Saturday, 18 October 2014
20 Strange & Interesting Facts About Microsoft, Google & Apple
No three companies can be more different, but they affect our lives in the same way.Microsoft, the oldest of the three, has the iron grip on desktop computing. Apple, next born, is about personal style thanks to iconic products like the Mac and the iPod.Google, the youngest, but arguably the most vivacious of the lot, has a finger in any pie that has to do with the internet (and beyond).But how well do we know these three that are with us 24×7?Every great company has a story behind its legend. Strange and interesting facts and anecdotes about behemoths such as these demonstrate that it’s not always about bits, bytes, multi-billion dollar revenues and lawsuits.
Interesting Facts About Google
- 1. The well known “˜Don’t be evil’ is actually an informal motto of Google. It is a reference to their corporate philosophy which says that you can make money without being evil. It was coined by Paul Buchheit, the man behind Gmail.
- 2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know too much about HTML. That’s why the first homepage had a very bare bones design. The simple design caused people to just sit there looking at the screen during initial tests. Test users were actually waiting for the “rest of the page to load”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was added as a line as an end of page marker.
- 3. Just so you know: “˜to google’ became a verb in 2006 when both Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary as well as the Oxford English Dictionary recognized it. It of course means – to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.
- 4. Users can search for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth’s orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface if they decide to make contact one day.
- 5. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin assembled their first server to test the PageRank code, they housed ten 4 Gigabyte HDD in a cabinet made of Lego bricks.
- 6. Google’s core search engine ranking system is called PageRank. Each page is assigned a rank that determines its ranking in the search engine results. But the term is not taken from its function; it’s actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page. In the early days it was called BackRub.
- 7. How much energy does a single Google Search take up? Google says it’s about 1KJ (Kilo Joules). In green terms, it’s approximately equal to .2g of CO2 emitted per search. See it compared against everyday activities.
Interesting Facts About Microsoft
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.” ““ Bill Gates
- 8. The first Operation System Microsoft coded was Xenix, which was a version of UNIX under a different name. But it was MS-DOS made for IBM PCs that gave it a foothold in the software market.
- 9. Bill Gates wrote a class scheduling program for his school. He tweaked the program’s code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
- 10. Microsoft fashioned the use of code names for under-development software and systems. For instance, Windows 7 was “˜Vienna’. Wikipedia has a complete list.
- 11. Did you know that you can’t create a folder named “˜con’ in Windows?
- 12. The first Windows virus was called Winver 1.4.
- 13. The name of its search engine “˜Bing’ has its origins in Bingo. Just like the game, it was meant to suggest that something looked for has been found or realized. “˜Bang’ was also proposed because it was memorable, short, and easy to spell. Finally, Bing was chosen for the same reasons.
- 14. Ironically, Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit is one of the largest developers of Macintosh software outside of Apple Inc. Also, Microsoft Office for Mac was introduced for Macintosh in 1989, a year before Office was released for Windows.
Interesting Facts About Apple
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.” ““ Steve Jobs (on Mac OS X’s Aqua user interface)
- 15. Fortune magazine named Apple as the most admired company in the United States in 2008; and in the world in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
- 16. The original Apple logo had Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. It was replaced by the one we are more familiar with. To differentiate the silhouette of the apple from a cherry, the “˜bite’ was put in.
- 17. “˜Macintosh’ is in fact a variety of apple. It also was the first commercially successful personal computer that resembles the ones we use today. It was the first ones to have a graphical user interfaces (GUI) and mouse instead of command line interfaces.
- 18. Apple also made one of the first consumer digital cameras. The Apple QuickTake, launched in 1994 was discontinued in 1997. The camera could shoot and store eight photos at 640×480 resolution, 32 photos at 320×240 resolutions, or a mixture of both sizes.
- 19. Apple had a third founder besides Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ronald Wayne had a 10% stake in the company. He forfeited his share to the new company for a total of $2,300. All three partners worked at Atari before they started Apple. Ronald Wayne drew the first Apple logo, wrote the three men’s original partnership agreement and wrote the Apple I manual. He has never owned an Apple product.
- 20. The flag bearer for Apple Inc, the Macintosh, wasn’t the brainchild of the two Steve’s. Jef Raskin an expert in human-computer interaction started and inspired the Apple Macintosh line. He also coined the name.
Thursday, 9 October 2014
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Beer
Sate your thirst for knowledge with these facts about beer's ancient origins, health benefits and surprising chemistry.
By Christian Millman|Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Shutterstock
1. The oldest known recipe is for a 4,000-year-old beer made by the Sumerians.
2. In the 1980s, Anchor Brewing re-created these ancient Fertile Crescent suds.
3. Sumeria’s neighbors, the Egyptians,
built the pyramids under the influence. Workers at Giza received about
four liters of beer a day, according to Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular
archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
4. Beer (in part because it contains antimicrobial ethanol) was a healthier drink than polluted Nile river water.
5. Ethanol, the intoxicant in beer, is a
powerful antiseptic, but not a good cold remedy. The optimal blood
alcohol content to kill germs would be more than 60 percent. Alas,
that’d kill you, too. (Fatal alcohol poisoning occurs between 0.40 and
0.50 percent.)
6. Salud! Researchers at the University
of Western Ontario found that micronutrients called polyphenols in one
12-ounce (0.35-liter) bottle of beer create protective levels of plasma
antioxidants that can prevent heart disease.
7. But at three bottles a day, the
cardiovascular benefits of beer are reversed by the pro-oxidants your
body creates as it metabolizes excess ethanol.
8. Another side effect, beer farts, might
earn you an offer for a bung — the large cork that seals a cask’s
bunghole to allow beer to ferment properly.
9. In Great Britain alone, 93,000 liters of beer are rumored to be lost each year in facial hair.
10. You might have known that fact if you
were a beer expert, or cerevisaphile — a word derived from the Latin
name of the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres, and vis, meaning strength.
Ernie Mastroianni/DISCOVER
11. More
on-tap trivia: “Aplenty bahl steinber horn!” means “A really great
beer!” in Boontling, a folk language developed by workers in the hop
fields of California’s Anderson Valley.
12. Hops, the bittering agent in beer, belong to the
family Cannabaceae, making them marijuana’s close cousins and lending a
little perspective to the term “hopped up.”
13. Trippy: Stanford researchers found that beer bubbles create a gravity-defying loop. Bubbles head up in the center where frictional drag from the glass is less and down on the outside as the top gets crowded.
14. While you’re examining your beer, try an experiment: Tilt the glass to see if foam adheres to the side. If it does, that’s called “Brussels lace,” considered by some to be a sign of high-quality beer — and clean glasses.
15. Experimenting with beer has taken many forms. John Lubbock, an 18th-century naturalist, studied the behavior of beer-boozy ants.
16. If the wandering drunken insects stumbled upon sober comrades from the same nest, they were carefully carried back home to sleep it off. Drunken strangers met a different fate: They got tossed.
17. According to a study from the London Business School, political differences dictate American beverage choice: Conservatives prefer domestic pours such as Busch to imports like Guinness.
18. Speaking of Guinness, to pour a perfect pint of the company’s stout, you need to let it rest for exactly 119.5 seconds between the first pour and the top-up — a period called the surge and settle.
19. That’s when nitrogen comes out of solution and forms a creamy head.
20.What do you call the study and practice of yeast fermentation in brewing? (Hint: It’s also the last word in many dictionaries, as well as in this issue of DISCOVER.) Zymurgy.
13. Trippy: Stanford researchers found that beer bubbles create a gravity-defying loop. Bubbles head up in the center where frictional drag from the glass is less and down on the outside as the top gets crowded.
