FASCINATA
FASCINATA
. . (My own word, to describe the fascinating aspect of these data.)
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Feb 8, 08: Two Komodo dragons have hatched at the Sedgwick County Zoo, apparently without the fertilization of a male. The dragons, both males, are believed to be the first in North America known to have hatched by parthenogenesis.
The carrot's orange color we know is the result of Dutch cultivation in the 17th Century, when patriotic growers turned a vegetable which was then purple into the color of the national flag.
Feb 4, 08: New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. Scientists have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6,000-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
Caffeine is a distant cousin of cocaine.
The 'standard' acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface is 9.8m per second squared. Gs vary equator to poles. So the figure varies from 9.78 at the equator to 9.83 at the poles. [I s'pose I cud figger that out in "G"s... ok; poles: 1.0020 to .997959 at the equator. a standard ton wud be 1002 kg to 997.96 kg.] A standard ton wud be 1002 kg to 997.96 kg.
Jun 26, 07: The skies of stars might experience weather like that on planets, researchers now find. The drifting clouds scientists have seen are wispy, "just like cirrus clouds on Earth" --except these are made of mercury! The star AR Aurigae might have clouds of strontium, yttrium and platinum.
*SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING?*
. . No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
. . "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
. . Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
. . An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
. . There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
. . There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
. . "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with your right.
. . TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
. . The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.
. . A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
. . A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
. . A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time: 1/100th of a second. A "myriad" is exactly 10,000. "Decimate" merely reduces by a tenth ("deci" means a tenth).
. . A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
. . A snail can sleep for three years.
. . Almonds are a member of the peach family.
. . Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
. . February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
. . In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
. . If the population of China walked past you, 8 abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction. [JKH: I saw this item in a Ripley's book from the '40's!]
. . Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
. . Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!
. . Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
. . The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns. (6 ipg! Worse'n a Hummer.)
. . The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
. . The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
. . There are more chickens than people in the world.
. . Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.
. . Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
Many years ago in Scotland, a new game was invented. It was ruled "Gentlemen Only...Ladies Forbidden"...and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.
Every day, more money is printed for Monopoly than the U.S. Treasury.
High-speed photography reveals that a kind of "seat belt" pulls down over the woodpecker's eyes right before it hits wood. Among other things, this prevents its eyes from popping out.
May 21, 07: What if the great events in history had turned out differently? How would the world today be changed?
. . Niall Ferguson wonders about this a lot. He's a well-known economic historian at Harvard, and a champion of "counterfactual thinking", or the re-imagining of major historical events, with the variables slightly tweaked. In a 1999 book Virtual Histories, Ferguson edited a collection of delightfully weird counterfactual hypotheses. One essay argued that if Mikhail Gorbachev had never existed, the USSR would still exist today. Another posited an alternative 18th century in which Britain allows its colonies to develop their own parliaments -- so the Americans never revolt, and the USA never exists.
. . He'd often argued that World War II could have been prevented if Britain had confronted Germany over its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. France would have joined with Britain, he figured, pinching Germany between their combined might and that of the Russian army.
. . But when he ran the computer simulation in Making History, everything fell to pieces. The French defected, leaving Britain's expeditionary force to fly solo --and get crushed by Germany. His theory, as it turns out, didn't hold water. He hadn't realized that a 1938 attack would not leave Britain enough time to build the diplomatic case with France.
. . Though Ferguson couldn't figure out how to make his 1938 scenario work, there was a better expert who could: His 13-year-old son, who was a whiz at strategy games. Rather than rush out to attack Germany, his son carefully set up robust trade agreements with France first to make sure the country felt diplomatically obligated to go along with the fight. Presto: France fought, and Germany fell.
. . Ferguson became so delighted with Making History that he has joined forces with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008, this one will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran.
. . The US used to be champions at this sort of strategic thinking, Ferguson notes, until Iraq came along. Much of America's failures in Iraq have been due to the overly rosy predictions of administration heads. They didn't have the healthy respect for chaos that was the original animating genius of conservatism --the thinkers like Edmund Burke, who distrusted aggressive tinkering with economies, states or cultures, because they shuddered to think of what genies might be unleashed.
The word 'cop' also did not enter the slang lexicon as an allusion to the highly polished buttons.
. . "Cop" has long existed as a verb meaning "to take or seize". The first example of 'cop' taking the meaning "to arrest" appeared in 1844, and the word then swiftly moved from being solely a verb for "take into police custody" to also encompassing a noun referring to the one doing the detaining.
Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.
Coca-Cola was originally green.
The State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska
The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% (now get this...)
The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $16,400
The average number of people airborne over the U.S. in any given hour: 61,000
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:
Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs -Alexander the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
May, 07: Hundreds of Indian rail passengers got more than they had bargained for when the driver of their train asked them to get out and push. It took more than half an hour to move the stalled electric train 12 feet so that it touched live overhead wires and was able to resume its journey. A train's momentum usually allows it to continue moving through neutral zones.
. . India's rail network carries more than 15 million people daily --more than the combined population of Norway and Sweden.
Claim: The ocean liner QE2 uses a gallon of fuel for every six inches it travels.
. . Status: False.
. . Origins: Like most modern cruise ships, Cunard's venerable and legendary Queen Elizabeth 2 boasts some impressive dimensions: 963 feet long, 105 feet wide, and 204 feet high; capable of carrying 1,778 passengers (serviced by a crew of 1,016); with nine diesel engines driving it at a top speed of 32.5 knots.
. . So her maximum range would be a scant 94.7 miles. No.
. . We arrive at a rough figure of 39.6 feet per gallon. Cunard itself says that one gallon of fuel will move the QE2 about 49 feet in open seas, so we'd peg the answer at a range of around 40-50 feet per gallon.
Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.
Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?
. . A. Their birthplace

Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested?
. . A. Obsession

Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter "A"?
. . A. One thousand

Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laser printers all have in common?
. . A. All were invented by women.

Q. What is the only food that doesn't spoil?
. . A. Honey

Q. Which day are there more *collect* calls than any other day of the year?
. . A. Father's Day

In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes, the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase......... "goodnight, sleep tight."
. . It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago, that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the honeymoon.
. . In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts... So in old England , when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them "Mind your pints and quarts, and settle down." It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's"
. . Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim, or handle, of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle" is the phrase inspired by this practice.

. . Don't delete this just because it looks weird. Believe it or not, you can read it.
. . I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
June 14, 06: Walk into the massive air hangar and the first thing you notice is an oppressive darkness broken only by a tiny beam of light from a gumball-size hole in the wall. Then, as the eye adjusts, an upside-down image emerges on the opposite wall that is startling in its clarity. If all goes well, within days, the hangar-turned-camera will record a panoramic image of what's on the other side of the door using the centuries-old principle of "camera obscura."
. . An image of the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station will appear upside down and flipped left to right on a sheath of light-sensitive fabric after being projected through the tiny hole in the hangar's metal door. The fabric is the length of one-third of a football field and about three stories tall.
. . Guinness World Records has created two new categories for the project --world's largest camera and world's largest photograph— and will certify the records once the photo is complete.
. . A nearly 31-by-111 foot piece of white fabric covered in 20 gallons of light-sensitive emulsion as the "negative." After exposing the fabric for up to 10 days, they will develop it in a huge tub made of pool siding, using 200 gallons of black-and-white developer solution and 2500 liters of fixer.
. . The photographers joke that they are also making the world's largest disposable camera. When they are done, the hangar will be torn down.
As many as 80% of animals in the deep sea produce some light.
Primitive snakes —-such as pythons and boa constrictors-— do have nub-like legs beneath their skins and tiny, half-inch claws that protrude out above the nubs but nestle close to their bellies near the anus. Actually, even the nubs are not legs but rather a remnant of upper-leg (thigh or femur) bones. The males still use the spurs —-but only during courtship and fighting-— not to walk. No other snakes have legs.
. . For a long time, we've known that snakes evolved from lizards but how they evolved is still unknown. A long-standing dispute whether snakes evolved from marine or land lizards smolders on.
. . Long ago, the Hox genes of limbed-python ancestors (lizards) apparently changed. The genes that controlled their formerly modest chest regions, in effect, told the embryo —-grow a chest along the entire trunk and up into the head. Those genes expanded their zone of expression (region of influence) from up into the head to almost the proto-python's tail. All the vertebrae that grow in this region bear ribs, which indicate that these are thoracic vertebrae. "So, the landmark for where to put the limb no longer exists" and no forelimbs develop.
A mosquito's heart is a long, skinny, fragile tube that runs along its back, starting near the anus, to the chest cavity (the thorax). The tube actually extends to its head but only the abdomen part has muscles to contract and is called the heart. The blood circulates freely in the body cavity making direct contact with internal tissues and organs.
. . The heartbeat rate varies among insect species, typically in the range of 30 to 200 beats per minute (compared to our 80 bpm).
