MICHAEL & PATRICIA FOGDEN/MINDEN PICTURES

20

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August. Vol. 32, no. 2. Published by Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 37808, Boone, IA 50037. Canada Publication

Agreement # 40010760, return all undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 875, STN A Windsor, ON, N9A 6P2.Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Publishing Co., 90 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011. Printed in the U.S.A.

1. e venom of the Australian funnel-web spider

can kill a person in less than an hour, and its fangs

can bite right through a shoe. 2. But for most people,

fear of spiders is a far greater problem than the spiders

themselves. Researchers at the University of So

Paulo have developed an improbable way to undo

arachnophobia by having patients stare at pictures

of spiderlike objectsa tripod, a carousel, a person

with dreadlocks. 3. Quackery? Apparently not. In a

2007 study, the scientists reported a 92 percent suc-

cess rate. 4. And there is an upside to spider bites.

Take the Brazilian wandering spider, Phoneutria

nigriventer, whose venom causes painful penile erec-

tions that last for many hours (thats the bad news).

5. e good news: e responsible toxin could yield

new treatments for erectile dysfunction. 6. e ven-

om of the South American tarantula Grammostola

spatulata might be used to treat atrial brillation. It

contains a peptide that can calm an irregular heart-

beat brought on by stress. 7. Back in Australia, Glenn

King at the University of Queensland is studying

the Blue Mountains funnel-web spider (Hadronyche

versuta) with an eye toward developing eco-friendly

pesticides. Proteins in this spiders venom target

the nervous system of insects but leave humans

unharmed. 8. First, though, theres the unpleasant

matter of getting the venom. Workers at the Spider

Pharm in Yarnell, Arizona, milk up to 1,000 spiders

a day. 9. e bugs are anesthetized with carbon

dioxide, then zapped with electricity, which makes

them release venom into minuscule glass capil-

laries connected to their fangs. 10. Web master:

Todd Blackledge at the University of Akron nds

that spider silk could be used as synthetic muscle.

Adjusting humidity up and down causes the silk to

expand and contract with 50 times the punch of the

equivalent mass of human muscle. 11. Blackledge

envisions spider silk someday being used to operate

miniature robotic devices and drug delivery systems.

12. Unlike many sticky things, the glue of orbed

web spiders gets stronger in the presence of water,

polymer scientists working with Blackledge have

discovered, suggesting that it might prove a useful

adhesive for surgery or for underwater engineering .

13. Spider-goat, Spider-goat, does whatever a spider

can: By manipulating genes, molecular biologists

at the University of Wyoming have gotten goats to

produce milk containing the protein that makes up

spider silk. 14. Next, scientists aim to introduce the

silk gene into alfalfa, which is far more e cient to

mass produce and, frankly, less creepy. 15. Safe sex:

e male nursery web spider (Pisaura mirabilis) will

bring a silk-wrapped insect to a female prior to mat-

ing so she will eat the giftinstead of him. 16. Safer

sex: e funnel-web spider Agelenopsis aperta has a

di erent approach, putting the female into a cata-

leptic state before mating so she wont cannibalize

him. 17. Scientists at Radford University in Virginia

say the A. aperta male can disable the female from

4.5 centimeters (about 2 inches), suggesting he may

be deploying a gas to knock out the femme fatale.

18. Cheap date: Certain cobweb spiders dine on

bugs poached from others webs. 19. Others dis-

pense with the killing entirely. e jumping spider

Bagheera kiplinginamed in the 1800s after the

panther in Rudyard Kiplings Jungle Bookis mostly

a vegetarian. 20. Dont want one of these things

jumping in your salad? Steven Kutcher, spider

wrangler on the lm Arachnophobia, says a dusting

of talcum powder or a spritz of Lemon Pledge makes

a tabletop or other at surface too slippery for the

critters to get any traction.

THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT SPIDERS

BY REBECCA COFFEY

80

DISCOVER

DV0311THINGS1A_QG.indd 80 1/4/11 11:34 AM

20

BY REBECCA COFFEY

ILLUSTRATION BY

JONATHON ROSEN

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August. Vol. 32, no. 5. Published by Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 37808, Boone, IA 50037. Canada

Publication Agreement # 40010760, return all undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 875, STN A Windsor, ON, N9A 6P2.Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Publishing Co., 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Printed in the U.S.A.

1. ink about money, work, economic outlook, family,

and relationships. Feeling anxious? You should be. In

a 2010 American Psychological Association survey,

those ve factors were the most often cited sources of

stress for Americans. 2. Stress is strongly tied to cardiac

disease, hypertension, in ammatory diseases, and

compromised immune systems, and possibly to cancer.

3. And stress can literally break your heart. Takotsubo

cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome, occurs

when the bottom of the heart balloons into the shape

of a pot (a tako-tsubo) used in Japan to trap octopus. Its

caused when grief or another extreme stressor makes

stress hormones ood the heart. 4. e hormone cor-

tisol is responsible for a lot of these ill e ects. Elevated

cortisol gives us a short-term boost but also suppresses

the immune system, elevates blood sugar, and impedes

bone formation. 5. Even the next generation pays a

price: Researchers at the University of California, San

Francisco, nd an association between high cortisol in

mothers during late pregnancy and lower iqs in their

children at age 7. 6. Stress during pregnancy has also

been linked to o spring with autism. 7. But enough

stressing! One way to relax: a career of mild obsoles-

cence. Surveying 200 professions, the site CareerCast.

com rated bookbinder the least stressful job of 2011.

(Most stressful: re ghter and airline pilot.) 8. Or nd

a new home. e online journal Portfolio.com looked

at Americas 50 biggest metro areas, analyzing such

criteria as employment, income, circulatory disease,

sunshine, and murder rate, and ranked Salt Lake City

as the least stressful. 9. e tensest? Detroit. 10. Les-

son: Landing a 737 at Coleman Young International

Airport is not a good way to unwind. 11. Cant relocate?

Perhaps you should take up violent video games.

Researchers at Texas A&M International University

gave 103 subjects frustrating tasks, then asked them to

play. Among subjects with a history of violent gaming,

the fake mayhem of Hitman: Blood Money and Call of

Duty 2 did a great job of easing stress. 12. You might

also try eating your veggies. Yale researchers reported

in the journal Military Medicine that after survival train-

ing, carbohydrate administrationeating complex

carbs like those in carrots and potatoesboosted sol-

diers cognitive functioning. 13. No such luck with the

simple carbs in cake and cookies, alas. 14. And watch

what you dont eat. Neuro scientists at the University

of Pennsylvania fattened up mice for four weeks, then

abruptly cut their caloric intake. When exposed to

stress, the animals responded with more depression-

and anxiety-like behaviors than did their nondieting

peers. 15. One of the mouse stressors that the Penn

scientists used: being hung by the tail for six minutes.

16. Over at Louisiana State University, rats were sub-

jected to unpredictable foot shocks and then allowed to

self-administer intravenous doses of cocaine. ey used

more once the stress started. Who could blame them?