14. While you’re examining your beer, try an experiment: Tilt the glass to see if foam adheres to the side. If it does, that’s called “Brussels lace,” considered by some to be a sign of high-quality beer — and clean glasses.
15. Experimenting with beer has taken many forms. John Lubbock, an 18th-century naturalist, studied the behavior of beer-boozy ants.
16. If the wandering drunken insects stumbled upon sober comrades from the same nest, they were carefully carried back home to sleep it off. Drunken strangers met a different fate: They got tossed.
17. According to a study from the London Business School, political differences dictate American beverage choice: Conservatives prefer domestic pours such as Busch to imports like Guinness.
18. Speaking of Guinness, to pour a perfect pint of the company’s stout, you need to let it rest for exactly 119.5 seconds between the first pour and the top-up — a period called the surge and settle.
19. That’s when nitrogen comes out of solution and forms a creamy head.
20.What do you call the study and practice of yeast fermentation in brewing? (Hint: It’s also the last word in many dictionaries, as well as in this issue of DISCOVER.) Zymurgy.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Gravity
The
apple of Newton's eye and the focus of Einstein's work, gravity is
weaker than you probably think and weirder than you probably imagined.
By Bill Andrews|Friday, July 19, 2013
Illustration: Alison Mackey/Discover, Apple: Thinkstock
1. Star Wars'
Obi-Wan Kenobi said the Force “surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds
the galaxy together.” He could have been talking about gravity. Its
attractive properties literally bind the galaxy together, but it also
“penetrates” us, extending physically through us, keeping us bound to
Earth.
2. Unlike the Force, with its dark and light sides, gravity has no duality; it only attracts, never repels.
3. NASA is trying to develop tractor
beams that could move physical objects, creating an attractive force
that would trump gravity.
4. Passengers on amusement park rides and
the International Space Station experience microgravity — incorrectly
known as zero gravity — because they fall at the same speed as the
vehicles.
5. Someone who weighs 150 pounds on Earth
would — if it were possible to stand on Jupiter — weigh a whopping 354
pounds on the enormous gas giant. Larger masses have greater gravity.
6. To leave Earth’s gravitational pull behind, an object must travel 7 miles a second, our planet’s escape velocity.
7. Gravity is by far the weakest of the
four fundamental forces. The other three are electromagnetism; weak
nuclear force, which governs how atoms decay; and strong nuclear force,
which holds atomic nuclei together.
8. A dime-size magnet has enough electromagnetic force to overcome all of Earth’s gravity and stick to the fridge.
9. An apple didn't hit Isaac Newton in
the head, but it did make him wonder if the force that makes apples fall
influences the moon’s motion around Earth.
10. The apple in Newton’s eye led to the first inverse square law in science, F = G * (mM)/r2. This means an object twice as far away exerts a quarter of the gravitational pull.
11. Gravity’s inverse square law also means the reach of gravitational attraction is technically infinite. Whoa.
12. Gravity’s other definition — meaning something weighty or serious — came first, originating from the Latin gravis, or “heavy.”
13. The force of gravity accelerates
everything at the same rate, regardless of weight. If you dropped balls
of the same size but different weights from a rooftop, they would hit
the ground at the same time. The heavier object’s greater inertia
cancels out any speed it might have over the lighter object.
14. Einstein’s general theory of
relativity was the first to treat gravity as a distortion of space-time,
the “fabric” that physically embodies the universe.
15. Anything with mass warps the
space-time surrounding it. In 2011, NASA’s Gravity Probe B experiment
showed Earth tugs on the universe around it like a wooden ball spinning
in molasses, exactly as Einstein predicted.
16. When distorting the space-time around
it, a massive object sometimes redirects light that passes through it,
just as a glass lens does. Gravitational lensing can effectively magnify
a distant galaxy or smear its light into a strange shape.
17. The “Three-Body Problem,” determining
all the patterns three objects orbiting each other could take if
influenced only by gravity, has puzzled physicists for 300 years. So far
they’ve found only 16 types of solutions — 13 of them just discovered
this March.
18. Although the other three fundamental
forces play nice with quantum mechanics — the science of the very small —
gravity is stubbornly incompatible with it; quantum equations break
down if they try to include gravity. How to reconcile these two
completely accurate but opposing descriptions of the universe is one of
physics’ biggest questions.
19. To understand gravity better,
scientists are looking for gravitational waves, ripples in space-time
that result from things like black holes colliding and stars exploding,
according to Amber Stuver, a physicist at Louisiana’s Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
20. Once LIGO researchers successfully
detect gravitational waves, they’ll be able to use them to see the
cosmos as never before. “Every time we’ve looked at the universe in a
new way,” Stuver says, “it revolutionized our understanding of the
universe.” Talk about heavy.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Failure
Next time you see the F-word, remember you're in good company.
By Jonathon Keats|Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Shutterstock
1.
Alfred Nobel considered himself a failure. After a newspaper’s
premature obituary dubbed him “the merchant of death,” the inventor of
dynamite set out to improve his reputation by establishing prizes in
peace, literature and the sciences.
2. Only one scientist has won a Nobel
for failing. In the 1880s, Albert Michelson tried to measure the
“luminiferous ether” that scientists thought was the carrier of light.
He couldn’t find it, because it didn’t exist. Michelson had
inadvertently discovered that light carries itself, though it would take
a patent office clerk named Albert Einstein to explain it. The short
version: E = mc2.
3. Several scientific journals now specialize in publishing failed experiments, including the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine and the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis.
4. Getting scientists to fess up to failure ain’t easy. After just over a year, the Journal of Errology managed to attract only two papers and called it quits.
5. Google budgets for failure and its
potential insight. Employees can spend 20 percent of each workday on
their own projects even though 80 percent of Google ventures fail.
6. The first product manufactured by
Sony, shortly after World War II, was an electric rice cooker. Handy,
except that it undercooked or burned the rice. Failing to sell a single
one, the company tried an even dicier new gadget: a tape recorder.
7. On average, 10 percent of U.S. companies go out of business annually.
8. And corporate extinctions follow a
pattern: A low-level attrition rate is occasionally punctuated by many
companies failing at once. The economist Paul Ormerod has found that the
relationship between severity and frequency follows a power law — mass
failure is exponentially rarer than everyday attrition.
9. The pattern seems to be natural. Over the past half-billion years, the extinction of species has followed that same power law.
10. Henry Ford’s Edsel was the dodo of automobiles, but Ford had far worse ideas.
11. His biggest failure? Fordlandia, a
2.5 million-acre rubber plantation in the Amazon. With characteristic
efficiency, Ford planted rubber trees in tight formation. Fordlandia was
efficient — as a buffet for caterpillars.
12. The nonprofit Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has monitored the skies for alien
communication for 53 years, and scientists have yet to hear a single
word.
13. Talk about failure to communicate: In
1999, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in Martian orbit
because navigation software used metric units while the thrusters were
programmed to follow English measurements.
14. In case you’re thinking of signing up
for Dennis Tito’s 2018 voyage to the Red Planet, better remember
Biosphere 2, a prototype Martian settlement in the Arizona desert. Most
of the animals went extinct, and the eight human inhabitants were nearly
asphyxiated.
15. Biosphere 2 is now studied by
environmental scientists to reckon why humans can’t maintain a
sustainable environment on Biosphere 1, aka planet Earth.
16. One failure leads to another. The
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania went into partial
meltdown after someone spilled a cup of water.
17. The dumped water triggered a safety fuse, which shut down a coolant pump, causing the reactor to overheat.
18. Nobody noticed the overheating because the warning light was covered by a repair tag. D’oh!
19. The Large Hadron Collider suffered a
catastrophic failure after just nine days when a solder connection
melted, igniting a bottle of supercooled liquid helium. Fourteen months
later, the LHC failed again after a bird dropped a piece of bread on
some exposed electronics.