The amount of heat needed to raise a pound of water (0.45 kg) by one Fahrenheit degree is equivalent to raising the water 778 feet (237 m) — about as high as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, 80 stories up. In 1845, James P. Joule first demonstrated this phenomenon in his "Mechanical Equivalent of Heat" experiment.
Most animals (roughly 85%) eat plants or their products (such as seeds, fruit, and nectar). Actually, almost all animals eat plants to some extent — even carnivores. The carnivore order includes 252 species out of the 4,237 mammalian species —-or about 6%. Not all eat only meat, however. Raccoons, civets, jackals, badgers, skunks, and bears also eat fruit, honey, seeds, roots, and other plant foods. The panda (a carnivore) eats bamboo shoots (plants) almost exclusively.
. . The number of frugivores (exclusive fruit eaters, like flying squirrels) is few (374 species, 9% of all mammals) compared with insectivores. Many animals do eat fruit when they find it, though. Deer scarf down apples in the fall.
. . Insectivores are fairly common because insects are very common but the small size and low nutrient value of insects means that most insectivorous mammals are small, except the anteaters. Anteaters eat termites that live in large colonies, so pickings are plentiful and anteaters grow big.
. . And finally, no, there is no other mammal besides the vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) that lives strictly on a diet of blood, though many animals like blood.
The Indian Ocean is the youngest ocean, formed a mere 80 million years ago after the southern supercontinent, Gondwanaland, broke up.
"No biologist (first-hand account) has ever seen wild dolphins beat up sharks."
Only four mammals besides the platypus are poisonous (but not lethal to humans). They are all insectivores: two types of shrews (the Blarina and Neomys species) and two types of the rare shrew-like solendons of the West Indies.
Actually, soap doesn't break down bacteria directly. Instead, soap loosens and suspends oil-containing bacteria so water can flush the germs away. A soap molecule is built like a two-ended monster —-grabbing oil with one end and water with the other. Babylonians made and used soap as early as 2800 BC.
Scorpions kill twice as many people as poisonous snakes do.
A tabanid fly (such as a deer or horse fly) has been clocked at 145 km/h (90 mph)
. . A midge flails his wings more than 1000 times per second — the record — but just putters along.
. . The fruit fly burns as much fuel (proportionately) as a jetliner that zooms at 970 km/h (600 mph). For the same relative energy, the fruit fly flounders at 3 to 5 km/h (2 to 3 mph).
Most of the heat deep within the center of Earth originated with Earth —-4.6 billion years ago. The molten metal at the center of Earth releases heat as it changes from a liquid to a crystalline solid, and, therefore, adds heat to the core.
. . Earth's core also gets heat from radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium. These elements, however, mostly occur in the mantle (above the core) and so contribute little to core heat.
The fastest spinning artifact. New rotors whirl at least at 4 million rpm. Ago Samoson makes these remarkable rotors in his small University-based company in Tallinn, Estonia. They're used in NMR machines.
. . Most dentist drills spin about 300,000 revolutions per minute (rpm) but the air turbine in the Turbo Carver II drill (made by Cyber Woodworking Depot in Holyoke, Massachusetts) whirls at 450,000 rpm.
. . Non-artifacts: Pulsars spin the fastest. Some spin at 60,000 rpm (which pales beside a 450,000-rpm carver's drill). But the surface of these 10-mile (16-km) diameter extraordinary dense bodies (the corpse of an exploded star) are traveling super fast --17% of light speed. The entire star rotates in a thousandth of a second.
A rabbit twitches his nose to detect the faintest odor that might mean danger. He twitches it constantly —-20 to 120 times a minute-— to expose more sensing pads in his nose. With his 100 million receptors (compared with a mere 5 or 6 million that we humans have), he's well equipped.
. . Rabbit incisor teeth grow as long as they live. In fact, abrasion *must wear down the teeth or they will grow extraordinarily long and be in the way so much that the rabbit cannot eat and literally starves to death.
. . Elephants get six sets of teeth. After that, they get no more and usually starve when their last wear to the gums. On the other hand, crocodiles get over 40 sets.
Only two mammals have a different number of cervical vertebrae. The slow-paced manatees have six and the lethargic sloths have six or nine. The flexible three-toed sloth has nine vertebrae and the more rigid two-toed sloth has only six. All others have seven — from shrews to whales. Long-necked giraffes and camels have the same seven neck bones as do short-necked mice and men.
. . The manatee can survive on 25% less energy than an animal of comparable size and the sloth on 40 to 45% less energy. A slower metabolism might diminish DNA damage and thereby inhibit cancerous growth. That, in turn, could allow Hox gene expression to change and spell out necks with a manatee's six bones or a sloth's six to nine.
The oceans contain an average gold concentration of about 13 billionths of a gram per liter of seawater (13 ppt). Even such microscopic traces still add up to a lot of gold — 25 billion ounces of gold, worth about 10 trillion dollars (7.6 trillion Euros). Humans have unearthed only 3 billion ounces over recorded history.
Actually, gold concentration varies between 5 to 50 ppt, depending on location. The Bering Sea contains the highest reported concentration.
. . They've found microscopic motes as large as five micrometers across along the Valu Fa Ridge 0.7 miles (1.1 km) beneath the Pacific Ocean. Where tectonic plates spread, cold water seeps down, encounters hot rocks, and leeches out gold. When it hits the cold water, it condenses.
All the species (45,000) of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals put together barely outnumber spider species (35,000). And that only counts the named ones. There may be thousands of undiscovered spider species.
. . Most live one to two years. House spiders live several years. Texas tarantulas (who live in 2-foot deep burrows) can live up to 30 years.
Marsupial mammals like the kangaroo, kola bear, or possum have no placentas and no bellybuttons.
A mile or so under the seafloor, the trickling water reacts with hot rocks and leaches out various metals and minerals —-copper, zinc, and iron, for example. The hot chemical-laden brew returns to the seafloor surface and spews out cracks and vent chimneys. Vent bacteria take hydrogen sulfide from upwelling vent water. They break the chemical bonds of the hydrogen sulfide and, with oxygen and carbon dioxide from seawater, use the bond energy to create life-supporting sugars.
. . Vent tubeworms don't even have mouths or stomachs. Most vent animals do. They graze, like cows, on bacterial scum or filter bacteria out of vent water. Predators and scavengers don't eat bacteria directly but do eat bacterial-fed animals.
Dolphins and sperm whales are "very closely related." A sperm whale usually holds its breath about an hour.
. . By the way, sperm whales have the largest teeth of any animal (not counting tusks) — up to 20 cm (8 inches) long —-and rarely use them. Instead, they swallow squid whole.
The egg-laying platypus of Australia is the world's most poisonous mammal. Males have hollow spurs connected to venom glands on the ankle of each hind leg. The extremely painful poison can harm a man but won't kill him.
How much does an elephant's ear weigh? Up to 50 kg (110 pounds) each.
How long is an elephant's trunk? This boneless proboscis (the longest animal snout) can weigh 180 kg (400 pounds) and be 2.1 m (7 feet) long.
. . The trunk probably evolved from a snorkel function 30 million years ago when elephants were aquatic creatures. Elephants still snorkel when swimming submerged.
. . A male's pair of tusks may exceed 200 kg (441 pounds) for the pair. The heaviest ones recorded were 209 kg (461 pounds), taken from an old bull shot in 1897. Tusks serve as weapons, shovels, rippers, and scrapers. About a quarter of the tusk —-a greatly elongated upper incisor tooth-— resides in the animal's head. Elephants are right- or left-tusked as we are right- or left-handed.
. . We used to think that elephants can't run (all fet off the ground at one point) but recent research indicates they can.
The return stroke of a lightning bolt —-the bright light we see-— follows a charge channel only 1.3-cm (about a half-inch) wide. As deadly as lightning is, as brilliant as it is —-the channel is no wider than a pencil. A luminous corona (made of hot ionized gases) envelops the lightning channel. This faint glow may be 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 m) across.
. . How long? A poker-thin bolt can extend, like a deadly tongue, 190 km or more. The longest recorded bolt was near Dallas, Texas — 190 km (118 miles) long. Most lightning bolts are about 1.6 km (a mile) long.
Old age record: A 205-year old rougheye rockfish (Sebastes aleutianuns), found off the coast of Alaska, trumps the 177-year old giant tortoise. In the tortoise's favor, though — she dwells in captivity. The Ocean Quahog (Arctica islandica) --a clam-- is perhaps oldest of all. We recently dredged up a specimen, from the mid Atlantic continental shelf, that had 220 annual growth rings. Biologists verified the specimen's age using radiometric- dating techniques. That creature's 220 years beats even the rockfish's 205.
The longest radio wave that we've detected is a whopping 19 million miles (0.01 Hertz). That's 100 million times longer than waves in the middle of the AM radio bandwidth. But there is no theoretical limit. A 0.01-Hertz wave has a wavelength of 30 million kilometers —-a super long wave.