17. Addled brain syndrome: Scientists at the University

of Minho in Portugal and the U.S. National Institutes of

Health found that chronically stressed lab rats respond

habitually and ine ectively to stimuli. Trained to press a

lever to receive a treat, the rats kept pressing even after

theyd been fed. 18. e stressed rats brains showed

shrunken neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (an area

associated with goal-directed behavior) and growth in

the dorsolateral striatum (related to habitual behavior).

19. e results suggest that people, too, get locked into

rote behavior by stress. Sure enough, other studies show

that the primate hippocampuscentral to learning

and memoryis damaged by long-term exposure to

cortisol. 20. Still, do you ever get the feeling that some

scientists are just taking out their stress on lab rats?

THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT STRESS

80

DISCOVER

DV0611THINGS1A_QG.indd 80 4/5/11 10:03 PM

CODY TREPTE

20

BY DEAN CHRISTOPHER

1.

e voice box sits lower in

the throat in

human

s

than

it does in other primates, giving us a uniquely

large resonating system

. ats why we alon

e are able

to m

ake the wide range of sou

nds needed fo

r speech

.

2. at also explains Mariah Carey, Barry W

hite, and

Rob

in W

illiams. 3. Unfortunately, th

e placem

ent of our

voice bo

x means we cant breathe an

d swallow at the

same time, as other anim

als can (chok

e). 4. Fortu-

nately, the human

voice box doesnt drop

until abo

ut

9 mon

ths, which allows infants to breathe while nurs-

ing. 5. Still the on

e: M

andarin is the long-stan

ding

cham

p am

ong world languages with 845 m

illion native

speakers, abo

ut 2.5 times as many as English. 6. But

more than

70 percent o

f all the hom

e pages on th

e

Internet are in English, and more on

line users speak

English th

an any other language, m

aking it th

e worlds

lingua fran

ca (assuming you con

sider brb, omg, g2g, and

ro English). 7. Hey, the world will never chan

ge

right? English is m

andatory for every student in China,

starting in th

ird grade. But in America, only 3 percent of

elem

entary schoo

ls and 4 percent of secon

dary schoo

ls

even o er Chinese. 8. Many science-related English

words starting with th

e letters al

including algebra,

alkalin

e, and algorithmare derived from

Arabic, in

which th

e pre x al just m

eans the. 9.

is is a legacy

of th

e medieval era, w

hen ancient Greek and Rom

an

know

ledge was largely lost in Europe bu

t preserved

and advan

ced amon

g scholars in th

e Islamic world.

10. Mod

ern technology is m

aking everything sm

aller,

even our words. Bits of eight shrank to becom

e by

te,

mod

ulate/dem

odulate becam

e mod

em, picture

cell becam

e pixel, and of cou

rse w

eb log becam

e

blog. 11. A

t the other end, the longest word recog-

nized by the Oxford English Diction

ary is pneu

mon

o-

ultramicroscop

icsilicovolcanocon

iosis, a lung disease

caused by inhaling volcan

ic silicon dust. 12. G

rss dich,

Dunkelheit, mein alter Freund. ree- to ve-day-olds

born into French-speaking families tend to cry with

the rising intonation characteristic of French

; babies

with German

-speaking parents cry with falling tones,

much like spoken German

. Infants m

ay start learn-

ing langu

age in the wom

b, it seem

s. 13. e neural

equipment for language develop

ment then seems

to ripen between birth and age 3. People deprived of

language before pu

berty (d

ue to isolation or abuse, for

instan

ce) m

ight later learn a limited supp

ly of w

ords,

but they never develop

the ability to make meaningful

sentences. 14. Other clues abo

ut language processing

come from

dam

aged brains. People who have sustained

an injury to a region

called Brocas area have trou

ble

prod

ucing even short ph

rases, indicating it is critical

to speech. 15. And dam

age to th

e brains superior

temporal gyrus can lead to Wernickes aphasia. Patients

sound as if th

ey are speaking normally, but what th

ey

say makes no sense. 16. In old W

esterns, Native

American

s often m

ade a sound like ugh

.

is wasnt

a commentary on th

e plots; it was a naive attem

pt to

reprod

uce th

e sound of the glottal stop of m

any Native

American

languages, produ

ced by brie y closing the

vocal cords du

ring speech. 17. !Say !W

hat? When

the Dutch encountered Africas Nam

a people, whose

language includes clicking sounds, th

ey dubbed them

Hottentots, D

utch fo

r stuttering. 18. R

eally foreign

sounds: Span

ish Silb

o, a whistle language, has only four

vowel and four consonan

t sounds. Audible for miles,

it resem

bles bird calls and is indigenou

s towhere

else?

the Can

ary Islands. 19. Indian

Sign Lan

guage is

the worlds most widespread silent language, with som

e

2.7 million users. 20. Another sou

nd of silence: M

ore

than

one-third of the worlds 6,800 spoken languages

are endan

gered. A

ccording to UNESC

O, abo

ut 200

tongu

es now

have fewer th

an 10

surviving speakers.

THINGS

YOU DIDNT

KNOW

ABOUT

LANGUAGE

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529) is published m

onthly, exc

ept for combined issu

es in January/F

ebruary and July/A

ugust, by Kalm

bach Publishing Co., 210

27 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 16

12, Wauke

sha, WI 5318

7-1612

. Volume 31, number 9; copyright 2010

Kalm

bach Publishing Co. Periodical postag

e paid at Wau

kesha, W

I, an

d at ad

ditional m

ailing offices. In Canada, maile

d under public

ation m

ail agreement 40010

760, P.O. Box 875,

STN A W

indso

r, ON, N9A 6P2. GST Registration #BN12

271 3209RT. SUBSCRIPTIONS: In the U.S., $29.95 for one year; in

Canada, $39.95 for one year (U

.S. funds only), in

cludes GST; other foreign countries, $44.95

for one year (U

.S. funds only). Back issu

es ava

ilable. All rights rese

rved. Nothing herein contained m

ay be reproduced without written perm

ission of the publisher. POSTMASTER: Please

address all su

bscription corre-

spondence, including change of address, to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 37808, Boone, IA 50037, or call toll-free 800-829-913

2; outside the U.S., 515

-247-7569. Printed in

the U.S.

80

DISCOVER

DV1

110T

HIN

GS1

A_QG

.in

dd

809/

8/10

11

:39

PM

CIR-PRM-DSC2012

A supplement to DISCOVER magazine

spiders and language and stressand that is

just the beginning! A total of 240 wonderful,

weird, and just plain eye-opening insights

about the world around you.

20 THINGS

YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT...

20

BY REBECCA COFFEY

ILLUSTRATION BY

JONATHON ROSEN

1. ink about money, work, economic outlook, family,

and relationships. Feeling anxious? You should be. In

a 2010 American Psychological Association survey,

those ve factors were the most often cited sources of

stress for Americans. 2. Stress is strongly tied to cardiac

disease, hypertension, in ammatory diseases, and

compromised immune systems, and possibly to cancer.