20. Scientists fretted that the repaired
LHC would fail to find a Higgs boson, the missing piece in the standard
model of physics. But finding a Higgs was the least of our problems. The
measured value of the particle shows that the universe itself is
unstable and — in perhaps a billion billion years — will fail just like
everything else.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Superstition
Knock on wood or not, superstition appears to have played a positive role in evolution and it continues to affect human behavior. Lucky us.
By Rebecca Coffey|Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Burial sites, such as Hallan Cemetery in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, often evoke superstitious ideas about death.
Ronald Sumners/Shutterstock
1.
Modern Halloween celebrations focus on fun frights, but superstitions
associated with the holiday’s ancestor, the Celtic festival of the dead,
were no laughing matter. Families left “treats” for departed loved ones
to discourage nasty “tricks” from beyond the grave.
2. On Halloween, 18th-century Scottish
villagers drove sheep through hoops of rowan branches to protect them
from ghostly mischief, including sickness.
3. The ritual may have arisen from
observing that sheep nibbling rowanberries were healthier; the berries
contain sorbic acid, which has anti-fungal properties.
4. Dowsers believe the forked rod or
pendulum they hold vibrates as they pass over underground water, but
there’s no science to support the notion. In fact, as early as the 19th
century, dowsing doubters such as French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul
suggested the vibrations came from intentional muscle movements.
5. The German government tested 500
dowsers in the 1980s. Six “showed an extraordinarily high rate of
success, which can scarcely if at all be explained as due to chance,”
the study says.
6. In further tests, they could not replicate their “extraordinary” results. Oops.
7. Evolutionary biologist Kevin Foster defines superstitions as incorrect identifications of causal links.
8. Foster doesn’t consider “superstition” pejorative: You don’t need to understand cause to benefit from a behavior.
9. Believing that rustling grass always
means a predator is approaching, for example, means you’ll hoof it
whenever you hear the sound, whether it’s caused by wind or a hungry
lion.
10. You’ll live to share your
superstition with your children, they’ll tell their children and so on,
protecting your progeny from grass-rustling lions. Foster believes that,
among early humans, natural selection favored the superstitious.
11. Superstition can still be a plus —
sort of. German researchers reported in 2010 that the more strongly
participants believed in their good luck charms, the more confident they
were.
12. The study also showed that the more
confident superstitious participants were, the better they performed,
perhaps due to self-efficacy — the belief in one’s ability to succeed at
a specific challenge — which has been linked to how willing people are
to persist at a given task.
13. Or maybe brains trump beliefs: In
1974, researchers in the state of Georgia found smart high school
students were less superstitious than those of average intelligence.
14. Is superstition for the birdbrained?
In the 1940s, B. F. Skinner gave eight pigeons food at fixed intervals.
Between feedings, six repeated the behavior they were doing when the
food first appeared, which Skinner likened to card players’ lucky
rituals.
15. Charms or rituals may boost
confidence, but an “unlucky” number can nix it. In 1993, researchers
near London reported that, over a three-year period, highway traffic was
lighter on Friday the 13th than on Friday the 6th. Yet, inexplicably,
on the 13th, road accidents sent 52 percent more people to hospitals.
16. Superstition can be even uglier. In
2009, Interpol calculated the lifetime incidence of rape for South
African women at 1 in 2, with nearly half of victims younger than 18,
likely due to a myth that sex with a virgin can cure a man of AIDS.
17. Does stress create superstition?
After the 1991 Gulf War, a Tel Aviv psychologist found that Israelis in
cities attacked by SCUD missiles were more superstitious than residents
of SCUD-free cities.
18. In 2008, an American study found
participants more likely to perceive connections between unrelated
events when first asked to recall a time when they lacked control.
19. In parts of Asia, many couples plan to have children during “lucky” years.
20. World Bank researchers found
Vietnamese children born in “lucky” years are healthier and better
educated, but possibly because they were born into families emotionally
and financially prepared for them.“Luck” may have had nothing to do with
it.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hunger
Get the skinny on why tummies rumble and how we might feed the world.
By Tasha Eichenseher|Wednesday, December 11, 2013
bildungsr0man/Flickr
2. Two billion people worldwide already rely on bugs for protein. One serving of caterpillar has more protein than a serving of beef.
3. Better than relying on the flesh of your traveling companions, like the survivors of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes. They ate the frozen bodies of their families and friends.
4. Hunger’s pangs don’t take long to kick in. Go a few hours without food, and grumbling ensues as continuous waves of muscle movement release pockets of gas in the intestines.
5. Eventually you start to burn fatty acids instead of glucose for fuel. And a few days into a fast, your body starts to feed on its own proteins. So, yes, your stomach will eat itself.
6. Without calories, your body will no longer be able to produce enough glucose for your big brain (and it needs a lot — about the daily equivalent of the sugar found in three cans of soda). Instead of shutting down, it resorts to using ketone, a fatty acid derivative.
7. Early humans’ ability to switch to another staple in this way may be what allowed us to outlast other primate species.
8. The discomfort and weakness that mark this stage of hunger is nothing compared with kwashiorkor, extreme malnutrition that causes a distended belly and swelling of the liver. But the No. 1 cause of death in people who are starving is heart failure due to extreme tissue and organ damage.
9. Nearly 1 billion people will go to bed hungry tonight, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. And 200 million of them will be children. Lack of vitamins and nutrients, especially in a child’s first year, can affect brain growth and intelligence.
10. Some studies have found that iron deficiency, another consequence of malnutrition, may drive anemics to eat clay and soil.
11. Nearly 30 percent of pregnant women crave nonfood items, an eating disorder called pica — from the Latin word for magpie, a bird known to eat anything.
12. Studies have traced cravings for high-calorie meals back to caveman days, when hunters and gatherers needed to store energy between unpredictable mealtimes. Now our cravings for fatty and sugary foods, which release chemicals that can trigger mild euphoria, spur obesity and diabetes.
13. Refined carbs can make you hungrier by interfering with messages the digestive system sends to the brain to signal it’s time to put down the doughnut.
14. A 2004 brain-imaging study revealed that even thinking about a favorite food triggered release of dopamine, a feel-good hormone also produced during sex and drug use.
15. Food for thought: A 2007 study found that women who tried to quit thinking about chocolate ended up eating 50 percent more than those who were encouraged to talk about their cravings.
16. Suppressing hunger or appetite, normally the job of a hormone called leptin, is a multibillion-dollar industry in the U.S.
17. New research indicates that people carrying the obesity gene FTO keep pumping out the hormone ghrelin, which tells the brain to eat again.
18. But some of the highest levels of ghrelin have been observed in anorexia patients.
19. A body can hold out only for so long. In the early 1980s, 10 fasting imprisoned members of the Irish Republican and Irish National Liberation armies lasted 46 to 73 days before dying of starvation.
20. On the other hand, a little hunger may go a long way. Studies in rodents show reducing daily calorie intake by 30 percent can lower risk for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and increase longevity. So much for an appetite for life.
Saturday, 4 October 2014
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hunger
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hunger
Get the skinny on why tummies rumble and how we might feed the world.
By Tasha Eichenseher|Wednesday, December 11, 2013
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hunger
Get the skinny on why tummies rumble and how we might feed the world.
2. Two billion people worldwide already rely on bugs for protein. One serving of caterpillar has more protein than a serving of beef.
3. Better than relying on the flesh of your traveling companions, like the survivors of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes. They ate the frozen bodies of their families and friends.