Sharks can detect smells 10,000 times fainter than a human can.
Deep-sea anglerfish (found in the inky black at 2000 m) have extremely large nostrils and a powerful sense of smell. Males can detect and follow the distinctive scent released by females of their kind. A tiny male (about a half inch, 1.3 cm) finds a female (which may be 10 times longer than he), bites her, fuses his skin to hers, and lives off of her. They grow together, even sharing the same bloodstream.
About 90% of the 9,700 bird species pair, mate, and raise chicks together —-some returning together to the same nest site year after year. Males, however, often raise other males' offspring unknowingly. DNA testing reveals that the social-pair male did not father 10, 20, and sometimes 40% of the chicks.
. . Only about 3% of the 4,000 mammal species are monogamous. Beavers, otters, bats, wolves, some foxes, a few hoofed animals, and some primates live together in social pairs but dally sexually much as birds do.
. . Only one species is absolutely monogamous. In the black darkness of the deep sea, the tiny male anglerfish (perhaps one tenth the female's size) detects and follows the scent trail of a female of his own species. Once found, he bites his chosen one and hangs on. His skin fuses to hers, their bodies grow together (he gets his food through a common blood supply and becomes essentially a sperm producing organ). They mate for life — a short life for the male.
Are there any body parts of a human body that we don't use?
. . A: Probably not. Some parts matter more than others but even the "useless" ones have value that we're just learning about. We used to think 180 parts (for example, the thyroid, tonsils, appendix) were without function. Now it's down to maybe one —-an internal tail-— the tail bone. Even that supports some abdominal muscles.

Some likely candidates for useless parts:
. . • wisdom teeth — they often grow in crooked or the opposing tooth doesn't emerge so they end up useless for chewing.
. . • male nipples — useless, perhaps, but may exist because natural selection can't easily edit out their production without messing things up for females.
. . • the plantaris muscle — a calf muscle that causes all toes to flex all at once for monkeys and thus helps their feet swing from a branch through trees. In humans, the muscle does not flex toes simultaneously and is largely useless. Indeed, it is atrophied, may be totally absent and, when present, does not even reach the toes.

• Male nipples — useless, perhaps, but may exist because natural selection can't easily edit out their production without messing things up for females.
• the plantaris muscle — a calf muscle that causes all toes to flex all at once for monkeys and thus helps their feet swing from a branch through trees. In humans, the muscle does not flex toes simultaneously and is largely useless. Indeed, it is atrophied, may be totally absent and, when present, does not even reach the toes.

The longest radio wave that we've detected is a whopping 19 million miles (0.01 Hertz). That's 100 million times longer than waves in the middle of the AM radio bandwidth. But there is no theoretical limit.
The egg-laying platypus of Australia is the world's most poisonous *mammal. Males have hollow spurs connected to venom glands on the ankle of each hind leg. The extremely painful poison can harm a man but won't kill him.
The return stroke of a lightning bolt —-the bright light we see-— follows a charge channel only about 1.3-cm (a half-inch) wide. As deadly as lightning is, as brilliant as it is —-the channel is no wider than a pencil.
. . A luminous corona (made of hot ionized gases) envelops the lightning channel. This faint glow may be 3 to 6 m (10 to 20 feet) across.
. . How long? A poker-thin bolt can extend, like a deadly tongue, 118 miles or more. The longest lightning bolts start at the front of a squall line and go backwards horizontally to the trailing cloud layers. "Lightning can be as little as a few feet long.
All the species (45,000) of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals put together barely outnumber spider species (35,000). And that only counts the named ones. There may be thousands of undiscovered spider species.
. . Spiders come in all sizes from the tiny ones as little as a poppy seed (0.05 inch, 1.27 mm) to giants with a leg span as big as a dinner plate (they eat birds!).
. . Consequently, spiders have vastly different life spans. Most live one to two years. House spiders live several years. Texas tarantulas (who live in 2-foot deep burrows) can live up to 30 years.
Zirconium tungstate shrinks as it gets hotter. Discovered in 1996, this novel material surprised scientists because it exhibited its strange property, called negative thermal expansion, over a wide range of temperatures. The reason for zirconium tungstate’s stability in something called geometrical frustration. The phenomenon is a bit like the age-old problem of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
. . In the case of zirconium tungstate, the crystal structure can be divided up into four-sided tetrahedra and eight-sided octahedra. When the temperature rises, these geometric figures squeeze together, but they do not match up very well. If there were no geometric frustration, zirconium tungstate would eventually rearrange itself and behave like most other materials.
. . zirconium tungstate could be mixed with another substance, so that the two materials would offset each other when the temperature changed – thereby reducing strains.
The Council of Europe expressed its concern that the EU's estimated 1.6 million deaf speak at least 44 different sign languages. There are some 114 sign languages in use around the world.
Apr 2, 03: Human sperm become excited when exposed to the scent of lily of the valley, doubling their speed and homing in on the aroma, a German scientist said.
. . Hans Hatt, a biology professor at Ruhr University, said knowledge about a newly discovered odor receptor on the sperm's surface could enable researchers to devise alternative contraception methods or, unfortunately, ways to boost fertility.
. . "This is the first time sperm has been shown to respond to smell."
. . Another compound, undecanal, was found to block the attraction and could be used for contraceptive ends.
Any mammal's heart beats about four times per breath. However, pulse and respiration each decrease roughly as the fourth root of body mass. That means a twenty-five-pound whippet breathes twice as fast as a four-hundred-pound gorilla. We mature far more slowly than other creatures, and our hearts typically beat around three billion times.
. . In an essay by Asimov, he sez, give or take a few million, all animals live for one billion heartbeats on average... except humans. According to him, humans live for about 4 billion heartbeats, on average.
. . An average heart beats 100,000 times a day, pumping some 2,000 gallons of blood through ... a 70-year life span, that adds up to more than 2.5 billion heartbeats.
. . Your heart beats about 60 times a minute. To beat a billion times takes it about 32 years, so a lifetime is, typically, 2 to 3 billion heartbeats long. Isaac Asimov, had remarked "Whatever the size, . . . the mammalian heart seems to be good for a billion beats, and no more."
. . For many thousands of years, humans had a life expectancy between 25 and 30 years. With the normal rate of 72 heartbeats/minute, they conformed nicely to the one billion invariant. Only during the last few hundred years has human life span significantly surpassed this number, largely due to reduced rates in infant mortality from improved medical care and living conditions.
The sizes of brains increases roughly as the three-quarters power of body mass. The cross-sectional area of a leg increases as the square of mass.
The average human body clock has a period of 24 hours and 11 minutes. The day on Mars is 24 hrs & 39 minutes long.
A Balsa tree & a Mahogany tree produce wood at about the same rate, by weight.
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Almost all the below is bits/pieces from April=Holladay's column, edited somewhat.
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Does marijuana kill brain cells? Probably not in humans. At least, marijuana does not kill neurons (nerve cells) in monkey brains, according to two studies.
The hippocampus (learning and processing new memories), makes new neurons at a steady, vigorous pace. Perhaps the hippocampus (located roughly behind your ear) needs constant renewal to keep up with new information. The hippocampus of rats and mice cranks out 1,000 to 3,000 new neurons per day — a substantial fraction of each animal's lifetime output. Younger animals make more new neurons than older ones do.
. . Exercise and a full, meaningful life increase cell count. Stress and anxiety decease the numbers.
Heat can hurt flashlight batteries, but, unless the temperature constantly exceed 90 degrees for months at a time, cooling the batteries will have little effect.
Fahrenheit set the zero of his scale at the temperature ice melts when it's mixed 50-50 with salt: for practical reasons. This is a stable mixture whose temperature he could measure. Then he assigned the value of 30 degrees to the temperature at which pure ice melts. He measured the body temperature as 96 degrees and later the temperature of boiling water as 212 degrees. Oh, oh: he noticed that there are 182 degrees, not his desired 180, between 212 and 30. Fahrenheit arbitrarily changed the value for pure water's freezing point from 30 to 32 degrees. Now the difference between water's boiling and freezing point on Fahrenheit's scale was the value he wanted --180 degrees.
. . Fahrenheit invented his thermometer scale in 1709, thirty-three years before the Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius, came up with his.
True. The custom well into the 20th Century was: "Eskimos" don't kiss; they rub noses. A Scots fur trader describes his experience in the 1960s. The girl reaches up and brings your face down to hers and holds the side of her nose against yours. That shows affection. But then she presses her nose against yours and rubs it slowly back and forth. That not only is considered passionate --it IS!
Schackleton was the explorer who discovered coal --200 miles from the south pole. They're on the Polar Plateau at an altitude of 10,200 feet, a blizzard rages. That day they make only 6 km. Weak from lack of food, hands and feet close to frostbite, they struggle into a headwind. The record doesn't show who noticed the coal seam but someone in their party did. They brought back samples and mapped the vein. It's on top of the Beardmore Glacier near Mount Buckley.