3. And stress can literally break your heart. Takotsubo

cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome, occurs

when the bottom of the heart balloons into the shape

of a pot (a tako-tsubo) used in Japan to trap octopus. Its

caused when grief or another extreme stressor makes

stress hormones ood the heart. 4. e hormone cor-

tisol is responsible for a lot of these ill e ects. Elevated

cortisol gives us a short-term boost but also suppresses

the immune system, elevates blood sugar, and impedes

bone formation. 5. Even the next generation pays a

price: Researchers at the University of California, San

Francisco, nd an association between high cortisol in

mothers during late pregnancy and lower iqs in their

children at age 7. 6. Stress during pregnancy has also

been linked to o spring with autism. 7. But enough

stressing! One way to relax: a career of mild obsoles-

cence. Surveying 200 professions, the site CareerCast.

com rated bookbinder the least stressful job of 2011.

(Most stressful: re ghter and airline pilot.) 8. Or nd

a new home. e online journal Portfolio.com looked

at Americas 50 biggest metro areas, analyzing such

criteria as employment, income, circulatory disease,

sunshine, and murder rate, and ranked Salt Lake City

as the least stressful. 9. e tensest? Detroit. 10. Les-

son: Landing a 737 at Coleman Young International

Airport is not a good way to unwind. 11. Cant relocate?

Perhaps you should take up violent video games.

Researchers at Texas A&M International University

gave 103 subjects frustrating tasks, then asked them to

play. Among subjects with a history of violent gaming,

the fake mayhem of Hitman: Blood Money and Call of

Duty 2 did a great job of easing stress. 12. You might

also try eating your veggies. Yale researchers reported

in the journal Military Medicine that after survival train-

ing, carbohydrate administrationeating complex

carbs like those in carrots and potatoesboosted sol-

diers cognitive functioning. 13. No such luck with the

simple carbs in cake and cookies, alas. 14. And watch

what you dont eat. Neuro scientists at the University

of Pennsylvania fattened up mice for four weeks, then

abruptly cut their caloric intake. When exposed to

stress, the animals responded with more depression-

and anxiety-like behaviors than did their nondieting

peers. 15. One of the mouse stressors that the Penn

scientists used: being hung by the tail for six minutes.

16. Over at Louisiana State University, rats were sub-

jected to unpredictable foot shocks and then allowed to

self-administer intravenous doses of cocaine. ey used

more once the stress started. Who could blame them?

17. Addled brain syndrome: Scientists at the University

of Minho in Portugal and the U.S. National Institutes of

Health found that chronically stressed lab rats respond

habitually and ine ectively to stimuli. Trained to press a

lever to receive a treat, the rats kept pressing even after

theyd been fed. 18. e stressed rats brains showed

shrunken neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (an area

associated with goal-directed behavior) and growth in

the dorsolateral striatum (related to habitual behavior).

19. e results suggest that people, too, get locked into

rote behavior by stress. Sure enough, other studies show

that the primate hippocampuscentral to learning

and memoryis damaged by long-term exposure to

cortisol. 20. Still, do you ever get the feeling that some

scientists are just taking out their stress on lab rats?

THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT STRESS

DISCOVER

DV0611THINGS1A_QG.indd 80 4/5/11 10:03 PM

1 www.DiscoverMagazine.com

20THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT FIREBy LeeAundra Keany 1. Fire is an event, not a thing. Heating wood or other

fuel releases volatile vapors that can rapidly combust with oxygen in the air; the resulting incandescent bloom of gas further heats the fuel, releasing more vapors and perpetuating the cycle. 2. Most of the fuels we use derive their energy from trapped solar rays. In photosyn-thesis, sunlight and heat make chemical energy (in the form of wood or fossil fuel); fire uses chemical energy to produce light and heat. 3. So a bonfire is basically a tree running in reverse. 4. Assuming stable fuel, heat, and oxygen levels, a typical house fire will double in size every minute. 5. Earth is the only known planet where fire can burn. Everywhere else: Not enough oxygen. 6. Conversely, the more oxygen, the hotter the fire. Air is 21 percent oxygen; combine pure oxygen with acetylene, a chemical relative of methane, and you get an oxy-acetylene welding torch that burns at over 5,500 degrees Fahrenheitthe hottest fire you are likely to encounter. 7. Oxygen supply influences the color of the flame. A

low-oxygen fire contains lots of uncombusted fuel par-ticles and will give off a yellow glow. A high-oxygen fire burns blue. 8. So candle flames are blue at the bottom because thats where they take up fresh air, and yellow at the top because the rising fumes from below partly suf-focate the upper part of the flame. 9. Fire makes water? Its true. Place a cold spoon over a candle and you will observe the water vapor condense on the metal... 10. ...because waxlike most organic materials, includ-ing wood and gasolinecontains hydrogen, which bonds with oxygen to make H2O when it burns. Water comes out your cars tailpipe, too. 11. Weve been at this a long time: Charred bones and wood ash indicate that early hominids were tending the first intentional fires more than 400,000 years ago. 12. Natures been at it awhile, too. A coal seam about 140 miles north of Syd-ney, Australia, has been burning by some estimates for 500,000 years. 13. The ancient Greeks started fire with concentrated sunlight. A parabolic mirror that focuses solar rays is still used to ignite the Olympic torch. 14. Every 52 years, when their calendar completed a cycle, the Aztecs would extinguish every flame in the empire. The high priest would start a new fire on the ripped-open chest of a sacrificial victim. Fires fed from this flame would be distributed throughout the land. 15. Good burn: The 1666 Great Fire of London destroyed 80 percent of the city but also ended an outbreak of bubonic plague that had killed more than 65,000 people the previous year. The fire fried the rats and fleas that car-ried Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing bacterium. 16. The Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin was the second dead-liest blaze in United States history, taking 1,200 livesfour times as many as the Great Chicago Fire. Both con-flagrations broke out on the same day: October 8, 1871. 17. Americas deadliest fire took place April 27, 1865, aboard the steamship Sultana. Among other passengers were 1,500 recently released Union prisoners traveling home up the Mississippi when the boilers exploded. The ship was six times over capacity, which helps explain the death toll of 1,547. 18. The Black Dragon Fire of 1987, the largest wildfire in modern times, burned some 20 million acres across China and the Soviet Union, an area about the size of South Carolina. 19. Spontaneous combustion is real. Some fuel sources can generate their own heatby rotting, for instance. Pistachios have so much natural oil and are so prone to heat-generating fat decomposi-tion that the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code regards them as dangerous. 20. Haystacks, compost heaps, and even piles of old newspapers and magazines can also burst into flame. A good reason to recycle discover when you are done.

ANTHONY ARCIERO/G

ALL

ERYSTO

CK.COM

LeeAundra Keany coaches public speaking to support her writing habit. www.thecontrarypublicspeaker.com

DISCOVER

DV101120THINGS [Pr].indd 80 8/3/11 10:57 AM

2www.DiscoverMagazine.com

20 THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT MAGNETISM

BY REBECCA COFFEY

ILLUSTRATION BY

JONATHON ROSEN

1. Magnetism is familiar to every fth grader, but

describing it can confound even the most brilliant

physicist. 2. Take the case of Richard Feynman.

