Strange Science

by Editors of Portable Press

  •Self-serve frozen yogurt parlors that charge by weight have become one of the most heavily franchised businesses. They’ve got low overhead, and the yogurt is sold at a markup estimated at about 500 percent.

  MUSICAL AILMENTS

  FIDDLER’S NECK

  The name might sound silly, but according to a study of regular violin and viola players by Dr. Thilo Gambichler of Oldchurch Hospital in London, the friction of the instrument’s base against the left side of the neck (for right-handed players) can cause lesions, severe inflammation, and cysts. What’s worse, said the study, published in the British medical journal BMC Dermatology, it causes lichenification—the development of a patch of thick, leathery skin on the neck, giving it a “bark-like” appearance.

  GUITAR NIPPLE

  A similar report issued in the United States cited three female classical guitarists who suffered from traumatic mastitis—swelling of the breast and nipple area—due to prolonged friction from the instrument’s body. The condition can strike male guitarists, too.

  BAGPIPER’S FUNGUS

  Recent medical reports have detailed the dangers of playing Scotland’s national instrument. Bagpipes are traditionally made of sheepskin coated with a molasses-like substance called treacle. That, the report said, is a perfect breeding ground for various fungi, such as aspergillus and cryptococcus. Bagpipers can inadvertently inhale fungal spores, which doctors say can lead to deadly lung (and even brain) diseases.

  Tesla vs. Edison

  The early 20th century’s most talented inventors—Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison—were rivals. When Edison died in 1931, the only dissenting voice came from Tesla, who had worked with Edison. “He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene,” Telsa wrote in the New York Times. It gets worse:

  His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge.

  In fact, this rivalry might be the reason neither man was ever awarded a Nobel Prize. The pair came close in 1915 when they were the favorites to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on X-rays. Instead, it went to British scientists William Henry Bragg and his son W. L. Bragg “for their use of X-rays to determine the structure of crystals.” Tesla and Edison would have likely been awarded the prize…if not for their very bitter public feud.

  HEART HISTORY

  •In a cave in Pindal, Spain, there’s a surprisingly well-drawn wall painting of an elephant made some 50,000 years ago. In the chest area is a red mark that some people argue is the creature’s ear, a handprint, or a mistake on the artwork. But others say it’s the animal’s heart.

  •Ancient Egyptians knew about hearts (which they removed and stored in jars alongside their wrapped, entombed dead).

  •Early Chinese medical practitioners knew it as part of the circulatory system.

  •The centuries-old sacred Hindu text, the Atharvaveda, included chants for heart health.

  •The Greeks were also aware of a beating heart in the body, but thought it was the home of the soul. The brain, many of them believed, was what kept us alive.

  •By about the 16th century, humankind had a pretty good idea what the heart looked like and what exactly it did, thanks to increasingly sophisticated scientific methods and public acceptance of dissection for the sake of information.

  •The Romans were the first to propose that the heart was a person’s emotional center, so it didn’t take much to make the connection between the heart and love. The physical reactions we have when we fall in love—that heady rush, the flip-flop in the midsection, the increase in pulse—probably led to that belief.

  •The ancients thought that there was a vein that ran from the fourth finger of the left hand directly to the heart (there isn’t), which is why we wear wedding rings on the left “ring finger.”

  The Language Of Cat Whiskers

  Whiskers can be used to communicate. Here are some tips for deciphering what a cat’s whiskers are saying:

  •A calm, resting, or friendly cat holds his whiskers out to the sides.

  •An alert, curious, or excited cat’s whiskers point upward.

  •Backward-pointing whiskers often indicate that a cat feels defensive or is angry. So, you… human…the one with the kitty shampoo and bath supplies in hand: Back off!

  STRANGE MEDICAL CONDITION

  SUBJECT: Graham Harrison of Exeter, England

  CONDITION: Cotard’s syndrome

  STORY: In 2004 Harrison, then 48, went to a doctor with an odd complaint: he was dead. He explained that he’d attempted to commit suicide several months earlier (he took an electrical appliance with him into a bath), and while he seemed to have survived, he was convinced he had, in fact, killed his brain. Harrison recognized that he could walk and talk, but he was still convinced his brain had ceased to function. His rationale: he had lost all sensation, he said, including the ability to smell, to taste, and to feel pleasure. He was so convinced he was dead that he saw no point in eating. (His family had to make sure he ate food and took his medications.) Finally in 2013, after nine years of suffering with the symptoms, doctors diagnosed Harrison’s condition as Cotard’s syndrome, also known as “walking corpse syndrome,” an extremely rare psychological disorder, the cause of which is unknown. People with Cotard’s sincerely believe they are, basically, zombies. After the diagnosis, Harrison was able to return to the land of the living: “I don’t feel that brain-dead any more,” he told New Scientist magazine. “Things just feel a bit bizarre sometimes.”

  In the course of being treated, Harrison underwent brain scans, and they were, according to his doctors, surprising: Harrison’s brain showed a level of activity similar to someone in a vegetative state. “I’ve been analyzing scans for 15 years,” said Dr. Steven Laureys. “I’ve never seen anyone who was on his feet, who was interacting with people, with such an abnormal scan result.”

