MANIMALS!
PIGGY BLOODY PIGGY
Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program in Minnesota, performed human stem cell injections into fetal pigs, and now has a group of pigs that have pig blood cells and human blood cells running through their veins. But it gets weirder: Some of the blood cells are both. Their DNA contains both human and pig genes. Platt hopes the work might lead to pigs being raised for their human blood and organs, but there are several hurdles, including the fact that some pig viruses can be passed on to humans.
MORE HOLLYWOOD PHYSICS
FICTION: Falls from great heights are easy to walk away from.
SCIENCE: Stunt players seem to do it all the time, but falls from as “high” as three feet (like falling out of bed) can cause serious injuries. Just remember that the farther a body falls, the harder it lands.
FICTION: A spaceship needs to bank when turning to compensate for the effects of centrifugal force.
SCIENCE: In Earth’s atmosphere, aircraft have to bank to create a pressure difference on the two wings in order to produce the turning force. Despite what you’ve seen small spacecraft do in the Star Wars movies, the only forces necessary for them to change direction in the vacuum of space are the rockets that propel them.
FICTION: When a space station explodes, it makes a deafening noise.
SCIENCE: There’s no air in outer space to transmit sound waves, so those big explosions you hear in Star Wars are pure fiction.
FICTION: Laser beams are visible.
SCIENCE: Though the end point is visible, the beam itself is only visible when reflected by the fine particles in mist or smoke.
THE SCIENCE OF
SINGING SANDS
The first part of the story is on page 255.
Dunes that “sing” need a special recipe of sand, moisture, wind, and movement. In particular, the dunes must be created out of grains of sand that have been blown over long distances, making them unusually smooth and round. All the grains must be similar in size, and the dunes free of foreign particles. Humidity and moisture also affect the sound—too much moisture and the sand goes silent because the grains can’t move. But the dune must have some rainfall so that its inner grains stay a little damp.
When a dune creates sound, its outer layer of sand (which must be a few feet thick) is dry from the Sun, but its inner core can be wet. Wind then pushes sand grains to the top of the dune and they accumulate until the angle of the slope reaches a tipping point of about 35 degrees. That causes an avalanche of sand grains to fall, creating friction and producing the loud bass tone similar to one produced by a stringed instrument.
BRAINPUT
As modern drivers, we all know the feeling of wanting to pay attention to the road but getting distracted by equally important activities like watching cat videos on our cell phones or eating a cheeseburger. The solution? Brain probes and robots, of course. Scientists at MIT, Indiana University, and Tufts University are working on something called “Brainput” to help us multitask more safely and effectively, because let’s face it: We’re never going to learn to actually pay attention to what we’re doing.
The system works like this: You attach two probes to your forehead, and, using what is purportedly science but sounds an awful lot like diabolical voodoo, the probes sense when your attention is drifting and notify a robot to pitch in and help you out (e.g., your car drives itself for a minute so you can focus on licking a dollop of errant mustard off of the steering wheel). If the concept of robots reading your mind causes you to repeatedly scream and then run way, don’t worry just yet: The technology has only been tested in a very basic form, in which the robot helps the user navigate a maze. Brainput’s application in real-life situations, like the driving-while-texting-and-noshing mentioned above, is still but a distant dream/nightmare.
DR. YESTERYEAR
•Doctors in ancient India closed wounds with the pincers of giant ants.
•The world’s first recorded tonsillectomy was performed in the year 1000 B.C.
•Sixteenth-century French doctors prescribed chocolate as a treatment for venereal disease.
•Leprosy is the oldest documented infection—first described in Egypt in 1350 B.C.
•Among the “treasures” found in King Tut’s tomb: several vials of pimple cream.
•Acne treatment, circa A.D. 350: “wipe pimples with a cloth while watching a falling star.”
•In medieval Japan, dentists extracted teeth with their hands.
•The Hunza people of Kashmir (India and Pakistan) have a cancer rate of zero. Some scientists link it to the apricot seeds they eat.
•In the Middle Ages, Europeans “cured” muscle pains by drinking powdered gold.
•Doctors in the 1700s prescribed ladybugs as a cure for measles; they were to be ground up and eaten.
•Between 1873 and 1880, some U.S. doctors gave patients transfusions of milk instead of blood.
•During World War I, raw garlic juice was applied to wounds to prevent infection.
•People in ancient China would swing their arms to cure a headache.