4. Hunger’s pangs don’t take long to kick in. Go a few hours without food, and grumbling ensues as continuous waves of muscle movement release pockets of gas in the intestines.
5. Eventually you start to burn fatty acids instead of glucose for fuel. And a few days into a fast, your body starts to feed on its own proteins. So, yes, your stomach will eat itself.
6. Without calories, your body will no longer be able to produce enough glucose for your big brain (and it needs a lot — about the daily equivalent of the sugar found in three cans of soda). Instead of shutting down, it resorts to using ketone, a fatty acid derivative.
7. Early humans’ ability to switch to another staple in this way may be what allowed us to outlast other primate species.
8. The discomfort and weakness that mark this stage of hunger is nothing compared with kwashiorkor, extreme malnutrition that causes a distended belly and swelling of the liver. But the No. 1 cause of death in people who are starving is heart failure due to extreme tissue and organ damage.
9. Nearly 1 billion people will go to bed hungry tonight, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. And 200 million of them will be children. Lack of vitamins and nutrients, especially in a child’s first year, can affect brain growth and intelligence.
10. Some studies have found that iron deficiency, another consequence of malnutrition, may drive anemics to eat clay and soil.
11. Nearly 30 percent of pregnant women crave nonfood items, an eating disorder called pica — from the Latin word for magpie, a bird known to eat anything.
12. Studies have traced cravings for high-calorie meals back to caveman days, when hunters and gatherers needed to store energy between unpredictable mealtimes. Now our cravings for fatty and sugary foods, which release chemicals that can trigger mild euphoria, spur obesity and diabetes.
13. Refined carbs can make you hungrier by interfering with messages the digestive system sends to the brain to signal it’s time to put down the doughnut.
14. A 2004 brain-imaging study revealed that even thinking about a favorite food triggered release of dopamine, a feel-good hormone also produced during sex and drug use.
15. Food for thought: A 2007 study found that women who tried to quit thinking about chocolate ended up eating 50 percent more than those who were encouraged to talk about their cravings.
16. Suppressing hunger or appetite, normally the job of a hormone called leptin, is a multibillion-dollar industry in the U.S.
17. New research indicates that people carrying the obesity gene FTO keep pumping out the hormone ghrelin, which tells the brain to eat again.
18. But some of the highest levels of ghrelin have been observed in anorexia patients.
19. A body can hold out only for so long. In the early 1980s, 10 fasting imprisoned members of the Irish Republican and Irish National Liberation armies lasted 46 to 73 days before dying of starvation.
20. On the other hand, a little hunger may go a long way. Studies in rodents show reducing daily calorie intake by 30 percent can lower risk for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and increase longevity. So much for an appetite for life.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Neanderthals
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Neanderthals
The hominids are depicted as degenerate and slouching because the first Neanderthal skeleton found happened to be arthritic.
By Jonathon Keats|Friday, September 05, 2014
1. You’re pretty
much a Neanderthal. While it’s been more than 5 million years since we
parted ways with chimps, it has been only 400,000 since human and
Neanderthal lineages split.
2. If you’re Asian or Caucasian, your
ancestors interbred with Neanderthals as recently as 37,000 years ago,
when they crossed paths in Europe.
3. And that sex had benefits. Inherited
Neanderthal genes come in alleles that help fight off nasty viruses such
as Epstein-Barr — associated with several kinds of cancer, says
Stanford University immunologist Laurent Abi-Rached.
4. If you want to know how much
Neanderthal DNA you carry, just swab your cheek and send it to the
National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project. Or you could have
your entire genome sequenced as Ozzy Osbourne did in 2010. Researchers
found a telltale Neanderthal segment on his chromosome 10.
5. Now that the whole Neanderthal genome
has been sequenced, Harvard geneticist George Church thinks a clone
could be gestated in a human surrogate mother. It could even be
beneficial, he believes, because the Neanderthal mind might be able to
solve problems we can’t.
6. Practically nobody believed you could
read a Neanderthal’s genes until 2010, when the paleogeneticist Svante
Pääbo successfully sequenced DNA from three Neanderthal skeletons found
in Croatia.
7. The first evidence of Neanderthals was
discovered in 1856. Miners in Germany’s Neander Valley found fossils
thought to belong to a cave bear. A local natural historian begged to
differ. He reckoned the strange bones were the remains of a lost Cossack
suffering from rickets.
8. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species
three years later. In the context of Darwin’s theories of evolution,
the bones were re-examined by anatomist William King, who promptly named
them Homo neanderthalensis, a name that provocatively (and incorrectly) suggested they were the missing link between apes and humans.
9. As late as the mid-1970s, creationists
were still claiming Neanderthal fossils were the remains of modern
humans with acromegaly or arthritis.
10. Paleontologist Marcellin Boule would
have been well advised to study pathology. Between 1909 and 1911, he
reconstructed the first skeleton of a Neanderthal — who happened to be
arthritic. Thus was born the degenerate, slouching image of
Neanderthals.
11. They were the ultimate craftsmen,
able to pick up impressive skills through practice, but none too
creative, say anthropologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L.
Coolidge of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
12. Credit Neanderthals with a couple of
great ideas: They made spears by hafting stone points to wooden shafts,
and bonding them with glue.
13. They threw those spears at bison and
woolly rhinoceros, resulting in hunting injuries that would end the
career of a linebacker.
14. Not that a maimed Neanderthal could
afford to retire. Instead they nursed each other back to health,
enlisting their greatest concept of all: empathy.
15. They also had medicine. Traces of
chamomile and yarrow, two anti-inflammatories, have been detected in the
plaque on Neanderthal teeth.
16. Or are these pungent traces of haute
cuisine? Neanderthals balanced their carnivorous diets with vegetables
roasted over smoky fires.
17. And they had a sense of style.
Archaeologists have recovered a yellow pigment in southern Spain that
may have been used as foundation for their skin.
18. Evidently Spain was the place to be
if you were a Neanderthal with cultural pretensions. Last summer,
paintings in El Castillo Cave on the Pas River were found to be at least
40,800 years old.
19. They were better painters than talkers. The anatomy of their vocal tracts would have prevented them from sounding some vowels.
20. In any case, we lost our chance at
conversation, since they died out some 25,000 years ago. Their last
refuge was Gibraltar, now a haven for tax evaders.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... 3-D Printing
20 Things You Didn't Know About... 3-D Printing
3-D printing is all the hype these days, but there's a lot about the technology that you don't know.
By Christian Millman|Wednesday, February 26, 2014
1.
We’ve heard so much hype about the wonder of 3-D printers, but they
aren’t really printers at all. They’re “additive manufacturers” more
akin to Star Trek’s replicators, building incredibly complex
three-dimensional objects by spraying materials in successive layers
through special nozzles.
2. Unlike Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, you can’t yet order “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” but several foodstuffs are already in testing, including scallops, cookies and burritos.
3. Mmmmm, burritos. Thingiverse, an online community for sharing 3-D designs, has dozens of templates for print-at-home bongs, bubblers and other items that elicit the munchies.
4. From spaced-out to space itself: NASA is sending a 3-D printer to the International Space Station so its crew can build spare parts — a far cry from the 1970 Apollo 13 misadventure when that crew stayed alive by MacGyvering a carbon dioxide filter using duct tape, cardboard and a plastic bag.
2. Unlike Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, you can’t yet order “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” but several foodstuffs are already in testing, including scallops, cookies and burritos.
3. Mmmmm, burritos. Thingiverse, an online community for sharing 3-D designs, has dozens of templates for print-at-home bongs, bubblers and other items that elicit the munchies.