  AN ANIMAL ODDITY

  In the early 1800s, French naturalist Georges Cuvier was studying a female argonaut, a small kind of octopus, when he discovered a strange parasitic worm inside its abdomen. He named the worm hectocotylus, “one hundred cups,” for the many suckerlike structures on it. It wasn’t until the 20th century that biologists discovered that it was the male argonaut’s penis, and it was supposed to be inside the female. Nearly all cephalopods—the class of marine animals that includes octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish—have this specialized tentacle that detaches once the job is complete. With the argonaut and similar species, it can actually break off before contact with the female…and swim over to her to do its business.

  A Singer Who

  Butchered

  Science

  Superstar Bette Midler recorded a very popular song that makes casual reference to a basic scientific phenomenon…and got the facts completely wrong. Midler’s 1988 ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings” was featured in the movie Beaches and won a Grammy for Song of the Year. The sentiment of the song is simple: the singer thanks a friend for always supporting her, for helping her metaphorically fly—the “wind beneath her wings.” The problem is that this is not how flight works. For the song’s narrator to “fly higher than an eagle”—or at all—wind would have to be moving above the wings, not below. But in any case, calling someone the “wind beneath my wings” sounds like a completely different kind of wind.

  WEIRD ENERGY:

  ALGAE

  One of the main obstacles in developing alternate energy sources is that alternatives are more expensive than oil. The fact that algae-based energy could be as cheap as petroleum might make it one of the more viable long-term options. Currently, crude oil is pumped out of seabeds, where it was created from heat and pressure, transforming
algae and other microorganisms over the course of millions of years. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state have devised a way to re-create and speed up the process of turning algae into oil. If they scale it up to mass production, the lab estimates that it could sell this biofuel for about $2 a gallon.

  Other benefits: the technology that converts algae into petroleum creates fertilizer that can be used to make more energy in the form of natural gas. The big negative: real estate. To produce enough energy to meet just 17 percent of the country’s current needs, we’d need an area the size of South Carolina for algae production.

  ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY:

  PENICILLIN

  Dr. Alexander Fleming had spent most of 1928 working in a cramped laboratory in a London hospital. While working on the influenza virus, he had filled his lab with culture dishes containing staphylococci bacteria. Exhausted from too many late nights, Fleming decided to take a break, giving strict instructions to his assistants on how to care for his specimens. On his return, however, Fleming was annoyed to find that someone had left a window open the previous night. The result? A foreign mold had flown in through the window and contaminated the culture dishes. A devastated Fleming went to dispose of the dishes when something caught his eye—moldy patches were growing all over the plates, but there were rings of clear space around them where there were no bacteria. Looking closer, Fleming saw that the bacteria closest to these clear rings were shriveling or dissolving. The astute doctor began experimenting with this mold that appeared to eat up bacteria. After years of research he was able to extract from it a drug—penicillin—that has saved millions of lives. And it was all because someone forgot to close the window.

  The Cow Egg Man

  In April 2008, a team of scientists at Newcastle University in England extracted an unfertilized egg cell from a cow, removed its nucleus—where most of a cell’s DNA resides—and replaced it with the nucleus of a cell taken from another animal. They then gave the egg a tiny electric shock, which “activated” it, meaning that the inserted DNA began to do its work, and the cell started dividing. In other words, it was alive. The DNA they inserted into the cow egg was taken from a human skin cell. The Newcastle scientists had successfully cloned a human-animal hybrid, possibly for the first time in history. However, the cells stopped dividing after about three days. But the team hopes to repeat the experiment and get an egg to keep dividing for about six days—at which time it should begin creating embryonic stem cells, the “building block” cells found in embryos that go on to become more than 200 different types of cells in the body. The cells would consist of 99.9 percent human DNA and only 0.1 percent cow DNA. If successful, the procedure would allow scientists to skirt around laws forbidding or restricting the use of “normal” human embryos for stem-cell production.

  “I WAS AT HOME, ASLEEP!”

  Somnambulism, or sleepwalking, affects millions of people. Yet the rarest and most unusual type of this disorder involves not only sleepwalking but elaborate, murderous actions—“sleep killing.” Take the 1987 case of Kenneth Parks of Toronto. He drove 14 miles to his in-laws’ house, where he stabbed his mother-in-law to death and choked his father-in-law into unconsciousness. Afterward, he woke up and drove to a police station. He turned himself in, his hands and clothes covered with blood, still unaware of what he had done. A jury found Parks not guilty because he had no conscious control over his behavior.

  A 7.0 earthquake is 900 times more

  powerful than a 5.0 earthquake.

  ANCIENT

  SOAPMAKING

  According to some accounts, around 1000 B.C., Romans performed many animal sacrifices to the gods on Mount Sapo. The fat from the animals mixed with the ashes of the sacrificial fires. Over time, this mixture of fat and alkali flowed down to the Tiber River and accumulated in the clay soils. Women washing clothing there found that the clay seemed to help get things cleaner. Whether or not this story is true, experts say Mount Sapo is the origin of the word soap.

