Skulls in the Stars

Here are this week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts! Due to a death in the family, I was traveling and had a difficult time finding facts on some days, but thankfully others stepped in to help me out, and we have two for September 2nd!

536. Aug 31: Bizarre fish evolved for the oceans, but lives on land! 

537. Sep 01: Fire tornadoes — enough said.  (h/t @discoveryplace)

538. Sep 02: The echidna has a four-pronged penis; it uses two prongs each mating, and swaps sets between matings. (via @larwe, who added: “You might call it the original Swiss Army Penis.”)  The link contains perhaps an even more bizarre revelation: the sperm of the echidna will work together to reach their target, traveling in groups!  Because a female can be inseminated by multiple sperm at once, it is an evolutionary benefit for the sperm to work together.  I imagine it somewhat like bicyclists in the Tour de France drafting off of one another!

538a. This rare genetic disorder, caused by intense inbreeding, is known as Polygamist’s Downs.  (via @stevesilberman)

539. Sep 03: A felt-tipped marker helped the Apollo 11 astronauts leave the moon & get home.  (This is number 8 on list of “myths” about the moon landing.  This story is true, though it was modified to promote the “space pen”.)

540. Sep 04: Valles Marineris canyon system of Mars — 8x longer, 10x wider & 4x deeper than the Grand Canyon.  Thanks in part to the lower gravity, everything is bigger on Mars!  We’ll see more examples of this in future posts.  Keep in mind that, roughly speaking, 320 Grand Canyons could fit in this Martian canyon system.

541. Sep 05: c. 1930, a volcanologist Frank Perret survives in the path of a pyroclastic flow.  I’ve known about this story for a long time, but couldn’t remember the details! (and a Google search didn’t find it!)  A pyroclastic flow from the same mountain killed some 30,000 people in the city of St. Pierre years earlier — Perret was extraordinarily lucky.

542. Sep 06: Project Mohole, the 1960 attempt to drill through the Earth’s crust to the Mantle!  Though the project didn’t succeed, give this some thought — they were trying to drill into the molten region of the Earth!  It was still an impressive technological achievement that brought back much useful scientific data.

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for the past week!

529. Aug 24: Avg density of the planet Saturn is so low, it would float in a (sufficiently large) bucket of water. Of course, there are some major caveats to this — that bucket of water would also have to be in the gravitation field of an (even more massive) planet or star, or the word “float” would be meaningless!  The point, however, is that Saturn is a very low density planet.

530. Aug 25: Vredefort crater — 300 km in diameter, largest known impact crater on Earth (asteroid probably 5-10km).  This is significantly larger than the Chicxulub crater, which is thought to be the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs!

531. Aug 26: Turning orange from eating too many carrots? In this post by @scicurious, she confirms an anecdote told to her by her father!  I’m expecting that in her next post, she’ll prove that if you make that face for too long, it will stay that way.

532. Aug 27: Paricutin, the volcano that grew out of a Mexican cornfield in 1943.  In one of the most amazing geological events in human history, the farmer and his family actually witnessed the volcano’s growth from a fissure in the ground.  Within a week, it was five stories tall!

533. Aug 28: A case of scientific illiteracy: the Charlotte amoeba panic of 1965! This post by @spacearcheology highlights a mystery involving my current home town!  It seems that, in the 1960s, a number of radio stations throughout the country played pranks by breathlessly announcing that an amoeba was loose in town.  The mystery: there seems to be very little record of this “panic”, which suggests that it wasn’t major.  Radio stations were cited by the FCC, however.

534. Aug 29: Would it help to nuke a hurricane? Remarkably, someone has done the math.  (via @motherjones)  Nukes have been suggested for all sorts of rather… unconventional… ideas.  We’ve noted previously that it was suggested that nukes could be used to carve out new shipping harbors!

535. Aug 30: February, 2000: the RRS Discovery rides an onslaught of rogue waves.  The excerpt is from the book The Wave, that I just started reading.  The Discovery crew got more than they bargained for, fighting for their lives to stay afloat in a truly monstrous storm.

The past week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts, right on schedule!

522. Aug 17: Ancient Damascus swords shown to contain very state-of-the-art carbon nanotubes!  I’m planning to blog about this next week — though carbon nanotubes are relatively new to science, they were unknowingly produced in the production of Damascus swords.  (h/t @drrubidium)

523. Aug 18: Neutrons may become cubes under high enough pressure? (via @rctautz)

524. Aug 19: Thatcherization: the failure to notice massively distorted faces oriented upside down.  I’m tempted to do this with my own photos!

525. Aug 20: Mike the headless chicken, who survived 18 months after his head was mostly cut off!  Enough of Mike’s head survived to keep basic motor functions going.

526. Aug 21: c. 850 C.E., Islamic scholar Abbas Ibn Firnas is reputed to have made an attempt at flight w/ glider.  Note the use of the word “reputed”!  Like many statements about pre-renaissance science, the glider attempt is poorly documented, with only a cryptic contemporary reference and a more detailed reference only 800 years later.  Why put any faith in it at all?  After all, Archimedes was credited with a “death ray” that is widely considered apocryphal.   Unlike Archimedes, though, Firnas’ attempt at flight was reported to be a failure, which ended up giving him significant injuries!  This gives it at least the veneer of plausibility.

527. Aug 22: Archeological evidence suggests Egyptian queen Hatshepsut moisturized to death!  Hatshepsut is known to have died of cancer, and recent investigations show that she was using a skin moisturizer that included highly carcinogenic materials.  (h/t @wilsondasilva)

528. Aug 23: The shark attack victim who drove to get himself help — with the shark still attached to his leg.  @cuttlefishpoet commented: First thought: “Australian?”

Yet another week of Twitter #weirdscifacts!  Have a healthy amount of weird creatures at the end of this week’s list.

515. Aug 10: Werewolves do exist! Sort of. The very odd medical condition hypertrichosis. 

516. Aug 11: A successful treatment for leukemia — created from a modified HIV virus?  (h/t @lousycanuck)

517. Aug 12: In 1930, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed in orgone, and through it that sex could control the weather.  Albert Einstein even agreed to inspect Reich’s orgone research, and politely said that it was “inconclusive”.

518. Aug 13: Codariocalyx motorius, the world’s fastest plant — its leaf motion can be seen w/ naked eye! Of course, “fast” for a plant is relatively slow for us; check out a video here.

519. Aug 14: The ironclad beetle — so good at playing dead they’ve been adorned & sold as living jewelry! U.S. customs intercepted one such adorned beetle at the border in January 2010.

520. Aug 15: Cymothoa exigua, the parasite that replaces a fish’s tongue.  This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing an organ of the host.

521. Aug 16: The Harlequin filefish, the fish that pretends to be coral!  (h/t @kzelnio)