Our long-ago ancestors lived rather short lives, even discounting high infant mortality. Before 1900, few lived to see 70 and practically no one lived for 80 years. Field workers unearthed 65 burials (400 to 1000 A.D.) from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in England and found none who lived past 45.
. . Kings did better. The mean life expectancy of kings of Scotland and England, reigning from 1000 A.D. to 1600 A.D. were 51 and 48 years, respectively. Their monks did not fare as well. In the Carmelite Abbey, only 5% survived past 45.
. . From 1600 to 1899 A.D., another royal court (20 men), born just that much later, lived an average of 62 years. These men also lived past adolescence (earliest death at 36). Five men lived into their 70s but none into their 80s although John Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, lived to 79.
When an odor molecule reaches a nerve hair on the smell lining in the nose, it fills a spot there. If the smell is strong (i.e., many molecules), soon all the hairs that respond to that particular odor are filled. Those receptor hairs have sent their smell messages to the brain and cannot send more until they detatch their present odor chemicals. So the receptors are quiet and the brain no longer perceives that smell. That is why you quit noticing the good smell of rain.
A century after a sinking, salvagers found a steamboat under 30 feet of silt with her cargo largely undamaged. They recovered brandied peaches, oysters, plum tomatoes, honey, and mixed vegetables. Later, chemists at the National Food Processors Association examined the canned food and detected no bacterial growth. The 100-year-old food is edible.
. . But always throw away swollen cans. If a can gets punctured, bacteria will enter and the food goes bad in hours.
In about 12 hours and in only a half teaspoon of space, a single bacterium can produce about five billion offspring.
Maggots eat voraciously, grow, and in 14 to 26 days, became full-grown mature maggots. Then they can migrate up to 46 meters (150').
. . Blowflies lay eggs preferably in dead rotting meat, but they'll happily use what's available: open wounds, eye sockets, mouth and body openings!
A seiche (pronounced SAYSH) can occur in a lake far from the earthquake source if the earthquake is large. In March 1964, the largest earthquake that ever hit the United States hammered Prince William Sound, about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Anchorage. This 9.2 jolt-the second largest in recorded history-created seiches thousands of miles away.
. . Seismic waves from the earthquake traveled over 3,000 miles through the Earth and caused seiches in rivers, lakes, and bayous along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas.
. . Strong winds cause seiches on the Great Lakes almost every day. The wind blows the water along and piles it up at one end of the lake. When the wind dies, the bulging high water surges back and creates a wave that heads for the opposite shore. Seiches on Lake Michigan can reach ten feet and, in 1954, one killed seven people on a Chicago dock.
A lichen can contain as many as three members of the plant kingdom. The partners are as different as plants can get: a fungus (the dominant one, a yeast, mold, mushroom kind of plant), alga, and cyanobacterium (formerly called blue-green alga).
. . The fungus farms the other partner(s) because it can't make food, and they can. What do the algae get out of it? Water, mainly, and protection. The spongy fungus partner shares its stored water with the algae and weaves a sheltering web about them. This tough combination can shut down its metabolism and survive long periods, barely alive. Handy in the Arctic and other forbidding places where it grows.
We can make electrical generators smaller and lighter if they operate at higher frequencies because alternators running at those frequencies need less iron and copper. Aircraft use 115 volts, 400 hertz (Hz) while our domestic supply is 115 volts, 60 Hz. But the inductive properties of cables carrying alternating current at 400 Hz frequency cause energy losses that are up to 7 times greater than the same cable carrying current at 60 Hz.
There are 399 species of ladybugs (assigned to 53 genera) recorded in the US and Canada.
The gravity field at the ISS (407 km high) is almost as strong as at the Earth’s surface. It is 88% of full strength.
[I've always grumbled about the use of "centripetal" instead of centrifical/centrifugal. Well...] If I tie a tin can to a string and swing it about my head, the string exerts a force (directed radially inward) on the can. That’s called "centripetal" force and it is real. Now, I let go of the string and the can zooms off in a straight line. That’s Newton’s law of inertia —-not a real force. Newton said that a body continues in a straight line at constant speed unless a net force compels it to change that state.
. . So, centrifugal force is not an applied force but a way to describe the inertial tendency to travel in straight lines. Thus it can’t act to cancel any real force like gravity.
The zunzuncito is the world's smallest bird -—a blue hummer that flits among the flowers of Cuba. It's just bigger than a grasshopper: a scant 2.5 inches (6 cm) and weighs a little more than four paper clips (2 g; .07 ounces). The name -—zunzuncito—- means (loosely) "little buzz buzz" in Spanish. Like all hummingbirds, it hovers while eating, drinking, and collecting nest material. It copulates and nearly lives its life in flight.

[OTOH...] Probably, the Bee Hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) from Cuba and the Isle of Pines is smallest. The male is a tiny 2.2 inches (55 mm) long and weighs 0.06 ounces (1.7 g). Some say the 0.007-ounce (0.2 g) egg of the Bee Hummingbird. Others swear by the Vervain Hummingbird (Mellisuga minima) of Jamaica and nearby islets. That egg is barely the size of a pea and weighs "somewhat less than a small paperclip".
. . Guinness World Records says the smallest bird egg was laid on Oct. 5, 1998 by a posture canary. It was a piddling 0.275 inches (7 mm) long and 0.2 inches (5.25 mm) in diameter — about the size of a pea.

The number of snow words Eskimos have varies with the Eskimo language, but it's about the same as English. Here's 14 of ours: avalanche, blizzard, blowing snow, dusting, flurry, hail, hardpack, powder, sleet, slushsnow, snow bank, snow cornice, snowflake, snowstorm. All the dictionary words for snow in the Eskimo language, Yup'ik: 14.
. . Eskimo languages spawn a fearful number of derivative words (what linguists call "distinct inflected forms") and herein lies the problem. A noun lexeme can have almost 300 distinct inflected forms and a verb may have over 1,000. So, if you count all these forms, you can get an awful lot of Eskimo words for snow, but that's cheating.
Many flies can hover like a hummingbird, spin about their axis like a bullet, zip through spaces little wider than their wingspan, land on ceilings, and even fly backwards. But, they don’t fly upside down.
In Wyoming, it takes about 5 acres to support a cow with the required 30 pounds of fodder, but 5 acres of grasshoppers (at a density of 6.5 per sq. yd.) will eat 34 pounds of food (30 x 5 / 4.36). So the grasshoppers eat more than the cow.
Not just insects —-sponges, sandworms, and snails, to name a few-- hatch from an egg into a wormlike larva. They are such efficient machines that many larvae do all the eating and the adult does none. Larvae eat. Adults reproduce.
Like many reptiles, birds see four primary colors (that is, they have four types of color cones in their eyes that receive light), not merely three like bees or us. Their 4-color system may produce "a range of hues we cannot imagine."
A shark's sense of smell is 10,000 times more acute than a human's.
New evidence suggests we need the appendix to fight infection. A whopping 15% of us have had our appendixes removed. This narrow muscular 8 cm (3-inch) tube sits at the beginning of the large intestine, like a guard shack. It's crammed with lymph tissue that produces white blood cells —-the cells that fight germs. The large intestine teems with mostly beneficial bacteria. The appendix, from its guard-duty site, probably kills hostile bacteria invaders — much as the tonsils do at the back of the mouth and beginning of the windpipe.
Two chickens hatched from one egg? Like twins? Twin chicks usually hatch from double-yolk eggs but can occur from a single yolk. But rarely. The two chicks are always tiny and usually hatch from a double yolk egg. Often only one embryo survives and sometimes neither does. The egg isn't big enough to house two normal-size chicks so often one dies. Ordinarily, they aren't identical twins but fraternal.
. . "A double yolker forms when one egg follows another down the shoot a little too closely and they both get wrapped in the same shell."
In 1917, a great mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, lay ill in a London hospital. His friend, the British mathematician G.H. Hardy came to visit. Hardy remarked that his taxi number, 1729, was dull. "No", Ramanujan replied, "it's an interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes (a cube is a number times itself three times) in two different ways." Zounds! To be able to recognize such a fact upon hearing the number. (1729 equals 1 cubed plus 12 cubed, and also 9 cubed plus10 cubed).
To Indians, it's Kolkata (Calcutta). To Russians, it's Mockba (Moscow).
The groundhog (also known as a "woodchuck" and "whistle pig") is a marmot — essentially, a giant North American ground squirrel.
No see'ums are flies: tiny, biting flies in the family Ceratopogonidae. You don't see them because they are smaller than the mesh of a screen door 1.6 mm (1/16th") long.