4. From spaced-out to space itself: NASA is sending a 3-D printer to the International Space Station so its crew can build spare parts — a far cry from the 1970 Apollo 13 misadventure when that crew stayed alive by MacGyvering a carbon dioxide filter using duct tape, cardboard and a plastic bag.
The Liberator printed gun.
Gastev via Flickr
5. Speaking of MacGyver,
the TV character hated guns, hence his reliance on a pocketknife as
sharp as his wits. He would have been dismayed to learn about the The
Liberator — a plastic, single-shot pistol made on a 3-D printer — which
easily gets past metal detectors.
6. Should you prefer making love, not war, the following will help: The sex toy industry has embraced 3-D printing with such gems as a toy shaped like Justin Bieber. Don’t ask.
7. It’s not only Beliebers rejoicing in their heroic figures. Engineers at Loughborough University in the U.K. used a 3-D printer to rebuild the skeleton of King Richard III.
8. Even more exciting than entire skeletons are individual bones. Replacement jawbones and hips are among the medical uses of 3-D printing.
9. Fitting, considering the fumes from 3-D printers may necessitate a new set of lungs. Research in the journal Atmospheric Environment shows many desktop 3-D printers produce emissions linked to health issues ranging from asthma attacks to strokes.
10. Some emissions come from certain plastics used as printer feedstock. But 3-D printers can use many other base materials: metal alloys, paper and even soil.
11. Not bad for technology that can cost as little as $300.
6. Should you prefer making love, not war, the following will help: The sex toy industry has embraced 3-D printing with such gems as a toy shaped like Justin Bieber. Don’t ask.
7. It’s not only Beliebers rejoicing in their heroic figures. Engineers at Loughborough University in the U.K. used a 3-D printer to rebuild the skeleton of King Richard III.
8. Even more exciting than entire skeletons are individual bones. Replacement jawbones and hips are among the medical uses of 3-D printing.
9. Fitting, considering the fumes from 3-D printers may necessitate a new set of lungs. Research in the journal Atmospheric Environment shows many desktop 3-D printers produce emissions linked to health issues ranging from asthma attacks to strokes.
10. Some emissions come from certain plastics used as printer feedstock. But 3-D printers can use many other base materials: metal alloys, paper and even soil.
11. Not bad for technology that can cost as little as $300.
3-D printed pieces of the RepRap Mendel.
makerbot via Flickr
12.
Or you can buy a printer to make your printer. The RepRap Mendel 3-D
printer can build about 50 percent of itself and counting. Can anyone
say The Matrix?
13. If this is starting to freak your mind, you’re in good company.
President Barack Obama devoted some of his 2013 State of the Union
address to the technology, saying it has “the potential to revolutionize
the way we make almost everything.”
14. Perhaps Obama got inspired after the White House viewing of the James Bond movie Skyfall. The Aston Martin DB5 that Bond appeared to drive was one of three models created using a 3-D printer.
15. Those DB5s were models. The URBEE isn’t: This hybrid car in development by Kor Ecologic aims to reach over 200 mpg on the highway. The car’s entire interior and exterior will be made with a 3-D printer.
16. First a car, then a house. Researchers at MIT have developed a 3-D material modeled after bone — denser on the outside than the inside, and seriously strong. It could be the next big thing in framing buildings.
17. The very small has its appeal, too. Northwestern University researchers are using low-cost desktop printers in nanofabrication. Several pint-size projects are in development, including gene chips, protein arrays, stem cell controls and electronic circuits.
18. There’s also cause for old-school audiophiles to party hard. An engineer at the project-sharing site Instructables has figured out how to convert digital music files into vinyl-like LPs.
19. Old wax must also be on the minds of artists at Madame Tussauds. It takes up to six months for a team of artists to create one of the wax figures. Yet a solo American 3-D designer, Dan Roarty, recently created a lifelike, printable 3-D model based on his belated grandmother in a third of the time.
20. If you’d like to extend the believe-it-or-not family portrait theme, you can order a 3-D model of your unborn baby. Several new fetal Fotomats specialize in turning sonograms into sculptures, lending new meaning to the term “prenatal development.”
14. Perhaps Obama got inspired after the White House viewing of the James Bond movie Skyfall. The Aston Martin DB5 that Bond appeared to drive was one of three models created using a 3-D printer.
15. Those DB5s were models. The URBEE isn’t: This hybrid car in development by Kor Ecologic aims to reach over 200 mpg on the highway. The car’s entire interior and exterior will be made with a 3-D printer.
16. First a car, then a house. Researchers at MIT have developed a 3-D material modeled after bone — denser on the outside than the inside, and seriously strong. It could be the next big thing in framing buildings.
17. The very small has its appeal, too. Northwestern University researchers are using low-cost desktop printers in nanofabrication. Several pint-size projects are in development, including gene chips, protein arrays, stem cell controls and electronic circuits.
18. There’s also cause for old-school audiophiles to party hard. An engineer at the project-sharing site Instructables has figured out how to convert digital music files into vinyl-like LPs.
19. Old wax must also be on the minds of artists at Madame Tussauds. It takes up to six months for a team of artists to create one of the wax figures. Yet a solo American 3-D designer, Dan Roarty, recently created a lifelike, printable 3-D model based on his belated grandmother in a third of the time.
20. If you’d like to extend the believe-it-or-not family portrait theme, you can order a 3-D model of your unborn baby. Several new fetal Fotomats specialize in turning sonograms into sculptures, lending new meaning to the term “prenatal development.”
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hoaxes
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Hoaxes
April Fools' Day started with Julius Caesar, and 19 other things you didn't know about hoaxes. But be careful: don't believe everything you read...
By Jonathon Keats|Tuesday, April 01, 2014
1. Marco Polo’s famous 13th-century account of Asia is an encyclopedia of hoaxes, describing unicorns and a solid gold palace.
2. The claim that Polo introduced noodles to Europe is also a hoax — though more plausible than the first televised April Fool’s prank: In 1957 the BBC showed spaghetti being harvested from trees. Many viewers inquired where to buy a spaghetti plant.
3. Another hoax: that the April Fool’s tradition began with Renaissance calendar reform, when the new year was moved from April to January, and those ignorant of the switch were mocked. Small problem: The old Julian calendar started in January, too.
4. The real originator was Julius Caesar, who reserved April 1 to ridicule political enemies. They assassinated him on the Ides of March to avoid the annual ignominy.
5. Et tu, readers? In 1995, Discover ran an April Fool’s story about the fictional hotheaded naked ice borer, provoking a record amount of hate mail. Nineteen years later, we still receive the occasional angry note warning us not to try that kind of funny business ever again. 6. At least we never took a page from Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a hodgepodge of classical medical texts and folklore falsely attributed to the great thinker. The manual hoaxed women into believing their children would be deformed if they even pondered adultery.
7. The first hoax you ever perpetrated was as a fetus, when you tricked your mother into giving you more food by releasing vast quantities of hormones that her body believed were her own.
8. And children only get more devious after they’re born — if they’re smart. In lab experiments, the frequency with which toddlers lie correlates with their intelligence.
9. Some 37 percent of American voters believe global warming is a hoax.
10. You can predict whether people think climate science is a hoax based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, according to a 2012 University of Western Australia study. Conspiracy theorists dismiss many scientific findings, such as the connection between HIV and AIDS.
11. And people duped by one conspiracy hoax fall for many, even if contradictory. University of Kent research shows that people who believe most fervently that Princess Diana faked her own death are the ones who most strongly believe she was murdered. People don’t fall for individual conspiracies so much as conspiracy as a concept.
12. More than 80 percent of the marine fossils in Chinese museums involve fakery, according to Chinese paleontologist Li Chun.
