Skulls in the Stars

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for the past week, delayed a day due to the publication of The Giant’s Shoulders yesterday!

333. Feb 09: The sucker-footed bat! (Actually stick to things via sweat, not suction.) Animal appendages come in an amazing variety of forms; here we have a bat that literally sticks to surfaces!

334. Feb 10: Komodo dragons will eat animal intestines, but only after swinging them around to fling out feces. (This fact was a big, big hit on Twitter!)

335. Feb 11: The Dana Octopus Squid uses flashes of light from photophores to blind & disorient its prey.

336. Feb 12: The odd behavior of superfluids, which will climb up the sides of their containers! Superfluids are cryogenic liquids that exhibit quantum-mechanical behavior on a macroscopic scale — this is, in essence, quantum physics that we can see with the naked eye!

337. Feb 13: Cryoseisms, aka “frostquakes”. (h/t @patrickneville via @Allochthonous @rockbandit)

338. Feb 14: Properly focused, 2 square meters of sunlight can melt steel & rock! This is a remarkable video — 2 square meters of sunlight is, as the video says, enough to illuminate a trio of sunbathers.  There is enough energy there, however, to produce extreme temperatures.

339. Feb 15: Record distance for free-space optical communication? 183 miles by heliograph — in 1894. A good portion of my research involves communication by laser beam over long distances through the atmosphere, which is marred by atmospheric turbulence.  It is very odd to realize that the U.S. Signal Corps managed to communicate over huge distances with simple heliographs — essentially mirrors used to reflect the Sun’s rays.  Of course, the Signal Corps was not trying to send megabytes of information in a matter of seconds.

Below are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for the previous week!

326. Feb 02: Daguerre’s photographic process was made “free to the world” in 1839 — w/ exception of Great Britain. Daguerre was competing with British scientist Talbot to perfect the photographic process, and he ended up patenting his invention in England to prevent being “scooped”.  A week later, France (which had then acquired the rights from Daguerre) declared it a process “free to the world”, which by law excluded England!  This unfortunate outcome is said to have hindered British photography research for years.

327. Feb 03: Neutron star density: a sugar cube-sized piece would roughly have mass of entire human population. We all learn in grade school that atoms are mostly “empty space”; this leaves a lot of room for them to be compressed.  When a relatively light mass star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravitational “weight”, becoming a tightly-packed aggregate of electrons, protons and neutrons known as a white dwarf.  A star of larger mass possesses larger gravitational “weight”, and can squeeze the electrons and protons together to form neutrons, leaving an even denser object known as a neutron star.  As this fact demonstrates, such objects are incredibly dense: with a mass between 1.35 and 2.0 solar masses, a neutron star might have a radius of only 12 km!

328. Feb 04: The Bay of Fundy has a tidal range (difference in high/low tide) of 55 feet. If it isn’t clear, this means that the difference in water elevation between high and low tide is some 55 feet — perhaps the height of a four-story building!  This is the largest tidal range in the world, statistically tied with Ungava Bay.

329. Feb 05: A classic: Mercury is a liquid so dense that cannonballs will float in it. This can be understood by Archimedes’ principle: “Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.”  Mercury has a room temperature density of 13.53 g/cm³, while solid iron has a density of 7.87 g/cm³.  Since Mercury has almost twice the density of iron, the iron will float at a level halfway submerged, as seen in the video.  Mercury is even denser than lead: 11.34 g/cm³.

330. Feb 06: The Casimir effect: in which quantum fluctuations in vacuum exert a pressure! In our current understanding of quantum physics, even empty space is never truly empty: so-called “virtual particles”, pairs of particles and anti-particles, constantly wink into and out of existence, unobserved.  Even though they are unobserved, however, their effects can be felt.  When two metal plates are brought close together, the area between them has the creation of these virtual particles hindered.  Because more virtual particles are created outside the plates, a net pressure is created that pushes the plates together.