When asked to explain magnetism, he urged his bbc

interviewer to take it on faith. After seven minutes of

stonewalling, he nally said, I really cant do a good

job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms

of something else that youre more familiar with

because I dont understand it in terms of anything

else that youre more familiar with. 3. He did break

down and try for a few seconds before abandon-

ing the attempt. ose seconds were packed with

oversimpli cations: All the electrons [in a magnet]

are spinning in the same direction. 4. But who

better than Feynman would have known that not all

electrons spin in the same direction? 5. And they

dont actually spin. Spin is just a physicists term for

the little magnetic north and south poles baked into

every electron. e orientation of those poles de nes

the direction of the electrons (somewhat imaginary)

rotation. 6. Why does every electron have those

poles? As soon as someone nds out, well get back

to you. 7. Here is what we do know. Within an atom,

each electron is usually paired with an opposite-

oriented electron so that their magnetic pulls cancel

each other out. 8. But if some of the electrons are

unpaired, they can be induced to move around so

that their poles line up, creating a net magnetic eld.

e arrangement of the electrons in metals makes

them particularly open to magnetic peer pressure.

9. diy refrigerator magnet: Apply an external mag-

netic eld to some hot metal. Cool it so the aligned

electrons get frozen in place. Slap on your local

plumbers business card, andvoil! 10. Yin Seeks

Yang for Magnetic Relationship. All magnets have

north and south poles, and opposite poles attract:

North poles seek south poles seek north poles seek

south poles seek . . . 11. You are standing on a mag-

net right now. e earths magnetic eld is created

by electric currents in an ocean of molten iron at its

core. ats why the north pole of a compass needle

points . . . er . . . why north? Since north poles are

attracted to south poles, the north arrow on your

compass actually points toward the earths south

magnetic pole, which is the one up north. Got it?

12. And the earths magnetic south (aka north)

pole isnt even precisely at the geographic north pole.

Right now it is in the Arctic Ocean, near northern

Canada. 13. Worse still, it is constantly drifting in

response to currents in the earths core. It is moving

toward Siberia at a rate of up to 35 miles per year,

according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Hey, shift

happens. 14. Ancient mariners navigated by lodestone,

naturally occurring magnetic rocks. 15. Where lode-

stones come from is another mystery of magnetism.

Some geologists think they are created when lighting

strikes iron-rich rocks. 16. Microbes, birds, and

some other animals have magnetic crystals inside

their bodies that allow them to orient themselves.

17. at is probably why loggerhead turtles can

migrate 8,000 miles in unfamiliar waters while humans

can get lost looking for the mens room at Olive Garden.

18. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (mri) machines

generate a eld 60,000 times as intense as the

earths to vibrate the hydrogen atoms in your body;

in response, the atoms emit radio waves that are

analyzed to produce a map of your insides. 19. Using

a sensor the size of a sugar cube, researchers from the

National Institute of Standards and Technology can

track the magnetic pattern of a human heart. 20. e

signal is faint, but the good news is that science has

proved attraction is quanti able. Word up, Hallmark.

DISCOVER

DV0711THINGS1A_QG.indd 96 5/12/11 11:47 PM

3www.DiscoverMagazine.com

MICHAEL & PATRICIA FOGDEN/MINDEN PICTURES

201. e venom of the Australian funnel-web spider

can kill a person in less than an hour, and its fangs

can bite right through a shoe. 2. But for most people,

fear of spiders is a far greater problem than the spiders

themselves. Researchers at the University of So

Paulo have developed an improbable way to undo

arachnophobia by having patients stare at pictures

of spiderlike objectsa tripod, a carousel, a person

with dreadlocks. 3. Quackery? Apparently not. In a

2007 study, the scientists reported a 92 percent suc-

cess rate. 4. And there is an upside to spider bites.

Take the Brazilian wandering spider, Phoneutria

nigriventer, whose venom causes painful penile erec-

tions that last for many hours (thats the bad news).

5. e good news: e responsible toxin could yield

new treatments for erectile dysfunction. 6. e ven-

om of the South American tarantula Grammostola

spatulata might be used to treat atrial brillation. It

contains a peptide that can calm an irregular heart-

beat brought on by stress. 7. Back in Australia, Glenn

King at the University of Queensland is studying

the Blue Mountains funnel-web spider (Hadronyche

versuta) with an eye toward developing eco-friendly

pesticides. Proteins in this spiders venom target

the nervous system of insects but leave humans

unharmed. 8. First, though, theres the unpleasant

matter of getting the venom. Workers at the Spider

Pharm in Yarnell, Arizona, milk up to 1,000 spiders

a day. 9. e bugs are anesthetized with carbon

dioxide, then zapped with electricity, which makes

them release venom into minuscule glass capil-

laries connected to their fangs. 10. Web master:

Todd Blackledge at the University of Akron nds

that spider silk could be used as synthetic muscle.

Adjusting humidity up and down causes the silk to

expand and contract with 50 times the punch of the

equivalent mass of human muscle. 11. Blackledge

envisions spider silk someday being used to operate

miniature robotic devices and drug delivery systems.

12. Unlike many sticky things, the glue of orbed

web spiders gets stronger in the presence of water,

polymer scientists working with Blackledge have

discovered, suggesting that it might prove a useful

adhesive for surgery or for underwater engineering .

13. Spider-goat, Spider-goat, does whatever a spider

can: By manipulating genes, molecular biologists

at the University of Wyoming have gotten goats to

produce milk containing the protein that makes up

spider silk. 14. Next, scientists aim to introduce the

silk gene into alfalfa, which is far more e cient to

mass produce and, frankly, less creepy. 15. Safe sex:

e male nursery web spider (Pisaura mirabilis) will

bring a silk-wrapped insect to a female prior to mat-

ing so she will eat the giftinstead of him. 16. Safer

sex: e funnel-web spider Agelenopsis aperta has a

di erent approach, putting the female into a cata-

leptic state before mating so she wont cannibalize

him. 17. Scientists at Radford University in Virginia

say the A. aperta male can disable the female from

4.5 centimeters (about 2 inches), suggesting he may

be deploying a gas to knock out the femme fatale.

18. Cheap date: Certain cobweb spiders dine on

bugs poached from others webs. 19. Others dis-

pense with the killing entirely. e jumping spider

Bagheera kiplinginamed in the 1800s after the

panther in Rudyard Kiplings Jungle Bookis mostly

a vegetarian. 20. Dont want one of these things

jumping in your salad? Steven Kutcher, spider

wrangler on the lm Arachnophobia, says a dusting

of talcum powder or a spritz of Lemon Pledge makes

a tabletop or other at surface too slippery for the

critters to get any traction.

THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT SPIDERS

BY REBECCA COFFEY

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CODY TREPTE

20

BY DEAN CHRISTOPHER

1. e voice box sits lower in the throat in humans

than it does in other primates, giving us a uniquely

large resonating system. ats why we alone are able

to make the wide range of sounds needed for speech.

