worked. Bad news: the papaya pollen drifted away and contaminated all the other papayas, so if you want to buy an organic papaya grown in Hawaii, good luck.
“A potato can cross with a different strain of potato but, in 10 million years of evolution, it has never crossed with a chicken. Genetic enginee
ring shatters these natural species boundaries, with completely unpredictable results.”
—Michael Khoo (from a letter published in the Toronto Globe and Mail)
Mixed - Up
HeriTage
In 2006 Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies, produced and hosted a PBS documentary entitled African American Lives. Gates asked several prominent African Americans to submit to genealogical DNA testing to help trace their family trees. They all had interesting results.
Oprah Winfrey believed she was of Zulu descent (the Zulu people now reside in South Africa). She also believed she had no Native American or European ancestors. She was mostly wrong. The tests showed her to have 89% sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, 3% East Asian, and 0% European heritage. Regarding her sub-Saharan ancestors, Gates told her that she descends from the Kpella tribe in what is now the West African nation of Liberia; the Bamileke people, in modern-day Cameroon; and the Nkoya people in Zambia.
Comedian CHRIS TUCKER guessed he was descended from a tribe in modern-day Ghana. Wrong. His test showed 83% sub-Saharan African, 10% Native American, and 7% European descent. And the African link was to the Mbundu tribe in present-day Angola. Gates said the link was so strong that it was likely that a direct ancestor of Tucker’s had been taken into slavery in Angola sometime in the 1700s. (The show featured Tucker going to Angola and meeting with his distant relatives.)