13. National Geographic was duped by one Chinese chimera, announcing the discovery of “a true missing link” between dinosaurs and birds in 1999. Further research showed that “Archaeoraptor” was the tail of a dino glued to the body of an extinct bird.
14. Even more audaciously, Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link between apes and Homo sapiens in 1912. The cranium came from a modern human linked to the jaw of an orangutan.
15. The platypus was originally deemed a hoax by British zoologists. The strange juxtaposition of bill and fur reminded scientists of fraudulent mermaids.
16. Yeti may be as real as the platypus, though. Last year, Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes sequenced DNA from alleged yeti hair samples and got a perfect match to an ancient Scandinavian polar bear. The species may still survive in the high Himalayas.
17. A lack of DNA hasn’t hurt Clonaid, the company that in 2002 claimed to have cloned the first human baby but refused to provide genetic evidence. Clonaid — closely tied to the Raelian sect, which believes aliens created humans and cloning is the gateway to immortality — is still in business.
18. In 2010 researchers from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected the first direct evidence of gravitational waves — crucial proof of relativity. After thousands of hours of verification, they learned that the signal was a “blind injection,” an authorized prank by colleagues to check their work.
19. Another blind injection: Science submitted a spoof research paper about a cancer cure to 304 open-access journals in 2013. Despite numerous intentional errors, 157 journals accepted it for publication.
20. So don’t believe everything you read. One of these 20 items is a hoax. We couldn’t resist.
Did you spot the hoax? Tell us in the comments below!
2. The claim that Polo introduced noodles to Europe is also a hoax — though more plausible than the first televised April Fool’s prank: In 1957 the BBC showed spaghetti being harvested from trees. Many viewers inquired where to buy a spaghetti plant.
3. Another hoax: that the April Fool’s tradition began with Renaissance calendar reform, when the new year was moved from April to January, and those ignorant of the switch were mocked. Small problem: The old Julian calendar started in January, too.
4. The real originator was Julius Caesar, who reserved April 1 to ridicule political enemies. They assassinated him on the Ides of March to avoid the annual ignominy.
5. Et tu, readers? In 1995, Discover ran an April Fool’s story about the fictional hotheaded naked ice borer, provoking a record amount of hate mail. Nineteen years later, we still receive the occasional angry note warning us not to try that kind of funny business ever again. 6. At least we never took a page from Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a hodgepodge of classical medical texts and folklore falsely attributed to the great thinker. The manual hoaxed women into believing their children would be deformed if they even pondered adultery.
7. The first hoax you ever perpetrated was as a fetus, when you tricked your mother into giving you more food by releasing vast quantities of hormones that her body believed were her own.
8. And children only get more devious after they’re born — if they’re smart. In lab experiments, the frequency with which toddlers lie correlates with their intelligence.
9. Some 37 percent of American voters believe global warming is a hoax.
10. You can predict whether people think climate science is a hoax based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, according to a 2012 University of Western Australia study. Conspiracy theorists dismiss many scientific findings, such as the connection between HIV and AIDS.
11. And people duped by one conspiracy hoax fall for many, even if contradictory. University of Kent research shows that people who believe most fervently that Princess Diana faked her own death are the ones who most strongly believe she was murdered. People don’t fall for individual conspiracies so much as conspiracy as a concept.
12. More than 80 percent of the marine fossils in Chinese museums involve fakery, according to Chinese paleontologist Li Chun.
13. National Geographic was duped by one Chinese chimera, announcing the discovery of “a true missing link” between dinosaurs and birds in 1999. Further research showed that “Archaeoraptor” was the tail of a dino glued to the body of an extinct bird.
14. Even more audaciously, Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link between apes and Homo sapiens in 1912. The cranium came from a modern human linked to the jaw of an orangutan.
15. The platypus was originally deemed a hoax by British zoologists. The strange juxtaposition of bill and fur reminded scientists of fraudulent mermaids.
16. Yeti may be as real as the platypus, though. Last year, Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes sequenced DNA from alleged yeti hair samples and got a perfect match to an ancient Scandinavian polar bear. The species may still survive in the high Himalayas.
17. A lack of DNA hasn’t hurt Clonaid, the company that in 2002 claimed to have cloned the first human baby but refused to provide genetic evidence. Clonaid — closely tied to the Raelian sect, which believes aliens created humans and cloning is the gateway to immortality — is still in business.
18. In 2010 researchers from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected the first direct evidence of gravitational waves — crucial proof of relativity. After thousands of hours of verification, they learned that the signal was a “blind injection,” an authorized prank by colleagues to check their work.
19. Another blind injection: Science submitted a spoof research paper about a cancer cure to 304 open-access journals in 2013. Despite numerous intentional errors, 157 journals accepted it for publication.
20. So don’t believe everything you read. One of these 20 items is a hoax. We couldn’t resist.
Did you spot the hoax? Tell us in the comments below!
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Animal Senses
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Animal Senses
From super-sniffers to electricity detectors, animals have an array of impressive sensory capabilities.
1. Think of the term alligator skin as a compliment: It’s extraordinarily sensitive to minute changes in vibration, which helps locate prey.2. Alligators are touchy, but the platypus is more the feely type. The only mammal with electroreception, it uses sensors in its bill to detect electrical impulses sent out by prey in murky water.
3. Researchers believe electromagnetism may help red wood ants sense imminent earthquakes in time to evacuate their mounds. Someday these creatures may be part of geologic threat-detection systems.
4. Elephants, too, are acutely aware of vibrations. They use seismic activity generated by their trunks and feet to communicate with one another about predators, territory and mating preferences.
5. Star-nosed moles have 22 tiny trunks containing a total of nearly 100,000 nerve fibers — six times as many touch receptors as on a human hand. As the mole burrows, the tentacles sweep ahead like a high-speed broom, faster than a human eye can detect.
6. Above ground, wolves have a sense of pitch. Not wanting to lose their voice in a howling chorus, they pick their own unique note.
7. Seals are notable for their whiskers, which can detect the hydrodynamic trail of fish swimming up to 600 feet away.
8. Sensing dinner is one thing, but animals from white-crowned sparrows to deer can sense if their diet is lacking in important nutrients. They’ll crave food containing amino acids that can’t be produced or stored by the body.
9. On the topic of bodies, a catfish’s is wrapped in taste buds. It’s like a swimming tongue that helps detect the flavor of potential prey from all directions.
10. Back on terra firma, chemoreceptors that detect chemical changes and provide a sense of taste cover an earthworm’s entire body.
11. Snakes’ tongues do more than taste: They help track prey. Their forked tongues pick up scent molecules that the animal transfers, via specialized ducts in the mouth, to the Jacobson’s organ, which can detect where the scent’s source is located.
12. Rats and common moles can smell in stereo with independently acting nostrils. Researchers are putting their talents to use in Africa detecting land mines and other explosives.
13. Up to 40 percent of a shark’s brain is dedicated to sense of smell. No wonder some experts believe they can sniff out prey that’s a third of a mile away in the open ocean.
14. Parasitic worms also use scent to find hosts. By identifying odors attractive to these parasites, researchers may one day develop traps for worms that pose major health risks.
15. Sight, not smell, is a raptor’s key sense. Even while diving at speeds of 100 mph or more, falcons can spot prey thanks in part to a reduced number of blood vessels in the retina. Since the vessels scatter light, having fewer of them creates extremely sharp images.
16. Scallops are no falcons, but some scientists believe they’re able to distinguish between light and dark with as many as 100 eyes on the edge of their mantle. A reflective surface on the back of each eye focuses light onto two retinas to form an image.
17. “Four-eyed fish,” Anableps anableps, really have just two eyes, but each one is partitioned: The top keeps a lookout for above-surface predators while the bottom watches underwater.