2. at also explains Mariah Carey, Barry White, and

Robin Williams. 3. Unfortunately, the placement of our

voice box means we cant breathe and swallow at the

same time, as other animals can (choke). 4. Fortu-

nately, the human voice box doesnt drop until about

9 months, which allows infants to breathe while nurs-

ing. 5. Still the one: Mandarin is the long-standing

champ among world languages with 845 million native

speakers, about 2.5 times as many as English. 6. But

more than 70 percent of all the home pages on the

Internet are in English, and more online users speak

English than any other language, making it the worlds

lingua franca (assuming you consider brb, omg, g2g, and

ro English). 7. Hey, the world will never change

right? English is mandatory for every student in China,

starting in third grade. But in America, only 3 percent of

elementary schools and 4 percent of secondary schools

even o er Chinese. 8. Many science-related English

words starting with the letters alincluding algebra,

alkaline, and algorithmare derived from Arabic, in

which the pre x al just means the. 9. is is a legacy

of the medieval era, when ancient Greek and Roman

knowledge was largely lost in Europe but preserved

and advanced among scholars in the Islamic world.

10. Modern technology is making everything smaller,

even our words. Bits of eight shrank to become byte,

modulate/demodulate became modem, picture

cell became pixel, and of course web log became

blog. 11. At the other end, the longest word recog-

nized by the Oxford English Dictionary is pneumono-

ultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease

caused by inhaling volcanic silicon dust. 12. Grss dich,

Dunkelheit, mein alter Freund. ree- to ve-day-olds

born into French-speaking families tend to cry with

the rising intonation characteristic of French; babies

with German-speaking parents cry with falling tones,

much like spoken German. Infants may start learn-

ing language in the womb, it seems. 13. e neural

equipment for language development then seems

to ripen between birth and age 3. People deprived of

language before puberty (due to isolation or abuse, for

instance) might later learn a limited supply of words,

but they never develop the ability to make meaningful

sentences. 14. Other clues about language processing

come from damaged brains. People who have sustained

an injury to a region called Brocas area have trouble

producing even short phrases, indicating it is critical

to speech. 15. And damage to the brains superior

temporal gyrus can lead to Wernickes aphasia. Patients

sound as if they are speaking normally, but what they

say makes no sense. 16. In old Westerns, Native

Americans often made a sound like ugh. is wasnt

a commentary on the plots; it was a naive attempt to

reproduce the sound of the glottal stop of many Native

American languages, produced by brie y closing the

vocal cords during speech. 17. !Say !What? When

the Dutch encountered Africas Nama people, whose

language includes clicking sounds, they dubbed them

Hottentots, Dutch for stuttering. 18. Really foreign

sounds: Spanish Silbo, a whistle language, has only four

vowel and four consonant sounds. Audible for miles,

it resembles bird calls and is indigenous towhere

else?the Canary Islands. 19. Indian Sign Language is

the worlds most widespread silent language, with some

2.7 million users. 20. Another sound of silence: More

than one-third of the worlds 6,800 spoken languages

are endangered. According to UNESCO, about 200

tongues now have fewer than 10 surviving speakers.

THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT LANGUAGE

(ISSN 0274-7529) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August, by Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612.

for one year (U.S. funds only). Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. POSTMASTER: Please address all subscription corre-spondence, including change of address, to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 37808, Boone, IA 50037, or call toll-free 800-829-9132; outside the U.S., 515-247-7569. Printed in the U.S.

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20THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT SAUSAGE

By LeeAundra Keany

in 10 minutes at the 2009 Nathans

Famous International Hot Dog

Eating Contest on Coney Island, the

current world record. 10. Tip for

trying this at home: Soak the bun in

water. 11. Another tip: Dont try this

at home. Hot dogs cause 17 percent of

food-related asphyxiations in children

under 10. 12. Zigeunerwurst, bier-

schinken, and jagdwurst. Germany

produces the greatest variety of

wursts, with over 1,000 combinations

of ingredients. 13. Does the thought

of haggis make you want to hurl?

You can do it for real at haggis-hurling

competitions held at the Scottish

Highland Games. 14. e record is

held either by Alan Pettigrew, who

hurled a 1 pound 8 ounce haggis

more than 180 feet, or Lorne Coltart,

whose 1 pound 4 ounce haggis trav-

eled 214 feet 9 inches. Some sports

have better record keeping than oth-

ers. 15. Not retching yet? Take some

time to consider haggis ingredients:

sheeps stomach, lamb heart and

lungs, beef, suet, onion, oatmeal,

salt, spices, and stock, simmered in

the stomach of the sheep. 16. You

thought you didnt want to know

what was inside. Traditional sausage

is encased in the submucosa, the

collagen layer of animal intestines.

For mortadella, that means cow

bladders; for liverwurst, pig bungs.

17. Too-hot hot dogs: e friction

inside a meat grinder running full

tilt can create a temperature of

120F. To keep from melting the

fat, some sausage makers dip their

grinders in liquid nitrogen.

18. Modern hot dogs incorporate

the most complex process in sau-

sage making, emulsi cation. Wie-

ners must be blended perfectly so

that the fat is evenly distributed and

stabilized by protein. 19. Mark Post

at Germanys Maastricht University

is trying to create sausage minus the

pig. For his prototype he is growing

mouse muscle from stem cells in

a petri dish. ousands of muscle

strips later: cruelty-free mouse sau-

sage. 20. Now are you hungry?

1. Sausages, a blend of meat or

blood protein, fat, and spices, were

the rst processed food. In e Odys-

sey Homer un atteringly compares

Odysseus to a fat sausage. 2. e

English word sausage comes from

the Latin salsus, meaning salted.

Salt is key to a good link because it

dissolves the muscle ber in meat so

the fat can oat in a chewy protein

matrix. Hungry yet? 3. e Roman

word for sausage, botulus, is the

origin of the word botulism. e

sausage production process creates

a warm, moist, anaerobic environ-

ment ideal for Clostridium botuli-

num, the bacterium that produces

the botulin toxin. 4. In Asia and

later the Mediterranean, sausages

were left out to ferment, producing

lactic acid that retarded the growth

of spoilage bacteria. 5. Nitrites

chemicals added to cure the sau-

sagekill botulism more reliably.

6. Unfortunately, nitrites also

combine with amines, the natural

breakdown products of proteins, to

form cancer-causing nitrosamines.

7. Before you vegetarians get on

your high tofu horse: Nitrites and

their chemical relatives, nitrates,

are ubiquitous in plants, including

vegetables and grains. 8. Over the

past 60 years vegetables, sh, and

home-canned foods have caused

more outbreaks of botulism than

beef, pork, and chicken. 9. And

hes still here to tell the tale. Joey

Jaws Chestnut scarfed 68 hot dogs

DAVID LIDBETTER/GALLERY STOCK

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20THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT KISSINGBY SHERIL KIRSHENBAUM ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHON ROSEN

Sheril

Kirshenbaums

latest book is

The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us (January 2011,

Grand Central

Publishing).

1. Only you: Human lips are di erent from those of all other

animals because they are everted, meaning that they purse

outward. 2. But we are not the only species to engage in

kissing-like behaviors. Great apes press their lips together

to express excitement, a ection, or reconciliation.

