Strange Science
Page 20
By that point—the 1920s—Tesla had become a bitter old recluse with little money to his name…or even much of a name. He was living alone in a hotel room, isolating himself from a world that, despite his unequaled genius and countless contributions, had shunned him. Feud after feud and watching others take credit for his work was too much to bear, so he found solace in feeding the birds.
But then one day, tragedy struck: Tesla found his favorite pigeon with a broken wing and leg. He rushed her back to his room and spent weeks nursing her back to health. He even built a special harness for her to sleep in without hurting her wing. After the bird healed, she returned to the scientist’s hotel room often and even flew to him when he called her.
Sadly, the pigeon wasn’t long for this world. One evening she landed next to Tesla, who sensed that the bird was near death. The old scientist cared for her well into the night. And then something amazing happened: “Two powerful beams of light,” he later wrote, emanated from the pigeon’s eyes. “A powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.” Then she died.
Tesla could never explain what the light was, but he knew at that moment that he was done with science, so he hung up his lab coat for good. “As long as I had her,” he lamented, “there was a purpose to my life.”
HOW P2P WORKS
•Peer-to-peer file sharing, or simply P2P, refers to a specific type of Internet file-sharing network. It allows people with the appropriate programs to make their computers part of an entire file-sharing network, including its bandwidth (meaning how much data can be transferred) and storage capabilities. That means that as more people enter into a P2P network, they automatically increase the network’s ability to handle more information.
•This stands against the more conventional client/server systems in which a finite number of servers—computers that “serve” many users in varying ways—can become slower as more and more people use them. (If you have an e-mail account with Yahoo! or Google, for example, you’re the client, and you use their servers to send and receive e-mails.)
•The concept of a P2P system was actually part of how the early Internet worked: In 1969 ARPANET, the “Grandfather of the Internet,” connected computers at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in what was basically a P2P system students could use to access the different schools’ computers and files. Each computer was, therefore, both server and client.
STRANGE LAWSUIT
THE PLAINTIFF: Carl Sagan, world-famous astronomer
THE DEFENDANT: Apple Computer, Inc.
THE LAWSUIT: Late in 1993, computer designers at Apple codenamed a new computer model “Carl Sagan.” Traditionally, this is an honor—“You pick a name of someone you respect,” explained one employee. “And the code is only used while the computer is being developed. It never makes it out of the company.” Nonetheless, Sagan’s lawyers complained that the code was “an illegal usurpation of his name for commercial purposes” and demanded that it be changed. So Apple designers changed it to BHA. When Sagan heard that it stood for “Butt-Head Astronomer,” he sued, contending that “Butt-Head” is “defamatory on its face.”
THE VERDICT: Case dismissed.
Q: What is the strongest creature known to exist?
A: The gonorrhea bacterium (Neisseria gonorhoeae). It can pull 100,000 times its own weight.
ANATOMY OF A HICCUP
•A hiccup occurs when a stimulus causes an involuntary contraction of the diaphragm, the muscle separating the lungs from the abdomen. The contraction makes the sufferer take a quick breath, causing the glottis (located in the voice box) to close, which makes the “hic” sound.
•Most common causes: too much alcohol, spicy food, cold water, carbonated drinks, indigestion, or asthma. They can also be caused by liver or kidney problems, abdominal surgery, or a brain tumor.
•Fetuses hiccup in the womb.
•Folk cures: eat peanut butter, eat wasabi, drink vinegar, eat lingonberry jam, drink a glass of water while urinating.
•Unlike other body reflexes (coughs, sneezes, vomiting), hiccups serve no useful purpose.
•The word “hiccup” may come from the French hocquet, which was used to describe the sound of a hiccup. The earliest known version in English is hicket, dating from the 1500s.
•Hiccup lore: In ancient Greece, a bad case of the hiccups meant an enemy was talking about you. To get rid of them one had to guess the enemy’s name. The Scots thought holding your left thumb (or your chin) with your right hand while listening to someone singing a hymn would stop the hiccups.