BOMBING MARS
One method to quickly make Mars more Earthlike (and thus more hospitable to humans) was suggested by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin in his 1996 book The Case for Mars. The plan: astronauts would attach a nuclear thermal rocket engine to a 10-billion-ton asteroid (kind of like in the movie Armageddon). Controlled remotely from Earth, the asteroid would hit Mars with the force of 70 hydrogen bombs. The impact would raise the Martian temperature 3°F, which would melt a trillion tons of ice. This would add CO2 to the atmosphere, triggering the greenhouse effect and melting the caps even more. One asteroid-bomb per year over 50 years could make up to 25 percent of the Martian surface habitable (temperature-wise, anyway). And scientists could then send their algae rockets to the planet’s new seas.
Sadly, all those nukes would soak Mars in toxic radiation (so we’d better be sure there’s no life there), and humans would have to wear air tanks for hundreds of years anyway. But no matter how we get there, Zubrin writes, the time to begin the journey is now. “We need a central overriding purpose to drive our space program forward. At this point in history, that focus can only be the human exploration and settlement of Mars.”
Romancing
the Stone
Many gem scholars attribute the tradition of birthstones to the jeweled “breastplate of Aaron” described in the Bible. The breastplate was a ceremonial religious garment worn by Aaron, the brother of Moses; it was set with 12 gemstones representing the 12 tribes of Israel and perhaps, say folklorists, the 12 months of the year.
Around that same time, the Assyrians began assigning gemstones to each region of the zodiac according to a color system that they believed controlled its power. Each stone had its own distinct magical, protective, and curative qualities that corresponded with the attributes of the astrological sign. Over time the stones came to be associated more with calendar months than astrological signs.
The custom spread to other cultures—including Arabic, Jewish, Hindu, Polish, and Russian, each of which modified the list of birthstones. Over the centuries, other changes and substitutions were made: sometimes accidentally by scribes, sometimes by royalty who didn’t like their birthstones, and sometimes according to fashion and availability.
In 1912 the American National Association of Jewelers came up with the Traditional Birthstone List, a standardized list that combined contemporary trends with all the birthstone lists from the 15th to the 20th centuries. A few years later, it was revised and renamed the Modern Birthstone List. The association hoped the modern list would eliminate confusion among jewelers.
Did it work? Not entirely. The old lists didn’t go away, so there are still variations in jeweler’s lists. And those aren’t the only lists, either. There’s a Mystical Birthstone list that’s based on ancient Tibetan culture, an Ayurvedic list originating from the 1,000-year-old system of Indi
an medicine, a zodiac list, and a planetary list, to name just a few.
It takes an estimated 40,000 years for a photon to travel from the core of the Sun to its surface…and then only about 8 minutes to travel to Earth.
THE RAT-HEAD EXPERIMENT
In 1924 Carney Landis, a graduate psychology student at the University of Minnesota, designed an experiment to determine whether there is a basic underlying human facial expression for any given emotion. In the school’s lab, Landis drew black lines on the faces of several volunteers (fellow grad students) to more easily track the movements of their facial muscles. He then photographed their faces as he exposed them to stimuli meant to evoke specific emotional responses, including exposing them to the smell of ammonia, having them stick their hands into a bucket of live frogs, and having them watch pornographic films. Then came the final experiment: Landis gave each of the students (one at a time, with no one else present) a live rat and a large, sharp knife—and instructed each student to decapitate the rat. Two-thirds agreed to do it, and actually cut off the rats’ heads. The other third refused, so Landis decapitated the rats for them, while taking photographs of their (disgusted) faces. Conclusion: Landis discovered no universal facial expressions, but did find that most test subjects will do whatever they’re told to do. (Our conclusion: Landis liked to kill rats.)
“Louis Pasteur’s theory of
germs is ridiculous fiction.”
—PIERRE PACHET, PROFESSOR OF
PHYSIOLOGY AT TOULOUSE, 1872
HOW TO
MAKE ICE
How do they maintain the ice in rinks, especially in warm-weather places like Florida? We caught up with Ken Friedenberger, Director of Facility Operations for the St. Petersburg Times Forum, home of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team, for the rundown:
•Two layers of sand and gravel mixture form the foundation of the ice. The two layers and the precise mixture, Friedenberger said, prevent it from freezing into permafrost (perpetually frozen soil), which would “eventually crack the piping and turn it into a big mess, which would look like spaghetti.”
•“The piping” he refers to is perhaps the most important part of the rink. Five to ten miles of it run under and through a massive concrete slab that sits on the base. A liquid similar to antifreeze is cooled by massive air conditioning units to below freezing and pumped through the piping, making the temperature of the concrete slab below freezing, too.
•Water is hosed onto the concrete and allowed to freeze in a very thin layer. When it’s frozen, more water is added and allowed to freeze, another layer is added… and the process is repeated until there are 24 layers of ice, each one from ¾ of an inch to a full inch thick.