3. Scientists are not sure why humans kiss, but some

think the answer lies in early feeding experiences. rough

nursing and (in some cultures) receiving pre-chewed

food from a parents mouth, infants may learn to associ-

ate lip pressure with a loving act. 4. Another possibility:

Smelling a loved ones cheek has long served as a means

of recognition in cultures around the world, from New

Zealand to Alaska. Over time, a brush of the lips may have

become a traditional accompaniment. 5. And yet kissing

is not universal, leading some experts, like anthropologist

Vaughn Bryant of Texas A&M, to think it might actually

be a learned behavior. 6. e Roman military introduced

kissing to many non-kissing cultures (after its conquests

were over, presumably); later it was European explorers who

carried the torch. 7. Being close enough to kiss helps

our noses assess compatibility. In a landmark study,

evolutionary biologist Claus Wedekind of the University of

Lausanne in Switzerland reported that women prefer the

scents of men whose immunity-coding genes are di er-

ent from their own. Mixing genes that way may produce

o spring with a stronger immune system. 8. Wed ekinds

experiment, widely known as the sweaty T-shirt study,

involved very little sweat. Male participants were asked

to shower beforehand so their scent would be faint. 9. e

earliest literary evidence for kissing comes from northern

Indias Vedic Sanskrit texts, written 1,000 to 2,000 years

ago. A portion of the Satapatha Brahmana mentions lovers

setting mouth to mouth. 10. Love Is the Drug: Dopamine,

a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of desire and

reward, spikes in response to novel experiences, which

explains why a kiss with someone new can feel so special.

11. In some people, a jolt of dopamine can cause a loss of

appetite and an inability to sleep, symptoms commonly

associated with falling in love. 12. Cant Get Enough of Your

Love: Dopamine is produced in the ventral tegmental area

of the brain, the same region a ected by addictive drugs like

cocaine. 13. In men, a passionate kiss can also promote the

hormone oxytocin, which fosters bonding and attach-

ment, according to behavioral neuroscientist Wendy Hill

of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. 14. Holding hands

and kissing reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol,

thereby lowering blood pressure and optimizing immune

response. 15. And a passionate kiss has the same e ect

as belladonna in making our pupils dilate. 16. Prelude to

a Kiss: Two-thirds of all people turn their head to the right

when kissing, according to psychologist Onur Gntrkn

of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. is behavior

may mirror the head-turning preference observed in babies

and even in fetuses. 17. Evolutionary psychologists have

discovered that men are far more likely to prefer sloppy

tongue kisses than women. 18. e exchange of saliva

could provide a reproductive advantage for males. During

an open-mouthed kiss, a man passes a bit of testosterone

to his partner. Over weeks and months, repeated kissing

could enhance a females libido, making her more recep-

tive to sex. 19. Always brush and oss, boys. Evolutionary

psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New

York at Albany found that when deciding whether to kiss

someone, women pay much closer attention than men

do to the breath and teeth of their partner. 20. You Give

Love a Bad Name: One milliliter of saliva contains about

100,000,000 bacteria.

DISCOVER

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20THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT THE PERIODIC TABLE

1. You may remember the Periodic Table of the Elements as a dreary chart on your classroom wall. If so, you never guessed its real purpose: Its a giant cheat sheet. 2. The table has served chemistry students since 1869, when it was created by Dmitry Mendeleyev, a cranky professor at the University of St. Petersburg. 3. With a publishers dead-line looming, Mendeleyev didnt have time to describe all 63 then-known elements. So he turned to a data set of atomic weights meticulously gathered by others. 4. To determine those weights, scientists had passed currents through various solutions to break them up into their constituent atoms. Responding to a batterys polarity, the atoms of one element would go this-away, the atoms of another thataway. The atoms were collected in separate containers and then weighed. 5. From this process, chemists determined relative weightswhich were all Mendeleyev needed to establish a use-ful ranking. 6. Fond of card games, he wrote the weight for each element on a separate index card and sorted them as in solitaire. Elements with similar properties formed a suit that he placed in columns ordered by ascend-ing atomic weight. 7. Now he had a new Periodic Law (Elements arranged according to the value of their atomic weights present a clear periodicity of properties) that described one pattern for all 63 elements. 8. Where Mendeleyevs table had blank spaces, he correctly predicted the weights and chemical behaviors of some missing elementsgallium, scandium, and germanium. 9. But when argon was discovered in 1894, it didnt fit into any of Mendeleyevs columns, so he denied its existenceas he did for helium, neon, krypton, xenon, and radon. 10. In 1902 he acknowledged he had not anticipated the existence of these overlooked, incredibly unreactive ele-mentsthe noble gaseswhich now constitute the entire eighth group of the table. 11. Now we sort elements by

their number of protons, or atomic number, which determines an atoms configuration of oppositely charged electrons and hence its chemical properties. 12. Noble gases (far right on the periodic table) have closed shells of electrons, which is why they are nearly inert. 13. Atomic love: Take a modern periodic table, cut out the complicated middle columns, and fold it once along the middle of the Group 4 elements. The groups that kiss have complementary electron structures and will combine with each other. 14. Sodium touches chlorinetable salt! You can predict other com-mon compounds like potassium chlo-ride, used in very large doses as part of a lethal injection. 15. The Group 4 elements in the middle bond readily with each other and with themselves. Silicon + silicon + silicon ad infinitum links up into crystalline lattices, used to make semiconductors for computers. 16. Carbon atomsalso Group 4bond in long chains, and voil: sugars. The chemical flexibility of carbon is what makes it the key molecule of life. 17. Mendeleyev wrongly assumed that all elements are unchanging. But radio-active atoms have unstable nuclei, meaning they can move around the chart. For example, uranium (element 92) gradually decays into a whole series of lighter elements, ending with lead (element 82). 18. Beyond the edge: Atoms with atomic numbers higher than 92 do not exist naturally, but they can be created by bombarding ele-ments with other elements or pieces of them. 19. The two newest members of the periodic table, still-unnamed elements 114 and 116, were officially recognized last June. Number 116 decays and disappears in milliseconds. 20. Physicist Richard Feynman once predicted that number 137 defines the tables outer limit; adding any more protons would produce an energy that could be quantified only by an imagi-nary number, rendering element 138 and higher impossible. Maybe.