. . The no see'um (like mosquitoes, always a female) slices skin with sharp mouthparts and injects saliva into the bloodstream to pool the victim's blood just under the skin surface. She sucks blood with a short snout (shorter than the mosquito's) to gain protein she needs to make eggs. We rarely feel the bite, but within 24 hours, the small flat red spot can become excruciatingly itchy (it's the saliva) and may swell to a spot one to two inches across that takes days to heal.
. . In Africa and South America, they spread parasitic worms, amoebas, and viruses. "These diseases, including one with the strange name, 'bluetongue', are more damaging to livestock than humans." [With global warming, it all moves north! Thanx SUV drivers!]
Pulling the plug on a color TV might be worthwhile. That can save 50% of the total TV energy spent. The TV's "standby" mode is costly. A 27-inch color TV costs 1.3 cents for an hour's watch. Pulling the plug is the only sure way to turn it off. Clicking the "off" button on the TV remote won't! Likewise, pull the plug or switch off the surge protector on your computer, monitor, printer, and copier. Their "standby" mode costs you bucks, too.
. . In addition to possible savings, unplugging does lessen the danger of an electrical fire. ============== Some people have a rare perception: one in 200 college students has synesthesia.
. . One synesthete sees music that looks like "shards of glass" — a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in her vision field. Another (novelist Vladimir Nabokov) saw "a tint of weathered wood" when he heard an English long A but saw "polished ebony" when he heard a French long A. Yet another synesthete sees blue when she plays C sharp on the piano. George Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue") saw notes in color.
. . Seeing and hearing mix. Synesthetes' brains are cross-triggered so one sense (hearing or tasting) fires another (seeing or feeling). The condition runs in families. Creativity may have evolved through such brain cross talk. Poets, writers, and artists see life as metaphors.
Fine hair is close to the resolution of the human eye —-about as fine as we can see. Hair thickness varies from person to person, day to day, year to year. It's anywhere between 17 to 181 microns (1/1500 to 1/450 inches).
. . Hair color is the biggest factor. Flaxen hair is the finest (17 to 51 microns, 1/1500 to 1/500 inches) and black hair the coarsest (56 to 181 microns, 1/450 to 1/140 inches).
Most mammals (for example, wolves, cats, hyenas, dogs, kangaroos, manatees, horses, elephants, and lamas) get two sets of teeth. Our reptile-like ancestors that lived about 250 million years ago developed the two-teeth system. Earlier vertebrates had a single set of teeth and replaced a tooth whenever it broke off or wore down. Most reptiles living now do likewise. They essentially have one set of teeth.
. . Most mammals are born with a set of smaller, weaker teeth called milk or baby teeth. Many species, like us, get them soon after birth. A few, like rodents, jump the gun. While they're in the mother's womb, their baby teeth erupt, fall out, and permanent teeth emerge before they're born.
. . Elephants have baby-teeth tusks that are only 5 cm (2") long. Throughout their life, they wear out (to the gums) six sets of 30 cm (foot-long) molars, grinding abrasive leaves and vines. The final set grows in when the elephant reaches 40 and wears out by 65. They starve if they outlive their teeth.
An ostrich has the biggest eyes among land animals — 5 cm(2" ) in diameter. A horse has the next biggest, even bigger than elephants' eyes. All land animal eyes, though, fall woefully short of the biggest eye of all —-the 25 cm (10") dinner-plate size giant squid eye. A human's eye is about an inch across.
A thin layer of hydrogen and helium probably make up a neutron star's inches-deep atmosphere. Whatever is lightest forms the atmosphere since the star's tremendous gravity field causes heavy elements to sink quickly. Most of the star is iron but some hydrogen and helium remain from its star-burning days.
. . It isn't made up entirely of neutrons. Most, but not all. Even deep in the star interior, one proton (positive charge) exists for every ten neutrons. An electron (negative charge) must exist for every proton because the star as a whole must be charge neutral.
White blood cells engulf germs and then kill the germs by bathing them in poison — hydrogen peroxide.
The animal with the biggest heart is the biggest animal ever —-the blue whale. This mammal's heart is as big as a small car (like the Volkswagen Beetle: 907 kg, about 2000 pounds). Its main blood vessel (the aorta) is big enough for a man to crawl through. The heart beats slowly (5 or 6 times a minute)
. . More surprisingly — the hummingbird's heart, pumping in flight at 1,000 zippy times a minute —-is the biggest heart of all, relative to the animal's size. A whale's heart is only 0.5% of its body mass; whereas a hummer's heart is 2%. That's 4 times bigger than the whale's relative to the their respective body sizes.
Water is one of the few substances that expands when it changes to a solid —-silicon is another. Ice (in its ordinary form) always expands as it freezes and occupies about 1/9th more space than the same amount of liquid water.
. . Six frozen H2O molecules link together to form a hexagonal ring that floats like a life buoy bobbing on the water. As the temperature drops to freezing, these rings join to make ice — a crystal lattice ridden with tiny "ring" holes. The "holey" configuration is less dense than water's more "packed together" structure.
. . We can apply high pressure (30 to 50 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level) to produce ice that's about 40% denser than water.
Less than 100 miles west of the Red Sea, nestled in the Danakil Plain, lies Dakol, in northeastern Ethiopia. This place suffers the world's highest year-round average temperature --34 degrees C(94 F ), with highs of 52 degrees C (125 F). The flat, barren African plain --broken by an occasional volcanic cone-- stretches like a widening funnel to the sea. The plain drops at places to 145 meters (380') below sea level.
. . BTW, some atmospheric scientists question both the Al-'Aziziyah and Death Valley records. But, organizations such as the U.S. National Climatic Data Center list them as official. To be official, a temperature reading has to be from a thermometer that's been calibrated, and it has to be sheltered from the sun.
It's hard to say which are the top ten smartest animals, but here's my list: apes and monkeys, dolphins and some whales, dogs, cats, crows, ravens, parrots, pigs, squirrels, octopuses. [Why not list humans? It does --the very first one!]
During their growing season, 10,600 average-size leaves exhale each day enough oxygen for one resting healthy person to inhale that day.
. . How many plants is this? It depends on how many leaves a plant has. For example, a large tomato plant has about 250 leaves. So, about 45 tomato plants could provide enough oxygen. It takes 58 sq. m. (625 square feet) of grass to make enough oxygen. That's a small lawn, 7.6 meters on a side.
. . Questions like this are important for those thinking of how we will some day travel to Mars. Both spaceships and human habitations on planets like Mars would grow plants not only for food, but also to help supply oxygen.
I'm on a cool extraordinary --dense neutron star-- a corpse of a star. All that's left when a star 15 to 30 times bigger than our Sun went supernova and then coasted through space, cooling for 6 billion years or so. My neutron star is tiny-maybe a 20 km diameter (12-mile), that I can circumnavigate in 38 minutes, going 100 km/h (60 mph).
. . The atmosphere is only centimeters deep. I look into the sky through a telescope and see the darkness of space and a sprinkling of stars. The stars look strangely blue and squished into "flying saucer" disks by gravity effects. Gravity warps the surrounding space, which shortens the waves of incoming starlight. That shifts the color toward the blue end of the spectrum. The horizon is slightly curved because the star is much smaller than Earth.
. . The surface appears distorted; shapes are fat and compressed like those reflected by a circus "fun house" mirror. No major features exist. Gravity has leveled the terrain into a crystalline iron surface.
What is the new-car smell? We're essentially sniffing glue. The new car smell emanates from 40 volatile organic compounds — "primarily alkanes and substituted benzenes along with a few aldehydes and ketones".
. . Perhaps you also smell the "treated leather" odor of shoe stores. Tanned leather smells slightly rank so tanneries add an artificial "treated leather" fragrance. Some automakers spray this in their cars.
. . These days, you may not smell much. In December 2001, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) reported on a two-year study of the volatile organic compounds released by new cars. They found threats to health — especially in the first six months after car purchase — especially on a warm day — with the windows closed (and air conditioning off). As a result, automakers now try to eliminate such substances.
A scorpion is eight-legged; a cousin to spiders. About 25 species can and do kill people —-more than 5,000 yearly. In the United States and Mexico, scorpions kill more people than snakes do.
Women have about 11% more brain cells than men in the part of the brain (directly behind the forehead) that perceives language-in the cortical layers of the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex.
. . Men have more brain cells in the part of the brain (at the top of the spine) that regulates mating behavior —-the proptic area of the hypothalamus. Men have twice the volume as women.
306 people were tested: more than 90% still have good levels present of antibodies to the live virus in the smallpox vaccine. What's more, it doesn't matter much whether a person had been vaccinated last year or as far back as 1928. The levels were about the same.
The quasar light was only 4 billion light years away when it started toward us. So, the light had time to reach us. That's the light we are seeing now. How did the quasar get 27 billion light years away in only 4 billion years? Space is expanding at greater than light speed. "For a red shift 6 quasar, that means that the Universe has expanded by a factor of 7 since the quasar emitted its light." Expanding space stretches distances that light traveled through in the past.