18. Not only do jumping spiders have eight eyes positioned to create nearly 360-degree vision, but some species can detect ultraviolet radiation, which facilitates mating. (Mood lighting, anyone?)
19. Worker honeybees navigate using rings of paramagnetic iron oxide in their abdomens that swell or shrink depending on outside magnetic changes, allowing the insects to find their way home by following changes in the Earth’s magnetic fields.
20. Jewel beetles have sensors that detect infrared radiation from forest fires as far as 50 miles away. The beetles use recently scorched areas for mating. Now that’s putting the “sense” in sensual.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Noise
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Noise
Did you know the Big Bang was noiseless?
By Jonathon Keats|Friday, May 23, 2014
1.
The Big Bang was noiseless. Everything in the universe expanded
uniformly, so nothing came into contact with anything else. No contact,
no sound waves.
2. Astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang in the ’50s, not because he thought it was noisy, but because he thought the theory was ridiculous.
3. For a really big bang, you should have
heard Krakatoa in 1883. On Aug. 27, the volcanic island in Indonesia
erupted with the explosive power of 200 megatons of TNT. The eruption
could be heard nearly 3,000 miles away, making it the loudest noise in
recorded history.
4. There are people who would outdo it if
they could. They pack their cars with stereo amps to pump out 180-plus
decibels (dB) of noise at so-called dB drag races. That’s how loud a jet
engine would sound — if it were a foot away from your ear.
5. Jets get a bad rap. According to
psychoacoustician Hugo Fastl, people perceive airplane noise as if it
were 10 dB greater than the equivalent noise made by a train.
6. Since the decibel scale is
logarithmic, growing exponentially, that means a jet sounds 10 times
noisier than a train when the noise levels of both vehicles are
objectively the same.
7. The only difference is that people
find plane noises more annoying. The effects are dubbed the “railway
bonus” and “aircraft malus.”
8. The first known noise ordinance was
passed by the Greek province of Sybaris in the sixth century B.C.
Tinsmiths and roosters were required to live outside the town limits.
9. Recognizing noise exposure as an
occupational safety hazard took longer. The first scientific study was
initiated in 1886 by Glasgow surgeon Thomas Barr. After he tested the
hearing of 100 boilermakers, he determined that incessant pounding of
hammers against metal boilers caused severe hearing loss.
10. One of Barr’s solutions to the
problem of “boilermaker’s ear” was to suggest that clergymen shave their
beards so that workmen could lip-read their sermons.
11. No wonder unprotected boilermaking
was a problem: The human ear can perceive sound waves that move the
eardrum less than the width of an atom.
12. You can fight noise with noise. The
first patent on “active noise cancellation” dates to 1933, when German
physicist Paul Lueg proposed to silence sound waves by simultaneously
generating waves of the exact opposite orientation. The principle is now
used in noise-canceling headsets.
13. Bring yours to the bar. Researchers
at the Université de Bretagne-Sud have found that men imbibe more than
20 percent faster when ambient noise is cranked up from 72 to 88 dB.
14. And people are only getting louder.
According to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, the volume of an
animated conversation between Americans increased by 10 dB during the
’90s.
15. Social and ambient noise causes
hearing loss, often misdiagnosed as an effect of aging. Preventing it
would require that cities become 10 dB quieter.
16. Deafness isn’t the only medical
danger of noise exposure. The stress causes some 45,000 fatal heart
attacks a year in the developing world, according to researcher Dieter
Schwela of the Stockholm Environment Institute.
17. And then there’s the unintended
assault on ocean dwellers by noisy navy sonar. The disorienting sound
drives beaked whales to beach themselves, and it makes humpbacks extend
the length of their songs by 29 percent.
18. To carry the same amount of
information in a noisier environment, the whale songs have become more
repetitive. Noise can be the nemesis of any signal.
19. Except when noise is the
signal. Back in the ’60s, Bell Labs astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson kept picking up static with their radio telescope. They
eventually realized that the noise was the sound of the universe itself,
a remnant of a dense, hot plasma that pervaded the early cosmos.
20. Their discovery of the cosmic
microwave background radiation won them the Nobel Prize because the
remnant heat showed that the universe must have begun with a violent
explosion. Sorry, Fred Hoyle. The Big Bang is proven.
20 Things You Didnt Know About... Cats
20 Things You Didnt Know About... Cats
Where to begin? Our relationship with our feline friends goes back some 9,500 years!
1.
Your kitty’s ancestor was a solitary hunter of small prey, as opposed
to dogs’ ancestors, which were large-game pack hunters. That’s why Rover
tends to gulp down a big meal while Mittens prefers to eat several
smaller meals throughout the day.
2. Cats will hunt even if they’re not
hungry. The University of Georgia’s KittyCam project, which outfitted 60
free-roaming pet cats with video cameras, found that only 28 percent of
the prey caught was consumed. Half of the kills were simply left in situ — the rest were brought home to lucky owners.
3. Evolved for low-light hunting, cats’ eyes are proportionally enormous. In Cat Sense,
John Bradshaw explains that their eye size makes focusing between near
and far so difficult that the muscles develop with an environmental
bias. Outdoor cats tend to be farsighted, while most indoor cats are
nearsighted.
4. Nearsighted, but not close-sighted.
Because their eyes are so large, cats can’t focus on anything less than a
foot in front of them — but their whiskers can swing forward to feel
what they can’t clearly see.
5. Whiskers will only get you so far.
Cats also have an excellent sense of smell. In a 2010 study from
Australia’s University of New South Wales, feral cats were attracted to
patches laced with a little Eau du Mouse six days after the scent was placed.
6. The vomeronasal organ helps cats
detect minute chemical clues about their environment, including the
proximity and status of other cats.
7. Cats’ sense of taste is not so
impressive, though: They’re one of the few mammals that lack taste
receptors for sweetness, according to a 2006 study.
8. That’s probably because cats need
meat, not sweets. Cats are obligate carnivores that get their energy
from protein rather than carbohydrates.
9. Mittens’ meat-loving ways informed
research, published in January, on the bones of two 5,300-year-old cats
from China. One of the cats had a millet-rich diet — a clue that humans
were likely feeding the animal, said researchers, and evidence of
domestic cats in China much earlier than previously thought.
Marina Jay/Shutterstock
10. That
ancient cat may not have been a pet, however. In March, other
researchers claimed the Chinese cats were not domesticated, but rather
commensal — in a mutually beneficial relationship with humans yet
independent.
11. Whether pet or not, those Chinese cats — like all domesticated cats — were descended from a wild cat, Felis silvestris lybica.
12. A 2007 study concluded F. s. lybica was
domesticated at least 9,000 years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, as
grain cultivation spread and farmers needed reliable pest control.
13. The earliest archaeological evidence
of our relationship with cats is a kitten buried beside a human on the
island of Cyprus about 9,500 years ago. Boats were too small for
stowaways back then, so researchers say the cat must have been brought
there purposefully.
14. Cats and sailors have had a long
relationship: For centuries, felines have been kept on ships for rodent
control and as good luck charms.
15. Those seafaring kitties left their
mark. More than 10 percent of cats in coastal cities from New England to
Nova Scotia have extra toes (polydactyly). Given the cities’ historical
trade networks, researchers believe that this high incidence of the
normally rare mutation resulted from a few polydactyl merchant-ship cats
taking shore leave as far back as the mid-18th century.
16. A different kind of merchant cat, the
world’s richest cat is arguably Japan’s big-headed cartoon Hello Kitty,
which earned more than $1 billion in sales and royalties in 2012.
17. According to several studies, psychologists believe Hello Kitty’s appeal is based on kawaii, or cuteness. Hello Kitty’s wide-set eyes and mouthless face convey the character is non-threatening and needs loving care.