For a printable periodic table visit: discovermagazine.com/web/periodictable

APIC/G

ETTY IM

AGES

Mendeleyev is above. Rebecca Coffeys blog, The Excuses Im Going With, is at rebeccacoffey.blogspot.com

By Rebecca Coffey

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20THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT ALCOHOLBy LeeAundra Keany 1. Sobering disclaimer: e family of compounds

known as alcohols are all toxins that can kill you, whether instantly, quickly, or gradually. 2. Yet one of themethyl alcohol, or ethanolis a staple of the human diet. Archaeologist Patrick McGovern speculates that fermented beverages were made as early as 100,000 years ago, when people rst spread out of Africa. 3. e seeds Johnny Appleseed sold to farmers throughout Ohio and Indiana produced apples that were inedible, but perfect for making hard cider. 4. According to the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, our zest for alcoholic beverages derives from our distant ancestors impulse to seek the ripest, most energy-intensive fruits. 5. Designated driver at the zoo: e Malaysian pen-tailed treeshrew routinely chugs the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a night in naturally fermented nectar, and yet it remains fully functional. 6. For a treeshrew, that is. 7. Fermentation occurs when enzymes, typically pro-duced by yeast, convert sugar molecules in grapes or grains into ethanol. 8. at process can also happen in your digestive system, spiking every 100 ml of blood with 0.01 to 0.03 mg of alcohol. 9. Seriously, o cer! Japanese doctors have observed patients with auto-brewery syndrome, in which high levels of candida yeast in the intestines churn out so much

alcohol that they can cause drunkenness. 10. No digestion required. Ethanol is such a small, simple moleculejust two carbon atoms, six hydrogens, and a spare oxygenthat it pours directly out of the stomach and small intestine into the bloodstream. 11. A lean, muscular person will be less a ected by drink than someone with more body fat: Water-rich muscle tissues absorb alcohol e ectively, prevent-ing it from reaching the brain. 12.Drunkenness is considered an impairment of the neurons in your head, but Australian researchers recently reported that part of the feeling may result instead from the e ect of ethanol on the brains immune system. e nding could lead to new treatments for alcoholism. 13. e times they are a-changin. In 1895 Anheuser-Busch launched Malt-Nutrine, a 1.9 percent-alcohol-content beer prescribed by physicians as a tonic for pregnant women and a nutritional beverage for children. 14. Until 1916 whiskey and brandy were listed as scienti cally approved medicines in the United States Pharmacopeia. 15. Drinking and driv-ing: Surplus wine in Sweden is distilled into ethanol, mixed with gasoline, and sold to service stations. 16. Ethanol was widely used as an industrial fuel in America until a tax on alcoholic beverages, levied to help pay for the Civil War, prompted a switch to kerosene and methanol. 17. Methanol, a distillation of wood pulp, can destroy the optic nerves. Blind drunk was Prohibition-era slang for damage caused by drinking grain alcohol that had been cut with methanol by unscrupulous bootleggers. 18. Interstellar brewery: e nebulas where stars form abound with hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, the atomic building blocks of alcohol. 19. Sure enough, astronomers found vast quantities of etha-nolas much as that in 400 trillion trillion beers

in G34.3, an interstellar cloud some 10,000 light-years from Earth. 20. Resolution for 2012: Dont stare at the cork. e carbon dioxide in champagne bottles creates 90 pounds of pressure per square inch, three times the pressure in automobile

tires. Flying corks can cause retina detachment, double

vision, and blindness. Happy New Year!

ISTO

CK

LeeAundra Keany coaches public speaking to support her writing habit. Her website is thecontrarypublicspeaker.com

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MC KY

20 THINGS YOU

DIDNT KNOW ABOUT

THE PENCIL

KELLY REDINGER/DESIGN PICS/CORBIS.

1 There is no risk of lead poisoning if

you stab yourself (or someone else)

with a pencil because it contains

no leadjust a mixture of clay and

graphite. Still, pencil wounds carry

a risk of infection for the stabees,

lawsuits for stabbers.

2 And bad juju for anyone linked

to Watergate: In his autobiography,

G. Gordon Liddy describes fi nding

John Dean (whom he despised for

disloyalty) alone in a room. Spotting

sharpened pencils on a desk, Liddy

fl eetingly considered driving one into

Deans throat.

3 Graphite, a crystallized form of

carbon, was discovered near Keswick,

England, in the mid-16th century. An

18th-century German chemist, A. G.

Werner, named it, sensibly enough,

from the Greek graphein, to write.

4 The word pencil derives from the

Latin penicillus, meaningnot so

sensiblylittle tail.

5 Pencil marks are made when tiny

graphite fl ecks, often just thousandths

of an inch wide, stick to the fi bers that

make up paper.

6 Got time to kill? The average pencil

holds enough graphite to draw a line

about 35 miles long or to write roughly

45,000 words. History does not record

anyone testing this statistic.

7 The Greek poet Philip of Thessalonki

wrote of leaden writing instruments in

the fi rst century B.C., but the modern

pencil, as described by Swiss naturalist

Conrad Gesner, dates only to 1565.

8 French pencil boosters include

Nicolas-Jacques Cont, who patented

a clay-and-graphite manufacturing

process in 1795; Bernard Lassimone,

who patented the fi rst pencil sharpener

in 1828; and Therry des Estwaux, who

invented an improved mechanical

sharpener in 1847.

9 French researchers also hit on the

idea of using caoutchouc, a vegetable

gum now known as rubber, to erase

pencil marks. Until then, writers

removed mistakes with bread crumbs.

10 Most pencils sold in America

today have eraser tips, while those

sold in Europe usually have none. Are

Europeans more confi dent scribblers?

11 Henry David ThoreauAmerican,

but a confi dent scribbler all the

sameused pencils to write Walden.

And he probably got them free. His

father owned a pencil-making business

near Boston, where Henry allegedly

designed his own pencils before

becoming a semi-recluse.

12 In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the

fi rst American mass-production pencil

factory in New York City.

13 Pencils were among the basic

equipment issued to Union soldiers

during the Civil War.

14 The mechanical pencil was patented

in 1822. The company founded by

its British developers prospered until

1941, when the factory was bombed,

presumably by pencil-hating Nazis.

15 Je suis un crayon rouge. After

the 1917 Soviet revolution, American

entrepreneur Armand Hammer was

awarded a monopoly for pencil

manufacturing in the USSR.

16 More than half of all pencils come

from China. In 2004, factories there

turned out 10 billion pencils, enough to

circle the earth more than 40 times.

17 Pencils can write in zero gravity and

so were used on early American and

Russian space missionseven though

NASA engineers worried about the

fl ammability of wood pencils in a pure-

oxygen atmosphere, not to mention the

menace of fl oating bits of graphite.

18 Those concerns inspired Paul Fisher

to develop the pressurized Fisher

Space Pen in 1965. After the Apollo 1

fi re, NASA banned pencils in favor of

his pen on manned spacefl ights.

19 The worlds largest pencil is

a Castell 9000, on display at the

manufacturers plant near Kuala

Lumpur. Made of Malaysian wood and

polymer, it stands 65 feet high.

20 At the other extreme, engineers at

the University of California at Santa

Barbara have used an atomic force

microscope as a kind of pencil to draw

lines 50 nanometers (two millionths of

an inch) wide. Just because they could.

Dean Christopher

10www.DiscoverMagazine.com

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20 THINGS YOU

DIDNT KNOW ABOUT HYGIENE

9 In a small victory for cleanliness,

Englands medieval King Henry IV

required his knights to bathe at least

once in their livesduring their ritual

knighthood ceremonies.

10 Thats their excuse, anyway:

Excrement dumped out of windows

into the streets in 18th-century London

contaminated the citys water supply

and forced locals to drink gin instead.

11 A seventh grader in Florida recently

won her school science fair by

proving there are more bacteria in ice

machines at fast-food restaurants than

in toilet bowl water.