Fingernails grow four times faster than toenails.
An outside observer sees me and my spaceship swell as I shove in the thruster. Soon we appear twice as large! As I hit 99.9997% of "c" (;ightspeed), my craft and I loom 410 times bigger than when we started. "E" becomes "m", as Einstein predicted.
A rocket is moving at some velocity close to the speed of light (for example, 0.8c, where c is light speed) relative to Earth. A missile leaves the rocket traveling at some velocity close to light speed (for example, 0.8c) relative to the rocket. What is the velocity of the missile relative to Earth?
. . Newton thought the two velocities simply add, which produces a pretty fast speed: 1.6c, relative to Earth. But, this is faster than light speed, which Einstein's relativity theory forbids.
. . Einstein says the two velocities combine in a more complicated way (see below) that, in this case, give a missile speed of 0.976c relative to Earth.
. . Here's the equation for combining the velocities (v1, v2):
. . (v1+ v2) / (1 + v1*v2/c*c)
Light waves oscillating through a medium goes slower than "c." How much slower depends on how much the light interacts with the medium's vibrating electrons. If the color (i.e., light frequency) matches the electron's natural or resonant frequency, the light interacts most and therefore slows most.
. . The electrons of air, water, and glass have a resonant frequency in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. (That's why glass absorbs ultraviolet rays from the Sun and protects you from sunburn.)
Human (and cat) eyes have two light sensors --rods and cones. We use the motion-detecting rods at night and the color-detecting cones in daytime. The rod sensors may not see stripes at night that the cones do so easily in bright daylight.
. . "Aha!" Zebras don't care how conspicuous they appear in the day. Lions, their predators, hunt at night. That's when zebras need to vanish and they do.
. . But also, "moving" camouflage works. The mingling stripes of a herd in motion may confuse a lion, making it difficult to pick a single target.
. . By the way, the zebra is a black animal with white stripes. An animal found in 1977 had white splotches and rows of white dots (poorly formed stripes) on a black background. So, striping results from suppressing the dark color (melanin).
Over continents, even on the hottest summer day, raindrops begin life as a snowflake.
You can spray wheast (a combination of whey and yeast) on your plants. Wheast is to ladybugs as catnip is to cats.
There's not a place in the universe that's safe forever; the universe is telling us, "Spread out, or wait around and die." – astronaut Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes in their novel, Encounter with Tiber.
. . The fossil record shows that mammals (like us) rarely survive more than four million years. It is prudent to spread out and colonize the Moon, for starters.
For the past 3.5 billion years, life has survived a steady extinction rate of one species per year. "We may be in the middle of a mass extinction. "It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause", says Richard Leakey, an African anthropologist. In the past 400 years, at least 640 species have disappeared.
Magnetotactic. [I just love the word. You can tell what it means without ever having encountered it before! (The ability to feel magnetism, as in a migrating bird.)]
The early ocean could have been almost twice as salty as that of today.
The loudest is the blue whale, which is also the biggest animal that ever lived [ the female is larger]. We have measured the foghorn blasts of the blue whale (and fin whales) at up to 188 decibels —-louder than the 180-decibel noise of a rocket launch.
. . Only males moan these enormous sounds, apparently searching the seas for a mate. Other whales can hear the calls up to 1000 miles (1600 km) away. Low frequency sound travels farther than high frequency and these frequencies are so low (about 10 to 39 hertz) that humans can barely hear some and cannot hear the lowest bellows at all.
During winter in the southern hemisphere, Earth is farther from the sun, so moves slower and has farther to go between the equinoxes than during the summer. So, winter is slightly longer than summer. [That's one reason Antarctica is colder.]
Dinosaurs were still around 100 million years ago when the first flowering plants appeared, but probably they didn't eat flowering plants. (We don't know why not but it might have contributed to dinosaur demise. Flowering plants exploded over the land.)
{If you like to eat Jello, DON'T read this!!] Gelatin is a colorless or slightly yellow, transparent protein made by boiling animal hide, bones, and connective tissues (i.e., gristle). Manufacturers most commonly boil cow parts to make gelatin but any animal will do.
. . They grind the bones and other parts, soak in a strong base to soften them, pass them through stronger and stronger acid solutions until the bones no longer look like bones. They boil the mess for hours and raise an incredible stink. The gelatin floats to the top. They skim off the gelatin from the boiling pot and dry it into a powder. Adding sugar, flavorings, and artificial color transforms it into Jell-O.
The blood pressure of an octopus is about a fifth that of humans. However, the octopus systolic pressure is twice that of a lobster. Mammals developed more efficient circulatory systems than non-mammals and have correspondingly higher blood pressures.
. . Their red blood cells are not equipped with hemoglobin (like ours and fish are) but rather with a poor oxygen carrier, called hemocyanin.
Poison ivy itches because your confused immune system thinks your body is under attack [--when it actually isn't]. Consequently, killer T-cells in your blood stream release enzymes and toxins that lay waste to the surroundings. Fluid oozes from blood and lymphatic vessels, flows over skin, and kills cells – both good guys and those chemically bound to the sap's active ingredient, urushiol. Your deadly T-cell liquid damages nerve cells and that makes you itch.
. . It's a case of false alarm. Poison-ivy sap and its urushiol are basically harmless to everything but us.
Ours is a flat Universe, which means that two parallel light rays will stay parallel forever. Isn't that nice? Space is not curved.
Trains are numbered much the same as railroad tracks. The idea behind the numbering is simple — so trains going in opposite directions don't collide. Even-numbered trains travel north and east. Odd-numbered trains travel south and west.
How do we know if the Big Bang theory is true?
. . A: On Sept. 19, 2002 University of Chicago astrophysicists announced a momentous discovery. Using a radio telescope (the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer, DASI) at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, they measured a tiny polarization of the fossil radiation that originated from almost the beginning of time, 14 billion years ago. They found that the microwave background radiation in adjacent patches of sky vibrates in slightly different directions. (Related: definitions of polarization and microwave. ) That may sound less momentous than it is. It means, though, that the Big Bang theory checks. The model predicts just such vibrations and. .. Bingo! We detected them.
After the Arctic tern, the next farthest migrating animal is the Gray Whale, with up to 20,000 km (12,430 mile) round-trip travel each year. A gray whale may live 40 years or more. Over her lifetime, she swims far: to the Moon --and back again!
If you dim a bulb's brightness by 50%, you lower the power consumed by 50% for fluorescent lights and almost as much —-40%-— for incandescent lights.
. . Modern dimmer switches chop up the electrical power by switching the power on and off 120 times a second. They use a transistor-like device called a triac (triode alternating current switch)
. . Dimming lights makes incandescent light bulbs last much longer (greater than 20 times longer at a 25% light level!) because the bulbs generate less heat.
American women, on the average, wear a size 8-wide shoe (American men: size 10.5) — Approximately 68% of American women wear shoes between the sizes of 6.5 and 9.5.
By 200 million years ago, the Pangaea continent had split into two parts: northern, Laurasia; and southern, Gondwana.
The heaviest *and animal ever recorded (according to the Guinness World of Records) was a male African bush elephant shot in Mucusso Angola on November 7, 1974. He weighed 12.2 tons (13.5 non-metric tons). They average of 4-7 tons (4 to 8 tons).
A starfish can —-not merely live after being split in two-— but repair itself and grow another starfish. Some starfish species (the species group, Linckia) can regenerate when chopped into tiny 1 cm (.4-inch) pieces. Each piece can develop into a whole starfish.
. . Starfish may grow new arms or bodies much the way we form fetuses —-by splitting unspecialized cells, called stem cells. We largely lose this ability upon birth, but not entirely. We can still, for example, grow new blood cells from stem cells.
. . Starfish (sea stars) aren't fish. They're echinoderms —-brainless creatures with a spiny skin covering an armor of tiny bone-like plates. Lacking a head, starfish sense light with eyespots at the end of each arm.
The average human adult brain weighs between 1.3 — 1.4 kg (2.9 and 3.1 pounds). A newborn's brain weighs 350 — 400 g (12 to 14 ounces). The growing fetus adds neurons (nerve cells) at a prodigious rate —-up to 250,000 cells a minute. The average number of neurons in the brain is 100 billion.
. . Nerve cells, however, are only one brain cell type. They're in a minority! Another type (glial cells) outnumbers neurons at least 10 to 1. Glial cells support brain structure, digest dead neurons, and insulate neurons. There are even more types of brain cells. So, the number of brain cells easily exceeds a trillion.
The Arctic gets about 20 -41 cm (8 to about 16") of water (rain or melted snow) each year. Dry Antarctica gets only 13 cm(5" ) and most of that falls along the coast. The inland Antarctic Plateau —-the world's largest and coldest desert-— receives only 5 cm (2").
. . For comparison, the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico gets between 10 — 30 cm (4 to 12") of moisture. A desert gets less than 10 inches (25 cm) of precipitation.