•Some forms of encephalitis (swelling of the brain) can cause hiccuping. During the encephalitis pandemics of the 1920s, several cities reported cases of mass hiccuping.
•Technical term for hiccups: a diaphragmatic spasm, or singultus.
“Scientific” Theory:
HOW TO BUILD A
SCORPION
For thousands of years, people believed that living things could grow out of nonliving things. Aristotle, for example, believed that oysters grew out of slime, and eels out of mud. Known as spontaneous generation, this was treated as fact for ages—and even persisted until fairly modern times. In the 17th century, for example, Flemish chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont, one of the most respected scientists of any era (he was the first to show that air was composed of different substances, and even coined the word “gas”), believed that you could create animals by following simple recipes. Van Helmont’s notes, for example, contain a recipe for making mice: Put some wheat on a dirty cloth inside an open container, let it sit for 21 days and—voilà!—mice will be created. Another: Put some basil between two bricks in sunlight. Then…scorpions. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that scientific progress finally saw spontaneous generation spontaneously combusted for good.
More Pop (Culture) Science
YOU CAN HEAR ME NOW
Scientists are hard at work making a universal translator a reality. Microsoft’s Skype Translator provides real-time translation between languages as people speak, and went live in 2016. The app was demonstrated at a conference in 2014: An English-speaking man in California chatted with a German-speaking colleague via Skype, with verbal and textlike translations appearing on-screen. The app still has some bugs to work out (it is Microsoft, after all), but expect universal translators to be a common sight before the end of the decade.
BLAST ’EM!
Dr. Evil (from the Austin Powers movies) had one simple request: “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.” Now his dream is a reality (minus the sharks). In 2014 the U.S. Navy demonstrated its LaWS (Laser Weapons System). The prototype—installed on the USS Ponce—has a targeting, tracking, and firing system that is operated via a “video game–like controller.” According to an ominous military press release, the weapons officer “manages the laser’s power to accomplish a range of effects against a threat, from disabling to complete destruction.” (Add maniacal laughter here.)
“You want to have consistent and
uniform muscle development across
all of your muscles? It can’t be
done. It’s just a fact of life. You just
have to accept inconsistent muscle
development as an unalterable
condition of weight training.”
—COMMENT TO ARTHUR JONES
(INVENTOR OF NAUTILUS EXERCISE EQUIPMENT)
AMAZING AMBER
Amber has been valued as a precious gem since ancient times, but today jewelers have to fight off paleontologists to get their hands on these precious gems. Because of how it is formed, amber droplets can hold a wealth of information for paleontologists. Amber starts out as tree resin; when exposed to the air, tree resin usually dries out and crumbles. If the resin is protected from oxygen (like if it its buried under clay and silt), it will, over millions of years, fossilize into amber.
Before it hardens, the s
ticky resin sometimes traps bits from its environment. Feathers, animal hairs, plants, and insects become fossilized along with the resin. Called inclusions, these remnants of ancient life, so fragile that they might not leave a fossil trace, are perfectly preserved inside bulbs of amber.
Fast-forward to the 1800s, when clay was mined in Sayreville, New Jersey. Large pits were dug to harvest the clay, and amber was found. But serious interest in Sayreville’s amber didn’t take off until the early 1990s, when a fossil hunter dug into an abandoned pit and discovered amber that held an insect.
While New Jersey doesn’t have the largest deposits of amber in the United States, it has the only substantial North American deposits that date back to the Cretaceous period (65–135 million years ago). At that time, dinosaurs were still around, and flowering plants and modern insects began to emerge. Sayreville’s amber and its inclusions contain perfectly preserved specimens of life from the Cretaceous. Paleontologists have found New Jersey amber with inclusions that date back as far as 95 million years, and discovered more than 100 species of insects and plants trapped inside the petrified resin. Sayreville’s amber has housed the world’s oldest:
•Ant—the first proof that ants lived during the Cretaceous.