12 Theres no ve-second rule when

it comes to dropping food on the

ground. Bacteria need no time at all to

contaminate food.

13 The rst true toothbrush, consisting

of Siberian pig hair bristles wired into

carved cattle-bone handles, was

invented in China in 1498. But tooth

brushing didnt become routine in the

United States until it was enforced on

soldiers during World War II.

14 Please dont squeeze the corncob.

In 1935, Northern Tissue proudly

introduced splinter-free toilet paper.

Previous options included tundra moss

for Eskimos, a sponge with salt water

for Romans, andhopefully splinter-

freecorncobs in the American West.

15 NASA recently spent $23.4 million

designing a toilet for the Space Shuttle

that would defy zero gravity with

1 Hygiene comes from Hygieia, the

Greek goddess of health, cleanliness,

and . . . the moon. Ancient Greek gods

apparently worked double shifts.

2 The human body is home to some

1,000 species of bacteria. There are

more germs on your body than people

in the United States.

3 Not tonight dear, I just washed my

hands: Antibacterial soap is no more

effective at preventing infection than

regular soap, and triclosan (the active

ingredient) can mess with your sex

hormones.

4 Save the germs! A study of over

11,000 children determined that an

overly hygienic environment increases

the risk of eczema and asthma.

5 Monks of the Jain Dharma (a

minority religion in India) are forbidden

to bathe any part of their bodies

besides the hands and feet, believing

the act of bathing might jeopardize the

lives of millions of microorganisms.

6 Its a good thing theyre monks.

7 Soap gets its name from the

mythological Mount Sapo. Fat and

wood ash from animal sacri ces there

washed into the Tiber River, creating a

rudimentary cleaning agent that aided

women doing their washing.

8 Ancient Egyptians and Aztecs rubbed

urine on their skin to treat cuts and

burns. Urea, a key chemical in urine, is

known to kill fungi and bacteria.

suction technology at 850 liters of air ow

per minute. Thats a lot of money for a

toilet that sucks.

16 In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sr. campaigned for basic sanitation

in hospitals. But this clashed with

social ideas of the time and met with

widespread disdain. Charles Meigs,

a prominent American obstetrician,

retorted, Doctors are gentlemen, and

gentlemens hands are clean.

17 Up to a quarter of all women

giving birth in European and American

hospitals in the 17th through 19th

centuries died of puerperal fever, an

infection spread by unhygienic nurses

and doctors.

18 TV kills! University of Arizona

researchers determined that television

remotes are the worst carriers of bacteria

in hospital rooms, worse even than toilet

handles. Remotes spread antibiotic-

resistant Staphylococcus, which

contributes to the 90,000 annual deaths

from infection acquired in hospitals.

19 It is now believed President James

Gar eld died not from the bullet red

by Charles Guiteau but because the

medical team treated the president

with manure-stained hands, causing

a severe infection that killed him three

months later.

20 What on earth made them think

manure-stained hands were remotely

acceptable to treat anyone?

Liza Lentini and David Mouzon

M. NEUGEBAUER/ZEFA/CORBIS.

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11

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20 THINGS YOU DIDNT KNOW ABOUT

LAB ACCIDENTS

12 Perhaps he should have chucked it

out instead: In 2005 the Environmental

Protection Agency identi ed a Te on

ingredient, per uorooctanoic acid, as

a likely carcinogen. It is now in the

bloodstream of 95 percent of Americans.

13 After a 1992 drug trial in the Welsh

mining town of Merthyr Tyd l, male

subjects reported that sildena l citrate

hadnt done much for their angina, but

it did have an unusual side effect on

another part of their anatomy. Today the

drug is sold as Viagra.

14 In 1943 Swiss chemist Albert

Hoffman inadvertently absorbed a small

quantity of lysergic acid through his

ngertips and experienced dizziness . . .

visual distortions . . . [a] desire to laugh.

The age of LSD had begun.

15 Hoffmans long, strange trip continues.

He turned 100 this past January.

16 Why hes not the father of the electric

chair: While trying to electrocute a turkey,

Benjamin Franklin sent a whopping jolt

from two Leyden jars into his own body.

The ash was very great and the crack

as loud as a Pistol, he wrote, describing

the incident as an Experiment in

Electricity that I desire never to repeat.

17 In 1965 astronomers Arno Penzias and

Robert Wilson scrubbed their Bell Labs

radio antenna to rid it of pigeon droppings,

which they suspected were causing the

instruments annoying steady hiss.

18 That noise turned out to be the

microwave echo of the Big Bang.

19 The world has scores of superpowerful

particle accelerators. Last year, a reball

created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion

Collider in Upton, New York, had the

characteristics of a black hole. Physicists

are reasonably sure that no such black

holes could escape and consume Earth.

20 Reasonably.

Sean Markey

book hero to develop superpowers after a

lab accident, attaining super speed after

inhaling hard water vapors.

7 Other bene ciaries of the Freak Lab

Mishap include Plastic Man (struck by a

falling drum full of acid), the Hulk (irradiated

by an experimental bomb), and of course,

Spider-Man (bitten by a radioactive spider).

8 In real life, perhaps a bigger risk

comes from lab-contracted diseases.

The worlds last documented case

of smallpox killed photographer

Janet Parker in 1978 after the virus

escaped from a lab at the University of

Birmingham in England.

9 But sometimes humans strike back:

Alexander Fleming, famous for his

serendipitous discovery of penicillin, also

chanced upon an antibiotic enzyme in

nasal mucus when he sneezed onto a

bacterial sample and noticed that his snot

kept the microbes in check.

10 The lab-accident rate in schools and

colleges is 100 to 1,000 times greater than

at rms like Dow or DuPont.

11 In 1938 DuPont chemist Roy

Plunkett opened a dud canister of

tetra uoroethylene gas and discovered an

amazing, nearly friction-free white powder.

He named it Te on.

1 There went our best chance: In

the ninth century, a team of Chinese

alchemists trying to synthesize an elixir

of immortality from saltpeter, sulfur,

realgar, and dried honey instead invented

gunpowder.

2 German scientist Hennig Brand stored

50 buckets of urine in his cellar for

months in 1675, hoping that it would

turn into gold. Instead, an obscure mix of

alchemy and chemistry yielded a waxy,

glowing goo that spontaneously burst

into amethe element now known as

phosphorus.

3 Soldiers supplied the raw material in

vast, sloshing quantities until the 1750s,

when Swedish chemist Carl Scheele

developed an industrial method of

producing phosphorus. He discovered

eight other elements, including chlorine,

oxygen, and nitrogen, and compounds like

ammonia, glycerin, and prussic acid.

4 Scheele was found dead in his lab at

age 43, perhaps owing to his propensity

for tasting his own toxic chemicals.

5 Kevlar, superglue, cellophane, Post-it

notes, photographs, and the phonograph:

They all emerged from laboratory blunders.

6 The Flash, created in 1940 for All-

American Publications, was the rst comic

All those petri dishes, but

nary a handkerchief to

hand: Thanks to a wayward

sneeze, Alexander Fleming

discovered a new antibiotic.

CORBIS.

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