Scorpions evolved before dinosaurs— more than 450 million years ago.
A graviton is a hypothetical (we still haven't found any) elementary particle having no mass and no charge. We can think of the gravitational attraction between two objects as the exchange of gravitons. Gravitons are analogous to photons. Gravitons and photons —-both massless-— travel at the speed of light.
Do you get wetter dashing to your car in the rain or walking there?
. . Walking gets you 40% wetter.
The .410 would be called a 68-gauge shotgun.
. . The second "30" in the .30-30 rifle refers to the amount of early smokeless powder used.
Enzymes change one material into another, quickly, and are left unchanged themselves. A typical enzyme molecule can convert a thousand molecules per second, indefinitely. Enzymes are comprised of proteins.
When a perching bird (passerine) lands and its legs flex, its flexor tendons automatically tighten. This causes the toes to close around a branch.
Twenty years ago, it took 84 days for a broiler chicken to reach market size. Now it takes 42.
A quasar is the extraordinary bright center of a distant galaxy, whose energy is powered probably by the in-fall of matter into a supermassive black hole.
A whip cracks when its tip exceeds sound speed. Big dinosaurs (diplodocid sauropods) may have whipped their tails supersonically, too.
All scorpions glow in the dark —-even after death, even fossilized! A thin, transparent film (hyaline) in the outermost layer (cuticle) of their exoskeleton contains a protein that fluoresces. At night in the Arizona desert, you can see scorpions within a 20-foot radius by shining a black (ultraviolet) light around. They glow bright green-blue or green-yellow like scorpion jewels.
The ostrich egg is the largest egg laid by all living creatures --but the smallest bird egg in relation to the hen's size.
Round, latex balloons float for about eight to ten hours. Mylar balloons-the shiny fancy-shaped ones-last several days. HI-FLOAT costs about 5 cents a balloon; you squirt it inside the balloon to coat the interior.
The yolks of overcooked boiled eggs turn green because the iron of the yolk gets together with the sulfur of the egg white to form ferrous sulfide. The result is harmless and doesn't even taste bad.
The oldest living plant individual — King's holly (Lomatia tasmanica) — is 43,600 years old. The shiny-leaf plant bears pink flowers but neither fruit nor seeds. It can only reproduce itself by cloning genetically identical bushes. It must produce clones instead of seed since it has three sets of chromosomes (a triploid) instead of the normal two and is, therefore, sterile. Triploidy is so rare that it's unlikely the trait occurred twice in the same species. Thus, the fossil remnants came from the same individual as the plant living now.
. . Investigators found fossil leaf fragments identical to the living bush.
The Giant Tortoise lives the longest, about 177 years in captivity, and the gastrotrich (a minute aquatic animal) probably lives the shortest --as short as a three days.
. . If we just look at mammals, then primates are the longest lived group and humans are the longest lived of the primates: 122 years for one woman. She was Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived from 1875 to 1997.
. . Tiny shrews live the shortest: 1 to 1.5 years.
. . Interestingly, among primates, the bigger your brain, the longer you live.
The sperm whale has the heaviest brain: 7.82 kg (about 17.2 pounds). Elephants do pretty well too: 7.5 kg (about 16.5#) for an African elephant. A human, on the average, has a measly 1.5 kg (3.3#) brain.
. . Here's the brain to body weight ratio for some species: sperm whale 0.02 %, cow 0.08 %, African elephant 0.15 %, human 2.1 %, sparrow 4 %, and Spider Monkey 5 %.
Probably the chimpanzee is the next smartest animal, although bonobos are close contenders [& physically most like us]. Parrots are also adept at using tools and solving problems.
. . Chimps/Bonobos make tools —-hammer stones and anvils to crack nuts, leaf sponges to soak up water, and sticks to gather ants, to name a few.
Modern domestic cattle evolved from a single early ancestor, the aurochs (OW-rocks). These fierce animals stood 2 meters tall (6') and lived until recent times. Some think auroch domestication took place 10,000 years ago.
Humans have salivary amylase in their saliva to break starch into sugars. Salivary amylase is not found in carnivores. Digestion of starch begins in the mouth for species, like humans, whose saliva contains amylase.
. . Cats, but not dogs, evolved as obligate carnivores: heavy meat eaters that must eat meat to survive and few foods containing carbohydrates. Consequently, dogs can tolerate more starch than cats. In fact, a dog's pancreas produces three times more amylase.
The 540 kg (1200-pound) Manatee and the similar but smaller (270 kg; 600#) Dugong have two teats under their flippers: in front.
. . The tiny 7-pound Hyrax is a weird mixture in many ways. It's related to the Elephant! These little furry creatures with hoof-like nails look like hefty guinea pigs and live among rocks or in trees. A female has two nipples in front between her shoulders and four around her crotch.
. . Since all the living kin of elephants have two teats between their front legs (or flippers), perhaps their common ancestor --the Moeritheres-– did too. She was a pig-sized mammal living in northern Africa between 55 and 60 million years ago.
Horses have a small stomach (only 8.5 % of the whole digestive system, compared with 71 % for an ox) but a long digestive tract for breaking down cellulose.
. . Birds have a three-chambered stomach whereas a rodent has only one. Many rodents have to eat their food twice.
The house fly has one of the shortest life cycles known: a fleeting 20 to 30 days. Mating in the early summer, a few flies kick off a chain of events that produce millions of descendants by fall. In those few months, the original Adams and Eves will have launched ten generations.
. . Their typical life cycle flashes by like this: A female lays 100 to 150 white eggs – tiny things that look like long-grain rice. She lays 500 during her life. A half a day later if the weather's hot, the hundred or so eggs hatch into cream-white wiggly worm-like creatures called maggots.
. . About four days later, the maggots transform into brown pupae. The pupae stay quiet while the creatures inside work on their next change.
. . In another six days, the pupae begin to move slightly. Soon, the end of one cracks open and an adult fly squirms out. He flies away and his horde of brothers and sisters soon follow. Within a couple of days the adults find mates and start the next generation. Within a week or so they die. [So if you miss her w the swatter, you can feel that she'll die soon anyway!]
Air enters through valves along insect's sides. In most, these openings occur in pairs at each segment of their outside skeleton. Small muscles in the openings contract to close the valves and relax to open them and thus, control airflow. The valves remain closed most of the time and only open to bring in air or expel carbon dioxide.
. . The air then goes into a series of long, connected tubes called the tracheal trunk that run the length of the insect's body and branch repeatedly into smaller and smaller tubes and finally ends in fine thin-walled cells. These cells, called tracheole, are less than one micron in diameter (a little bigger than a flu virus). The successive branching reaches every cell in the insect's body, & insinuate themselves between cells.
Queen ants live the longest among insects: up to 28 years in captivity.
A thought experiment: suppose any animal in a pool of many species could reproduce with any other. What happens to the genes as a consequence of their flow through such a large system? Then, some individuals are better off in their locale because natural selection has favored them. What about, however, the next generation? A favored animal may pair with an animal adapted to a different environment. Their offspring would probably have a gene combination poorly adapted to either situation. The kids are worse off. [Therefore. "species "lockouts" evolved.]
Most animals are male or female, but snails, for example, are both. Poppies have both a male and a female part on the same flower. Corn has them in the same plant but not the same flower. Cannabis has separate male and female plants.
Coyotes and wolves can interbreed [dogs, too]. Their offspring live and reproduce. Apparently, male coyotes don't mate with female wolves. At least, their offspring don't survive.
The order Carnivora includes the cat, hyena, bear, weasel, seal, mongoose, civet and dog families. All have ancient origins: some 40-60 million years ago.
Chromium keeps stainless steel shiny in much the same way aluminum stays bright— chromium forms a tough oxide film that stops more corrosion. The film is self-healing
Poison from the skin of the world's most poisonous known creature --the tiny, 1.5-inch, Golden Poison Frog (Phyllobates terribilis). An average P. terribilis contains about one milligram of poison, which is enough to kill 10,000 mice --perhaps enough to kill 10 to 20 humans, if the poison reaches their bloodstreams.
. . This poison is found only among three poison frogs in Colombia and two poison birds in Papua, New Guinea.
. . Frogs grown in captivity, however, are not poisonous. "All evidence indicates that such frogs obtain the poisons unchanged from some creature in their diet."
The dark-brown long coarse hair of a mammoth was about 19 inches long. Beneath that was another woolly blanket to keep the big beast warm: yellowish brown fur about an inch long. Finally, beneath that, a three-inch layer of insulating fat.
Musical notations. The ancient Greeks and Romans did not use a five-line staff to indicate pitch. Instead of placing notes higher or lower on the staff, they used letters: for example, in English notation, "a g f c" indicated a series of four succeeding tones with the range of a quarter note. They placed rhythm signs above the letters to indicate how long each note should be held.
. . It is known as enchiriadic notation, i.e., the idea being to remind one of how a tune goes, rather than being notation as such.
