Skulls in the Stars

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for December 15th through December 21st!

277. Dec 15: Thomas Midgley Jr., disabled engineer & chemist, died in 1944 when he was strangled by his self-designed bed pulley system. This one is as tragic as it is bizarre.  Midgley was an incredibly successful researcher who was granted over a hundred patents.  His legacy, however, also includes the development of lead additives in gasoline and CFCs.  Late in life, he contracted polio, which left him disabled.  He developed a system of pulleys to help others lift him from bed, but became entangled in the device one day and was killed by it.

278. Dec 16: The cosmic microwave background radiation was first interpreted in 1964 as pigeon droppings in sensor. Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson developed a sensitive cryogenic microwave sensor for radio astronomy observations.  When they detected an unexpected amount of noise in their measurements, the prime candidate was the large amount of pigeon droppings that had accumulated in the sensor horn.  Further investigation found the effect to be real, and what they had measured was background radiation left over from the Big Bang!

279. Dec 17: The tarantula hawk wasp, which hunts tarantulas for dinner. (Recommended by @tobascodagama, who has a strong dislike of wasps!)

280. Dec 18: A clock that tells time with flowers, by Linnaeus! Different flowers open at different times of day; Linnaeus (1707-1778) suggested that one could construct a “clock” of flowers that would indicate the time based on what was already opened.

281. Dec 19: Bioluminescent microorganisms can make the wake of ships glow; has been used to target ships in war and land on carriers! (See, for instance, the excerpt in this book.)

282. Dec 20: In 1861, astronomer Simon Newcomb got a U.S. Naval Observatory job because many Confederate sympathizers left their jobs.

283. Dec 21: In 1955, astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge posed as her husband’s assistant to work at the men’s only Mt. Wilson Observatory. Burbidge is another woman who made very important contributions to physics but who is relatively unknown.  She was one of the researchers who solved the problem of stellar nucleosynthesis, the method by which all the heavier elements are generated in the stars by nuclear reactions.  She was not allowed to get a fellowship at Mt. Wilson, which was men’s only at that time, but by posing as her husband’s assistant she was able to log time in the observatory in his name.  The ruse was eventually found out, and Margaret and her husband were allowed to continue at the observatory, albeit living in a separate cottage!

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for December 8th through December 14th!

270. Dec 08: Amazing trip of Isabel Godin des Odonais c. 1769 through the Amazon in search of her naturalist husband! (via@DrBondar‘s interview w/ Dr. Frederickson.)  Isabel’s husband had traveled the length of the Amazon to make preparations for their joint return to France, but political forces kept him from returning to her and they were separated for 20 years.  In 1769, she joined a 42 person party to travel in search of him, and all members save Isabel ended up dying along the way.  She wandered alone for nine days before being rescued by a group of natives; the couple was finally reunited in 1770!

271. Dec 09: The pen-tailed tree shrew consumes approx. 10-12 glasses of wine/night in nectar equivalent.

272. Dec 10: John Parsons (1914-1952) — CalTech rocket propulsion researcher and occultist. Before each test launch, Parsons would chant Aleister Crowley’s hymn to Pan.  He ended up blowing up himself in 1952 working on chemicals in his home laboratory.

273. Dec 11:  Astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) used horse manure to make molds for his telescope mirrors. (via @allinthegutter)

274. Dec 12: Percy Spencer invented the microwave oven in 1945 when a magnetron melted a candy bar in his pocket.

275. Dec 13: Janet Parker, the last person to die of smallpox… in 1978. Smallpox is one of the few diseases that was able to be eradicated from all natural sources, making it essentially extinct by the 1970s.  However, labs still contained specimens, and Janet Parker worked above such a lab and caught the illness through the ventilation system.  The head of the microbiology department in charge of the smallpox later killed himself evidently because of guilt.

276. Dec 14: Solar powered hornets???

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for December 1st through December 7th!

263. Dec 01: While developing the bubble chamber c. 1950, physicist Donald Glaser tested early prototypes filled with beer. Bubble chambers are used in high-energy physics to detect and trace the paths of subatomic particles.  They consist of a chamber of superheated liquid; this liquid forms bubbles when particles pass, allowing their tracks to be photographed.  If a magnetic field is applied to the system, the curved trajectories of the particles can be used to deduce their charges and momentum, as well.  Glaser needed a liquid with low surface tension to make this work, however, and beer was one option he tried.  “His experiments with beer left nothing but a stench in the room and raised a few eyebrows, he said. Instead, he filled the tubes with diethyl ether.”

264. Dec 02: Posted another #weirdscifacts for the day, but the arsenic bacteria deserve to be on the list! (@edyong209‘s post) The results are being disputed, however, so it will probably take some time before we know if this fact will stick!

264a. In 1966, physicist Luis Alvarez performed a photo analysis of the Kennedy assassination, improving on the FBI analysis. Alvarez became intrigued by the case after seeing photos of the assassination in LIFE magazine, and decided to investigate what could be learned from the film.

265. Dec 03: Alexander Graham Bell devised a metal detector to find the 2nd bullet that hit assassination target James Garfield in 1881. (Bell’s device failed to find the bullet, and instead detected the metal bed springs.)

266. Dec 04: Nightmare fodder: the goliath bird-eating spider.

267. Dec 05: Louis Slotin, and the horrifying criticality accident that killed him in 1946. Slotin was guiding an experiment in nuclear chain reactions when the slip of a screwdriver let two pieces of material come together to form a critical mass.  Slotin slapped away a piece, stopping the reaction, but he received a fatal dose of radiation in the process, dying 9 days later.

268. Dec 06: The singing sands! (This is an earlier post by @JenLucPiquant that I saved for a later fact!)

269. Dec 07: A popular mathematical puzzle goes back at least as far as ancient Egypt. (h/t @anthinpractice)