Skulls in the Stars

Just got back from ScienceOnline 2011 this week, and I’m hoping to put up a few posts about it over the next couple of days — as well as a few science posts!  In the meantime, here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for the past week.  While I was at the meeting, I sent out a distress call asking for help in finding some facts, as I was too, um, “distracted”, to think clearly enough to find my own.  A number of these are courtesy of other Twitterers!

305. Jan 12: c. 1870, physicist William Crookes was one of many to investigate and give credence to spiritualism. It’s easy to forget that, even until the middle of the 20th century, scientists still seriously allowed for the possibility of psychic/spirit forces that have been completely discounted today.

306. Jan 13: John Tyndall died in 1893 at the hands of his own wife. To quote Wikipedia, “In late years he was taking magnesia for dyspepsia and chloral hydrate for insomnia. His wife, who administered the drugs, accidentally gave him none of the former and a lethal overdose of the latter.” (h/t @darwinsbulldog)

307. Jan 14: Johannes Kepler found mathematical inspiration in a wine barrel. A lot of scientists have found inspiration from alcohol!  Via Wolfram Mathworld, “When buying supplies for his second wedding, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler became unhappy about the inexact methods used by the merchants to estimate the liquid contents of a wine barrel. Kepler therefore investigated the properties of nearly 100 solids of revolution generated by rotation of conic sections about non-principal axes.” (h/t @blakestacey)

308. Jan 15: Joseph Black (1728-1799) discovered latent heat and founded thermodynamics while trying to improve whisky distillation. Like I said in the last fact, lots of scientists have been inspired by booze!  (h/t @blakestacey)

309. Jan 16: 9 banded armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets. (h/t @DianeAKelly)

310. Jan 17: The strangely long-lived belief in polymerized water.

311. Jan 18: Charles Dalziel (1940-1986) performed electric shock expts on 200 volunteers; developed safety devices. From shocking lots of people, Dalziel developed the ground fault circuit interrupter, which protects people in homes today from electrical shock.

Here are the Twitter weird science facts for the week!

298. Jan 05: China’s treacherous Yellow River: est. 1.5k floods (millions killed) & 26 course changes in 2.6k years.  The Yellow River is especially dangerous because of the high proportion of silt in it, which continuously raises the level of the river bed.  Historically, levees were built to accommodate the raising river, and the breaking of these levees has lead to the catastrophic flooding and course changes.  In 1938, in the second Sino-Japanese war, Chinese soldiers broke the levees to hinder the progress of the advancing Japanese; the flooding is estimated to have killed over a half million people.

299. Jan 06: The vampire finch? A finch is an unlikely blood sucker, but a certain species has developed the habit of opportunistically feeding on the blood of other birds.

300. Jan 07: 34,000-year-old bacteria found alive!  (h/t @AndreaMustain, @BoraZ)

301. Jan 08: The Theremin, hands-free electronic instrument invented in 1928 (h/t Big Bang Theory!)

302. Jan 09: The infamy of the Tacoma Narrows bridge followed one engineer even as a Japanese POW.  (h/t @blakestacey)

303. Jan 10: In 1669 Hennig Brand discovered phosphorous while boiling urine to search for Philosopher’s Stone.

304. Jan 11: Thunderstorms hurl antimatter into space!

We’ve entered a new year for my Twitter #weirdscifacts!  The previous week’s facts are below:

291. Dec 29: In the late 19th century, paleontologist O.C. Marsh speculated that stegosaurus had a second brain in its rear! This was no so crazy at the time as it perhaps appears now.  Marsh noted that stegosaurus has a large canal in the hip region of the spinal cord, and this canal was significantly larger than the animal’s brain.  Because of the smallness of dinosaur brains, it was thought that perhaps a large animal like stegosaurus needed a second brain in the rear area to control reflexes back there.  This is no longer believed, but the canal’s purpose is still unclear.

292. Dec 30: The case study of a woman who (literally) feels no fear.

293. Dec 31: Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, a leech that only lives in the anus of hippopotamus. (h/t @DrBondar)  This is obviously a very specialized leech.  It has not been studied very much, due to the obvious dangers of not only working with hippos, but rooting around in a hippo’s rear-end!

294. Jan 01: Start New Year’s weird facts with a bang! The Tunguska blast and other similar events.  It is really striking, and a little frightening, how frequently meteorite airbursts occur with energies in the kilotons of TNT or higher.

295. Jan 02: Physicist Roger Penrose’s geometric work influenced the art of M.C. Escher.

296. Jan 03: Vampire bats: a 40g bat can drink 20g of blood in 20 mins — and pee most weight away in 2 mins. These bats are remarkably adapted: they drink so much blood that they can’t even fly with it all, but their bodies quickly absorb the nutrients and pee out the leftover liquid.

297. Jan 04: Soldiers can collapse a bridge simply by marching across it: ex. Angers Bridge, 1850. Such bridge collapses are an example of mechanical resonance.  Bridges, buildings and other structures tend to have characteristic frequencies of vibration, and external forces that vibrate in synch can produce massive oscillations of the structure that can lead to failure.  The most famous example of this is the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed due to wind forces in 1940.

In the case of the Angers Bridge, the resonance was induced by soldiers marching in lockstep across it.  The disaster led to soldiers being advised to break step when crossing bridges, though evidently this rule had been implemented by much earlier military groups and later lost.