•Mosquito with a mouth tough enough to bite a dinosaur!
•Mushroom, Archaeomarasmius leggetti. It’s 90 to 94 million years old.
•Bee, Trigona prisca. It flew for the last time about 65 to 80 million years ago.
You Do WHAT in Your Car?
These unique inventions will allow you to
multitask while you drive.
INVENTION: Integrated Passenger Seat and Toilet apparatus (1988; patent no. 4,785,483)
INVENTOR: Paul H. Wise; Tucson, AZ
DETAILS: This inventor figured that when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, so he designed a way to conceal a toilet under a passenger seat with a swiveling chair. It includes a built-in privacy curtain, a foot pedal flush system, a holding tank beneath the car, and an electric water pump.
INVENTION: Flushable Vehicle Spittoon (1991; patent no. 4,989,275)
INVENTOR: Dan L. Fain; Chancellor, AL
DETAILS: Some drivers love to chew tobacco or munch sunflower seeds as they head down the road—but there’s always the problem of where to spit. The Flushable Vehicle Spittoon attaches by Velcro to your door or dashboard, to be ready wherever and whenever you need it. Gravity drains the waste through a funnel into a tube that empties into the great outdoors. A separate line attaches to the windshield wiper fluid container, providing an extra flush should gravity fail to do the job. Unfortunate pedestrians walking nearby will just have to step lively to avoid being sprayed by any discharge.
Edison the Executioner
By the early 20th century, electricity was spreading to homes and businesses across America. The preferred method was AC, or alternating current, electricity being promoted by George Westinghouse. One guy not too happy about that: Thomas Edison, who came up with DC, or direct current, electricity. Edison staged publicity stunts to prove that his method was superior.
Edison went about promoting DC power, and showing that it was safe and effective, in a bizarre way—he’d use AC power to publicly electrocute animals. Edison killed cats, horses, an orangutan, and once helped the state of New York execute a convicted ax murderer. Did Edison prove once and for all the greatness of DC power by using it to kill a slew of powerful beasts? Not exactly—AC remained the industry standard.
BALLOON
BOMBS AWAAAY!
On May 5, 1945, a group of picnickers in Oregon fell victim to one of the oddest weapons used in World War II. The party found a 32-foot balloon in the woods. When they tried to move it, it exploded, killing six of them—the only fatalities of World War II to occur on American soil. In 1944, feeling intense pressure from American air raids, Japan came up with a seemingly brilliant way of striking back. Their planes couldn’t fly all the way to the States, so they started sending balloons made of rubberized silk, each carrying an explosive device. The balloons were supposed to ride high-altitude winds across the Pacific and come down to wreak havoc on the American heartland. The U.S. Air Force estimates that Japan launched 9,000 weaponized balloons between November 1944 and April 1945. About 1,000 of those actually made it to the United States, but they inflicted only minor damage. Designed to be a weapon of mass terror, Japan’s balloon bomb campaign was rather ineffective. Had the Japanese added “germ bombs” to their balloons, casualties might have been immense. It’s likely that they balked at such a step for fear the United States would retaliate with their own germ weapons.
Rubin’s Cubed
Vera Rubin, the astronomer whose work provided the first real evidence of dark matter (see page 89), was one of the few bright female stars in a male-dominated field. As she found this anomaly quite strange, she spent much of her life advocating for female scientists until her death in 2016. Along the way, she came up with “Three Basic Assumptions.” Here they are:
1.There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.
2.Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.
3.We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.
Proving that progress does happen, in 2001, Princeton University (which Rubin was unable to attend because of her gender) appointed Shirley M. Tilghman as the first woman president in the school’s 255-year history.