18. Not quite as kawaii as Hello
Kitty, a painting of a collar-wearing cat found in a 4,400-year-old
tomb in Saqqarah, Egypt, is the oldest known image of a domesticated
cat.
19. We’ll soon have a complete genetic
image of cats. In January, the 99 Lives Cat Whole Genome Sequencing
Initiative began collecting DNA samples from cats worldwide.
20. The open-access, cloud-based 99 Lives
database will be used to research both feline diseases and some human
ailments, including diabetes, which affects cats similarly — and for
which we share risk factors such as a sedentary lifestyle. You’ve come a
long way, F. s. lybica.
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Blood
20 Things You Didn't Know About... Blood
Blood types aren't unique to humans: Dogs have more than a dozen.
1. Karl Landsteiner
discovered blood types in 1901 by observing that blood from people of
different types would clot when mixed together. He later classified them
as A, B and O.
2. ABO isn’t the only blood grouping
system, however. There are currently 33 systems recognized by the
International Society of Blood Transfusion, with monikers like Lutheran,
Duffy, Hh/Bombay and Ok.
3. Blood type refers to different
molecules on the surface of red blood cells. A mismatch of these
molecules between donor and recipient can trigger a fatal immune
reaction after a blood transfusion, as the recipient’s body attacks the
outsider blood.
4. But not all blood types matter for all
transfusions. Some variants are very rare, or exist only in certain
ethnic groups, so the danger of getting a mismatch is, for most people,
low.
5. The Junior blood type was formally
classified just two years ago when researchers pinpointed the molecule
responsible for it. The vast majority of people are Junior positive, but
more than 50,000 Japanese are Junior negative. For them, a mismatch can
cause a dangerous reaction.
6. Blood types aren’t unique to humans. Dogs have more than a dozen, for example.
7. Before blood types were discovered,
doctors experimented with blood transfusions between humans and animals.
Spoiler: It didn’t go well.
8. In December 1667, physician
Jean-Baptiste Denis twice infused a man with calf’s blood in an attempt
to cure him of mental illness. After tolerating the first procedure, the
patient responded to the second, larger transfusion by vomiting,
passing black urine — never a good sign — and complaining of pain in his
kidneys.
9. After suffering a third and final
transfusion, the man died. Denis went on trial for murder, but was
acquitted when it became clear the patient had been poisoned — not with
blood, but with arsenic.
10. Other doctors had orchestrated the
poisoning, fearing the procedure was morally dangerous, and wanting to
make sure Denis failed before he started a trend, according to historian
Holly Tucker’s book Blood Work.
11. Speaking of iffy practices, in 1892,
citizens of Exeter, R.I., exhumed the body of Mercy Brown, recently dead
of tuberculosis, and fed the ashes of her heart and liver to her sickly
younger brother. They believed she had become a vampire and was preying
on him.
12. Such 19th-century New England vampire
panics coincided with tuberculosis outbreaks. The dead person’s family
members often got sick and died, suggesting supernatural interference to
townsfolk.
13. True blood eating, or hematophagy, is
practiced by about 14,000 insects, including the dreaded bedbug,
scourge of the mattress.
14. A sup of blood is referred to by entomologists as a bloodmeal. Transparent young bedbugs turn ruby-red after their first feed.
15. Being a bloodmeal’s no fun, but at
least it’s temporary. A more serious burden plagued the British royal
family until recently: hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder. The
mutation that caused it arose spontaneously in Queen Victoria.
16. In 2009, researchers reported that
the “royal disease” was in fact quite rare. It was hemophilia B, which
affects about 1 in 25,000 males in the U.S. — that’s five times fewer
sufferers than hemophilia A.
17. The conclusion was drawn from an
analysis of the bones of the assassinated Romanov family of Russia,
descended from Victoria’s daughter Alice.
18. Today, hemophiliacs are treated with
regular infusions of the clotting factors their bodies are unable to
make, which are manufactured from donated blood.
19. Researchers are investigating ways to
insert functioning versions of the clotting factor gene into patients’
own cells. In 2011, six hemophilia B patients were able to stop or
decrease the frequency of their usual injections thanks to gene
therapy.
20. No one is proposing gene therapy for a
more common blood-based woe, however: the ice cream headache. You’ll
just have to learn to live with the pain, believed to be caused by quick
dilation of the brain’s anterior cerebral artery due to sudden
temperature changes in the mouth.
20 Things You Didn't Know about Galaxies!!
1. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant was one of the first people to theorize that the Milky Way was not the only galaxy in the universe. Kant coined the term island universe to describe a galaxy.
2. Astronomers now estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
3. One of the earliest uses of the English term Milky Way was in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The House of Fame.” He likened the galaxy to a celestial roadway.
4. While we’re talking road trips: Due to the expansion of the universe, all other galaxies are receding from our own. Galaxies farther from the Milky Way are speeding away faster than those nearby.
5. Some of the galaxies receding from the Milky Way are ellipsoidal, like footballs. Galaxies can also be thin and flat with tentacle-like arms — just like the Milky Way.
6. Galaxies come in irregular shapes, too, including many dwarf galaxies. These galaxies, the smallest in the universe, contain only a few hundred or a few thousand stars (compared with 100 billion stars in the Milky Way).
7. You’ll often find dwarf galaxies clustered around larger galaxies.
8. Dwarf galaxies frequently lose their stars to their larger neighbors via gravity. The stars stream across the sky as the dwarf galaxies are ripped apart. Alas, you can’t see it with the naked eye.
9. You also can’t see the enormous black hole lurking in the center of the Milky Way, though if you’ve ever looked at the constellation Sagittarius, the archer, you’ve looked in the right direction.
10. Most galaxies have a black hole at the center, and astronomers have found the mass is consistently about 1/1000th the mass of the host galaxy.
11. Two of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way — the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud — may not have black holes. Or, because both are low-mass galaxies, their central black holes may be too small to detect.
12. Every galaxy does have dust, though. Produced by stars, the dust causes light to look redder than it really is when observed visually, which can make it difficult for astronomers studying properties of stars.
13. That dust can really travel, too. Some galaxies drive galactic winds, expelling dust and gas at hundreds of kilometers per second into the intergalactic medium, the space between galaxies.
14. These winds are caused by starlight exerting pressure on the dust and gas; the fastest galactic winds are in distant galaxies that are forming stars more rapidly than the Milky Way.
15. The Milky Way rotates at about 250 kilometers per second (about 560,000 mph) and completes a full revolution about every 200 million years.
16. One galactic revolution ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
17. Galaxies rotate faster than predicted based on the
gravity of their stars alone. Astronomers infer that the extra
gravitational force is coming from dark matter, which does not emit or
reflect light.
18. Dark matter aside, galaxies are mostly empty space. If the stars within galaxies were shrunk to the size of oranges, they would be separated by 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles).
19. If galaxies were shrunk to the size of apples, neighboring galaxies would only be a few meters apart. The relative proximity of galaxies means that galaxies occasionally merge.
20. In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way will merge with the Andromeda galaxy. The result of the merging process — which will take at least a hundred million years — will be an ellipsoidal galaxy nicknamed “Milkomeda.”
18. Dark matter aside, galaxies are mostly empty space. If the stars within galaxies were shrunk to the size of oranges, they would be separated by 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles).
19. If galaxies were shrunk to the size of apples, neighboring galaxies would only be a few meters apart. The relative proximity of galaxies means that galaxies occasionally merge.
20. In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way will merge with the Andromeda galaxy. The result of the merging process — which will take at least a hundred million years — will be an ellipsoidal galaxy nicknamed “Milkomeda.”
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