331. Feb 07: The fungus that turns carpenter ants into zombies…

332. Feb 08: The odd case of Phineas Gage, who survived an iron rod passing through his head. Gage may not even have lost consciousness when the 1.25” iron rod went through his skull and brain!  The case revised doctor’s views of traumatic brain injuries and provided some of the first insights into behavioral changes brought about by such injuries.  (Link to a classic @scicurious post.)

Here are the (slightly belated) Twitter #weirdscifacts for the previous week!

319. Jan 26: The 1927 Mississippi River flood: at some points, the river was 70 *miles* wide. This is a frightening testament to the destructive power of floods.

319a. Bonus fact, via @jasonrobertshaw: Bull sharks used to swim up and down the Mississippi as far north as Illinois. Can you imagine swimming in the Mississippi outside of St. Louis and getting bit by a shark?

320. Jan 27: Snow rollers: rare, naturally-rolled snowballs! (h/t @patrickneville ) When conditions are right, sheets of snow can be blown by the wind into rolls like a carpet.

321. Jan 28: Surgeon/scientist John Hunter (1728-93) likely infected himself with gonorrhoea to test his theories. Hunter had a hypothesis that syphilis was a late-stage form of gonorrhoea, and he injected an unnamed subject to test the idea.  Scholars believe that he in fact injected himself; it’s hard to believe that someone else would have been willing to undertake the experience.

322. Jan 29: On 1/1/2010, in accordance with Life+70 law of copyright, the works of Sigmund Freud entered Public Domain. (h/t @jgold85)

323. Jan 30: Max Born had rights of German optics book stolen twice: once by Germany when he fled, once by U.S.A. when they conquered it. My Ph.D. advisor Emil Wolf shared this story with me; he worked with Born on a revised English optics book, Principles of Optics, that is still in use today.  Born was Jewish and had to flee the Nazis, who appropriated the rights of his book.  When Germany was conquered, part of the “spoils of war” involved the rights to many German books being given to publishers in the conquering countries.  Born actually received a letter from the U.S. publisher asking what parts of his old book he would be using in the new one, so that they could charge him!  (As I understand it, he more or less told them to stuff it.)

324. Jan 31: The 1903 Amundsen expedition to find NW passage sailed just in time to escape its creditors! It is oddly simultaneously reassuring and depressing to realize that scientists and explorers have always had to worry about losing funding.

325. Feb 01: Via @wiredscience: Vikings may have navigated w/ polarized skylight. This was one of those facts that was all over Twitter, but I really couldn’t beat for the day.

I’m currently in the airport in San Francisco, waiting to get my flight back to Charlotte.  I thought this would be a good time to post the past week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts!  Hopefully life will settle down somewhat soon and I’ll be back to more regular science and pulp fiction postings.

312. Jan 19:  At about three tons, a blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as a small elephant. (via @CaptainSkellett)

313. Jan 20: The 1827-28 Burke & Hare murders; motive was cash for anatomy college specimens. In that era, the need for anatomy specimens was on the rise, but legal sources — namely executed criminals — were on the decline.  Burke and Hare took it upon themselves to create their own source of fresh corpses, via murder.

314. Jan 21: The Great Thunderstorm of Widecombe-in-the-Moor, 1638: apparent ball lightning kills 4, injures 60. The ball lightning hit during a church service; it was “explained” at the time as the devil arriving to claim the soul of a man sleeping during church.

315. Jan 22: Scientists have used tombstones to track environmental changes. Tombstones are long-lasting and can serve as a record of pollution and other environmental factors.

316. Jan 23: Scientist & philosopher Francis Bacon died in 1626 from pneumonia, possibly due to studying the use of snow to preserve meat. The connection is not quite certain, but Bacon is often cited as a man who literally died in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

317. Jan 24: The doctor who kept Einstein’s brain in a jar for 43 years.

318. Jan 25: Flesh-eating plant doubles as bat-cave. Couldn’t beat this post by @edyong209 for sheer weirdness on this day!