Skulls in the Stars

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.

With the holidays upon me, I haven’t had much time to blog, but I’ve made a special effort to keep up my Twitter #weirdscifacts!  Here are the facts from December 22 through December 28.

284. Dec 22: Botanist David Douglass died in 1834 when he fell into a pit trap in Hawaii and was crushed by a bull. Scientists lead interesting lives, and those lives often lead to just as interesting deaths.

285. Dec 23: Panda porn! I’ve known about this one for a few years!  (Though I probably shouldn’t admit that; somehow sounds really bad.)  Pandas have notoriously low libidos, making them difficult to breed.  They actually respond quite well to videos of other pandas in the act, however.

286. Dec 24: Freud diagnosed the grandniece of Napoleon with frigidity from failure to orgasm in missionary position. This one highlights yet again one of those odd connections between scientists and other historical figures, as well as Freud’s rather odd diagnoses!

287. Dec 25: Nobel scientists born on Christmas: A.O.R. Windhaus, Chem 1928, G. Herzberg, Chem 1971, E.A.F. Ruska, Phys 1986! This isn’t too unusual, statistically, but I wanted to do a Christmas fact!

288. Dec 26: The Guinea worm (very nasty!), and kudos to Jimmy Carter for eliminating it! I won’t describe the details of the Guinea worm here — the details are too nasty for casual, unprepared readers!  Suffice to say that it is a particularly icky parasite of humans that formerly infected millions of people per year.  Thanks to an effort by Carter’s foundation, the number of cases were reduced to the thousands this year.

289. Dec 27: Timothy the tortoise, who lived an estimated 165 years (1839-2004)! This tortoise, which died only very recently, was already old by the time the Civil War was waged!

290. Dec 28: Ancient Australians made immortal art w/ fungus! (h/t @JenLucPiquant )  This is fascinating because it answers a question so obvious that nobody ever thinks to ask it — why have Australian rock paintings survived so long in such extreme conditions?

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???