•When all of this is finished, the ice surface temperature hovers between 22°F and 26°F. And because of the constantly cooled concrete below, the temperature inside the stadium stays in the 60s or 70s even when the air temperature outside is in the 90s.
•The lines, circles, and spots are painted on before each game, and four to five new layers of ice are frozen over them to protect them.
•A Zamboni machine smooths out the ice before a game—and it’s time for the opening faceoff.
8 ELEMENTS DISCOVERED BY THE
ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS
1.Antimony
2.Copper
3.Gold
4.Lead
5.Mercury
6.Silver
7.Sulfur
8.Tin
ALBERT EINSTEIN SAYS…
“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
“Common sense is the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
“To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.”
“Why is it that nobody understands me, and everybody likes me?”
“With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.”
“A life directed chiefly toward fulfillment of personal desires sooner or later always leads to bitter disappointment.”
“My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual, and no man idolized.”
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever…This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather, a man of value.”
THE TIPLER TIME MACHINE
Frank Tipler has been fascinated with time travel since he was five years old. In 1974 he designed a time machine that he hoped would work in real life.
In his design, a person would take off in a spaceship and arrive at a cylinder rotating in space. Tipler believed that if the cylinder had enough mass and was rotating fast enough, it would work like an artificial black hole and have the power to warp time. After orbiting the cylinder the spaceship would go backward in time and it would be the past when the ship returned to Earth. The design had a few problems: to generate a black hole, the cylinder would have to be infinitely long. Once within the vortex created by the fake black hole, your ship would not be able to generate enough velocity to escape. So…you’d be stuck there. But not for long: Your ship would be crushed, and you’d be dead.
Lounge Lizards
The Gila monster, native to Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, is North America’s most venomous lizard. Thankfully, it’s so slow that it poses little threat to humans. And now it might even help us. In 2012 a Swedish scientist named Karolina Skibicka created a synthetic version of a substance found in the Gila monster’s saliva called exendin-4 that “affects the reward and motivation regions of the brain.” In clinical tests, rats that were treated with the drug had reduced cravings for chocolate. “This is both an unknown and quite unexpected effect,” explains Skibicka, adding that “our decision to eat is linked to the same mechanisms in the brain which control addictive behaviors.” Her hope is that one day the lizard spit drug will help reduce cravings in not just people with a sweet tooth, but alcoholics as well.
WHO’S THE
RAREST OF
THEM ALL?
A circumhorizontal arc (aka, “fire rainbow”) is the world’s least common natural atmospheric condition, but it’s actually neither a rainbow nor a fire. Although the phenomenon appears as rainbow-colored clouds sporting wisps that look like flames, it is produced by ice crystals, not warmth, and conditions have to be perfect for one to form. Start with cirrus clouds more than 20,000 feet high. Then add the Sun also high in the sky, at least 58 degrees above the horizon. The clouds must contain hexagonal ice crystals just the right thickness and aligned horizontally with a flat face pointed at the ground. Similar to a prism, light enters through the vertical side face and exits through the flat bottom, producing an arc of colors that lights up the cloud. Some of these anomalies cover hundreds of square miles and last for more than an hour. However, due to the specific conditions they require, the arcs are impossible to view in latitudes below 55 degrees south or above 55 degrees north. Sorry, Canada!
MAD DOGS
AND A DEADLY
DISEASE
Louis Pasteur worked on a number of vaccines, including one for treating rabies. Human beings get it by being bitten or even licked by infected animals, mostly dogs, who drool and look mad—not angry, but crazy. The bad news is that no one has ever been known to recover from rabies. However, thanks to Pasteur, you can prevent it from taking hold.
Pasteur was so sure that his rabies vaccine would work that he was ready to deliberately inoculate himself with rabies in order to demonstrate his discovery. Before that could happen, a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister arrived in Pasteur’s laboratory. Joseph had been bitten two days earlier by a rabid dog. So, fortunately for Pasteur, he had a guinea pig other than himself. The treatment involved a ten-day course of injections; Joseph survived—and so did Pasteur’s reputation.
•Frozen yogurt isn’t just regular yogurt that’s been frozen. If you put yogurt into a soft-serve machine, you’ll end up with a milky slush. (And if you put that into the freezer…you’ll get a weird brick of white stuff.)
•The ingredient that chemically gives fro-yo an icecream-like consistency is sugar—lots of sugar, as much as ice cream has. The science: sugar molecules block ice crystals from forming.
•Frozen yogurt contains a bunch of processed dairy products and dairy by-products, such as pasteurized nonfat milk, pasteurized buttermilk, whey, dry milk, and milk protein isolate—plus carrageenan, an extract from seaweed.
•Most commercial frozen yogurts include live yogurt cultures.
Strange Science Page 21