LEECH THERAPY
Leeches are worms that live in freshwater and latch onto victims to suck up their blood. When these creatures bite, they secrete an anticoagulant called hirudin that prevents the victim’s blood from clotting. That makes it easier for the leeches to feed. After being bitten by a leech, a person can bleed for hours. For thousands of years, doctors used leeches for bloodletting. They thought bloodletting could cure everything from headaches to hemorrhoids. By the mid-1800s, it became clear that bloodletting didn’t work, and leeches went down in history as a medical mistake.
RETURN OF THE LEECHES: In the 1980s, leeches made a comeback. Plastic surgeon Joseph Upton had reattached the severed ear of a five-year-old boy—an amazing medical feat at the time—but the tissues in the ear were dying. Upton rounded up some leeches, attached them to the boy’s ear… and it healed. Why? When a body part is reattached, blood may pool and clot, blocking circulation. Leeches suck up the extra blood, which prevents swelling. Their saliva releases chemicals that numb pain, fight infection, and calm inflammation. The fresh blood that flows to the damaged tissue helps it to heal and to produce new growth.
PURPLE TO THE
PEOPLE
In 1856 an 18-year-old chemist named Sir William Henry Perkin was trying to create a new medicine for malaria. When he mixed together several chemicals, he found not a cure…but an unusually beautiful purple dye. Up until that point, purple dye was acquired through costly, drawn-out processes—it was extracted from animals (see page 135). Fabrics made from these dyes were available only to the rich. Perkin’s family saw the commercial potential for his accidental discovery. They named the dye mauveine, or mauve. Within a year they opened their first dye factory, bringing inexpensive and easy-to-make purple fabric to regular people like us.
URINE GOOD HANDS
Dr. Savely Yurkovsky of Chappaqua, New York, says he knows a cure for the deadly disease SARS. Victims must collect some of their own infected saliva, mucus, and urine, mix it with a little water, and drink it. The potion, Yurkovsky says in his book, Biological, Chemical and Nuclear Warfare: Protecting Yourself And Your Loved Ones, will trigger the immune system to go after the disease. Other revelations in Yurkovsky’s book: “Poison can be your best friend,” “Carcinogens can protect you against cancer,” and “Toxic chemicals can extend lifespan and enhance immunity.”
In 2014 Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed God* for his podcast.
*or, at least, the person whos
e twitter handle is @TheTweetofGod
Genius School
There’s a school in New Jersey that has no classes, no tests, no degree programs, and…it’s free. The catch? You have to be a genius to get in. The school was started in 1930 by noted educator Dr. Abraham Flexner. He wanted to give genius types a place to lose themselves in the world of ideas, a place where they would not have to worry about things like cooking or cleaning. The school is called the Institute for Advanced Study, and it’s located at 1 Einstein Drive in Princeton. At first, it was just a school for mathematics. Later other departments were added: Historical Studies, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.
The geniuses invited to stretch their brains at IAS have included Albert Einstein, John von Neumann (father of game theory), J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb), Kurt Gödel (called “the most important logician of our times”), and Hetty Goldman (archaeologist and the first female genius at IAS).
RANDOM ORIGIN:
Organ Transplants
On June 17, 1950, an Illinois surgeon named Dr. Richard Lawler removed a kidney from a donor who’d been declared brain dead moments earlier and transplanted it into a 49-year-old woman named Ruth Tucker. Kidney dialysis had only recently been invented and was not yet widely available; for most people, failing kidneys were still a death sentence. A transplant wasn’t very promising either—doctors still hadn’t figured out how to stop the human body from rejecting transplanted organs. Lawler went ahead with the surgery anyway. The transplanted kidney did fail several months after the surgery, but not before taking strain off of Tucker’s remaining kidney, which began functioning normally again. Tucker lived another five years before dying of a heart complication; Dr. Lawler never performed another transplant. “I just wanted to get it started,” he explained years later. (The first successful organ transplant, between identical twins for whom rejection was not an issue, followed in 1954.)