  However, a recipe for soap was discovered on Sumerian clay tablets dating back to 2500 B.C. During excavations of ancient Babylon, archaeologists uncovered clay cylinders containing a soaplike substance that were around 5,000 years old. The Phoenicians were making soap around 600 B.C., and Roman historian Pliny the Elder recorded a soap recipe of goat tallow and wood ashes in the first century. A soap factory complete with finished bars was found in the ruins of Pompeii.

  In Spain and Italy, soapmaking did not become an established business until about the 7th century. France followed in the 13th century and England a century after that. Southern Europeans made soap using olive oil. Northern Europeans used the fat from animals, including fish oils.

  In most places, soap was a luxury item because it was so difficult to manufacture. And it was often so heavily taxed that it was beyond the budgets of most people. Furthermore, bathing was out of fashion for many centuries, being considered sinful, even unhealthy. But when Louis Pasteur proved in the mid-1800s that cleanliness cuts down on disease, bathing and the use of soap for personal hygiene became a more accepted practice.

  If you could tap the energy released by an

  average-sized hurricane, it would be enough to

  satisfy all U.S. energy needs for six months.

  YOU AREN’T “YOU”

  The average adult human body is made up of more than 30 trillion cells, all of them descendants of the one original zygote—the egg cell from your mother that was fertilized by sperm from your father. The average body also contains microbes: organisms that enter from the environment, such as the bacteria that line the intestines and aid in digestion. These beneficial microbes colonize our bodies during and shortly after birth, and they stay with us our entire lives. In fact, the average adult human body contains as many colonizing microbes as native human cells.

  Oops!

  City officials in Nottingham, England, spent more than £1 million (about $1.5 million) installing solar-powered parking meters on city streets after reading reports that the meters saved a fortune in maintenance costs in Mediterranean countries. The only problem: Mediterranean countries get a lot of sun…and England doesn’t, not even in summer. More than 25 percent of the parking meters went out of commission, allowing hundreds of motorists to park for free.

  Meteorologists’ Jargon

  bomb: unforeseen weather; also called a gremlin

  cold low: a weather system that consists of a low-pressure area riding above a mass of cold air at the earth’s surface, bounded by slowly swirling bands of cloud and precipitation in the upper atmosphere

  Colorado hooker: a storm that originates over the eastern plains of Colorado and moves across the central Plains and Mississippi Valley; the storm taps moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and pulls cold air down from Canada as it travels its hooked, or curved, path

  dead clouds: cumulus clouds that blot out the sun but are usually incapable of generating precipitation

  helicity: a measure of the potential of a small area of the atmosphere to spin rapidly, forming a tornado; expressed as a number, it is used to describe the danger of tornadoes forming

  hot box: a localized storm area squared off on a weather map for which a meteorologist is likely to issue severe storm warnings; helicity is often closely monitored within hot boxes

  severe clear: not a cloud in the sky

  sucker hole: a brief period of clear weather that lasts until just after the good weather forecast has been issued or until a pilot flying without instruments takes off; only a sucker amends the forecast to reflect the good weather, and only a sucker flies without instruments when such conditions occur

  Texas gully washer: rain intense enough to flood gullies

  TTTC: weather that is “too tough to call”

  INSTANT DRUNKENNESS-REVERSING PILLS

  Imagine being able to get rip-roaring drunk, raise hell for a few hours, and then pop a few pills and sober up quicker than you can
say, “I’ll be glad to walk on that line, officer!” Well, we’re soon going to find out, because scientists appear to have unlocked the key to countering the intoxicating effects of alcohol: enzymes. A team of researchers led by Yunfeng Lu, a UCLA professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Cheng Ji, a professor of biochemical and molecular biology at USC, has devised a way to package enzymes inside a nanoscale polymer shell. In non-egghead speak, they found a way to put chemicals inside your body that can change what your body does. Anyway, they tested these tiny capsules on drunk mice and found that the enzymes caused their blood alcohol levels to drop quickly and significantly. Professor Lu stated that down the road he can envision an alcohol prophylactic or an antidote that could be taken orally after someone becomes inebriated. Nothing bad could possibly come of that, right?

  “PSYCHIC DRIVING” PROCEDURE

  In the early 1950s, Scottish-born psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron developed what he believed was a cure for schizophrenia, and in 1953 began testing it on patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. He called it “psychic driving.” The treatment: Patients were drugged into unconsciousness with powerful sedatives, had earphones placed on their heads, and were subjected to repeated messages, such as “People like you” or “You have confidence in yourself,” over and over…and over… for days, weeks, and, in some cases, months. Over a decade, Cameron subjected hundreds of people to “psychic driving.” Not a single person is believed to have been cured or even helped by the treatment—and many were quite likely made worse off. At the same time Cameron was performing these experiments, he was taking part in the CIA’s notorious MKUltra “mind control” program, involving, among other things, dosing unwitting subjects with LSD. That’s why Cameron’s clinic was in Canada—it would have been illegal to do such things in the United States.