. . About 50 whole compositions and fragments survive-perhaps two hours of ancient Greek and Roman music, in total. By the way, the Romans wrote music in Greek scores.
Beyond Pluto. We have discovered over 300 Kuiper Belt Objects since Jewitt and Luu discovered the first in 1992. Up to half the bodies have the same 3:2 mean motion resonance as Pluto does.
If you come across baby birds that have fallen from the nest before fledging, return them to the nest immediately. The mother bird does not reject the young.
No substance is harder than a diamond. No other material can scratch a diamond. Diamond's only hardness contender --beta-carbon nitride-- may or may not even exist. They've been struggling to make it since 1985, when it was theorized. No group has produced the material reliably in large quantities -—only atom-thick sandwiches.
At sea level, a large raindrop about 5 millimeters across (house-fly size) falls at the rate of 9 meters per second (20 miles per hour). Drizzle drops (less than 0.5 mm across, i.e., salt-grain size) fall at 2 meters per second (4.5 mph).
. . Air resistance increases with the square of the velocity.
. . Most drops are fairly round – the small ones spherical, larger ones flattened on the bottom by the airflow.
. . A falling human hurtles to the ground at a terminal velocity of about 125 miles per hour.
Mussels breathe through gills much like fish.
That solid-looking eggshell has about 10,000 pores that let oxygen in and carbon dioxide and water out.
The first concoction resembling ice cream was made in China during the Tang period (A.D. 618 to 907). Ice-cream makers for King Tang of Shang heated buffalo, cow, and goat milk together and then fermented the brew to form yogurt. They thickened the yogurt with flour and flavored it with camphor (an insect repellant, of all things). Refrigerating first, they served the confection to the king.
. . Tortoni, an owner of a Parisian cafι in the middle 1700s, first developed custard-based ice cream, made with egg yokes.
A lobster has a brain the size of a grasshopper's and is a collection of nerve endings, like an insect's nervous system. The tiny brain lacks a central nervous system and therefore cannot process pain signals. They're cooked alive because the meat spoils quickly.
Once, marshmallow makers went to marshes to find mallow root. Two thousand years ago in Egypt, people first pounded the gummy root of a mallow plant into a medicinal syrup and ointment. Marshmallows weren't fluffy then. French candy-store owners began making what we might call marshmallows in the mid 1800s.
. . By the late 1800s, the demand grew so large that manufacturers streamlined their process by adding starch and creating marshmallows in molds. About the same time, they substituted gelatin for the mallow-root gum.
Peanuts originated in South America, perhaps Brazil or Bolivia, and now are grown worldwide. Georgia grows nearly half the US crop.
. . The fruit (i.e., peanuts) develop a woody outer shell (the peanut shell) and the pointed fruits bury themselves: in the ground! They continue to mature underground but ripen at different times-anywhere from 90 to over 150 days –-which makes harvesting them tricky.
Although wine is naturally created only by live single-celled plants called yeasts, there are NO living organisms in finished wine.
Flint arrows date back 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, but no doubt men made arrows without stone points for untold ages before that.
Seven out of ten American adults wear some type of corrective lens. 5% of Americans have low vision even when wearing corrective lenses. These people suffer from retina disorder due to diabetes, cataracts, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration. 90% of Americans wear corrective lenses after age 49. The Inuits (Eskimos) were seldom shortsighted until recent times, when they began to attend schools.
No land vertebrate has had more than five digits for the past 340 million years. Early in limb evolution, digit number was not fixed. Some had eight.
Even identical twins can have biological differences. Identical twins do have the same genes but never the same mitochondria (which also contain genetic material). The mitochondria split into two different sets at the very first division of the fertilized egg-before twinning occurs.
When you pull on your finger to crack your knuckle, you create a partial vacuum in the knuckle joint. This, in turn, causes the gas in the fluid of your knuckle joint to come out of solution and form a bubble. The bubble expands the joint capsule by about 15 to 20%. All this happens fast enough that you can hear the gasses pop as they come out of solution.
. . You can't crack your knuckles again right away because the gas must go back into solution before it can pop out into a bubble when you pull on your finger. [So... you *want* to get arthritis?]
Guesses: We yawn to stay together and synchronize our activities. We yawn when we wake up and need to get moving. We yawn next most often when we get ready to go to sleep. A long time ago, when we were primitive peoples facing constant dangers, perhaps contagious yawning was a useful tool to manage the different activity transitions through the day.
. . A few yawning facts, tho:
. . Humans yawn before they're born, even in the first trimester of prenatal development. Ultrasonic scanners catch fetuses yawning and hiccupping at 11 weeks. Children up to about age five, yawn but not contagiously. From 5 to 11 they become increasing susceptible to "catching" a yawn from others.
. . Olympic athletes yawn on the starting line, students yawn before an exam, and musicians yawn before a concert begins. They yawn before a big activity change: the race, the test, the concert.
. . Schizophrenics rarely yawn.
. . Chimpanzees and apes yawn infectiously, just as we.
. . Cats, fish, and birds yawn
. . Myth: People yawn to take in more oxygen and the reason it's contagious is everyone in the stuffy room needs more oxygen. Provine proved this false in 1987 when he observed experiment subjects yawning even though breathing pure oxygen.
Why did the Babylonians base their number system on 60? I can understand 10 or 20 but 60?
. . Yes, 10 is easy to see: using the fingers. Twenty, also, is understandable: fingers and toes; the way Mayans may have started their number system. However, sixty does seem strange.
. . The Babylonians got their base-60 number system from the Sumerians –-a folk whose origins we know little about. The Sumerian culture started about 4000 BC in Mesopotamia (what is now southern Iraq).
. . The most commonly accepted theory holds that two earlier peoples merged and formed the Sumerians. Supposedly, one group based their number system on 5 and the other on 12. When the two groups traded together, they evolved a system based on 60 so both could understand it.
. . But how does one count by 12s? Maybe using the finger parts of four fingers? Finger parts instead of whole fingers.
. . The 360-degree circle is 4400 years old.
. . The base 60 of their number system lives on in our time and angle divisions.
Our trillion is equivalent to the U.K. billion.
The Dead Sea: down to about 40 meters (130'), the seawater has about 300 grams of salt per kilogram of seawater. That's about ten times the salinity of the oceans. Below 100 meters, though, the sea has 332 grams of salt per kilogram of seawater and is saturated. Salt then precipitates out and piles up on the bottom of the sea.
. . Its surface is about 400 meters (1300') below sea level; the lake reaches a depth of another 400 meters below its surface.
Different species see different primary colors. Birds are sensitive to red. Bees are blind to red but can see ultraviolet-beyond our range of color perception. Dogs can barely perceive any color.
. . Human eyes have two types of cells for absorbing light: rods and cones. You see little color at night. Consequently, the rods, used mostly for night vision, detect primarily light and dark. The cones detect color and favor some colors over others. They absorb blue, green, and red light best. That's why those colors are called "primary."
You have to be high enough to look down on the rainbow so that sunlight, beaming in from behind, shines through raindrops falling below you. Then you can see the whole circle rainbow.
. . Looking at your garden hose spray, you can see most of the rainbow circle, but not the bottom part shaded by your body. A mountain won't work for a full circle. On a mountain peak --no matter how high-- droplets on the part of the circle below the antisolar point will be shaded by the mountain.
Energy waste: Idle for more than 10 seconds (except in traffic) and you're wasting gas and money, according to the Office of Efficiency in Canada.
. . Ovens: Cook food until it's done. Roasting meat costs only about 22 cents. Don't preheat the oven, though. That wastes money and energy unless you're baking biscuits, for example, for a short time at high temperatures.
. . The efficiency experts say: turn off the television when you're not watching it. That's a cute trick, however. Clicking the "off" button on the remote control sure won't do it. The thing is still on in "standby" mode. TVs left in standby consume about 15% of the total TV energy spent. Pull the plug. A 27-inch color TV costs 1.3 cents for an hour's watch.
. . Turn off your computer and monitor (and printer and copier) if you don't plan to use them in the next half hour. What hurts these days is head-disk wear rather than electrical surges and thermal cycling of start up. Of course, turning off a computer (for REAL) is as hard as turning off a TV. Use the off switch on a surge protector.
The Egyptians, in 3000 BC, developed a mixture similar to modern concrete by using lime and gypsum as binders. But the Romans used it much more.
Fans create a wind that cools you for a couple of reasons. The warmth of your body heats a thin layer of air next to your skin. Like someone ripping a blanket off, wind blows the warm air away. A breeze also blows water vapor away from your skin, which lowers the humidity, increases the evaporation rate, and cools you, like stepping out of a humid shower cools your body.
A high-voltage transmission line loses about 3% to 4 % of the energy sent over it.
The definition of noise depends on what makes the noise. Water dripping into a quiet pool soothes us but from a leaky faucet into a sink does not.
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