Skulls in the Stars

Whenever I think I’m running out of weird science facts, I stumble across a set of bizarre things that refills my queue!  Anyway, here are this week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts!

410. Apr 27: S. Morse (1791-1872), an art professor, built the telegraph partly with art supplies. The telegraph was such an important and practical invention in its time, it is hard to conceive that it was first constructed by a professor of art!  Morse used art and print shop materials to make his first prototype.  (h/t @amhistorymuseum)

411. Apr 28: Armadillos can pass leprosy to humans?  It is important to note, though, that people shouldn’t panic and start slaughtering the poor animals; the risks are relatively low.

412. Apr 29: Kifuka, Africa: world record holder of lightning intensity, at 158 strikes per square km per year! 

413. Apr 30: The Tully Monster — the fossil that nobody knows quite what it is!  (classic @laelaps post!)

414. May 01: Amorphous metals and the “atomic trampoline“! On an atomic level, metals typically have a crystalline structure, with regularly-spaced atoms forming a periodic array.  An amorphous metal does not possess this long-range structure, and has a disordered arrangement of atoms.  Such an unusual state of metal can be produced by, among other methods, rapid cooling of the material from its molten state.  Such amorphous metals can have unusual properties, including the “bounciness” of ball bearings.

415. May 02: Stealing… ahem… “borrowing” another #weirdscifacts from Grand Illusions: solids of constant width!  What kind of three-dimensional solid object has the same width from every direction?  If you guessed “sphere”, you know the familiar answer, but it turns out there are irregularly-shaped objects that also have the same width from all directions!

416. May 03: The pistol shrimp, which hunts with a sonic weapon that creates temperatures comparable to the sun!

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for the previous week!

403. Apr 20: 150 yrs ago today, the government gave muskets to the Smithsonian for protection against the Confederacy!  (h/t @smithsonian)

404. Apr 21: Largest genome belongs to plant Paris japonica — *50 times* larger than human!  (h/t @anthinpractice)

405. Apr 22: The “electric kiss”, Venus electrificata, a 1700s electricity demo concocted by G.M. Bose.  The link is to a German article on Bose, so I should summarize!  In short, Georg Matthias Bose ended up joining in the furor over electricity in the early 1700s, creating a number of attention-getting demonstrations.  Among these was the Venus electrificata, in which a woman standing on an electrically isolated platform gets charged up with static electricity.  A grounded paramour ends up getting a strong shock when he steals a kiss:

406. Apr 23: Can an elephant paint? Short answer: yes!  The link is to an old blog post of mine.  Though the demonstrations of elephants painting portraits are the result of careful guidance from their trainers, elephants do enjoy putting paint on canvas.  In fact, a number of zoos offer paintings for sale by their elephants! (I have one.)

407. Apr 24: Non-transitive dice: very unusual odds in dice-playing! (From an old blog post of mine.)

408. Apr 25: The spinthariscope — see atoms decay before your eyes!

409. Apr 26: The “light flash” phenomenon, in which astronaut’s eyes interact with cosmic rays. (Scroll down in this link for explanation.)

Here are the previous week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts!  A lot of interesting facts appeared on Twitter, and I didn’t have to do a lot of searching for once.

395. Apr 12: “Sex with wife leads to scientific breakthrough“ (via @stevesilberman)  This is definitely one of the oddest ways in which a scientific discovery has been made!

396. Apr 13: The wombat’s deadliest weapon? Its ass!  As a defensive mechanism, the wombat has evolved a butt nearly impervious to predators.  When being chased, it will run face-first into its burrow and plug the hole with its hiney!  If a persistent predator foolishly tries to climb over the wombat’s back, the wombat will push up with its powerful legs and crush the attacker’s jaw against the roof of the burrow.

397. Apr 14: Chitons has eyes that are literally made of limestone! (article by edyong209)

398. Apr 15: The Blue People of Troublesome Creek.  This will be the first of a number of ways that people can turn blue!  These people were blue due to a recessive genetic trait.

399. Apr 16: Hippos are big animals — the hide of a hippopotamus alone can weigh 1/2 ton! 

400. Apr 17: Some sea stars eat mollusk prey by extending a stomach out of their body and into the prey’s shell. 

401. Apr 18: How hard is it to fold a piece of paper in half a successive number of times? World record is 13!  This is a good illustration of exponential growth!  Every fold of a piece of paper doubles its thickness, and those doublings add up quickly.  As noted in the excellent linked article, if one could do the folding 42 times — a seemingly small number — the stack of paper would reach the moon!

402. Apr 19: T.S.C. Lowe’s long distance balloon flight at beginning of Civil War got him arrested as a Union spy! Lowe was a scientist and inventor as well as a balloon flyer.  He was planning a trans-Atlantic flight, but several problems with the balloon prompted a shorter test flight, intended to go from Cincinnati to Maryland.  His timing was poor — he left on April 19th, only a week after the first battle of the Civil War!  He ended up drifting off course and landing in Virginia, which earned him the spy charges.  He was released soon after, but perhaps the South should have kept him imprisoned — he was appointed chief aeronaut by President Lincoln in the military’s Balloon Corps!  More in the Wikipedia article.

Here are the previous week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts!

389. Apr 06: Wasps airlift competitor ants away from food source. (h/t @katewong @BoraZ)

390. Apr 07: Actual medical condition: “The Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disorder“.

391. Apr 08: Common wombats have *cube-shaped* poo! As @scimomof2 noted, this fact makes a great conversation starter!

392. Apr 09: What’s the biggest bird you’ve seen? A species of extinct moa *stood* 12 ft high! The moa were flightless birds that lived only in New Zealand.   They likely disappeared within the last thousand years,  hunted to extinction by newly-arrived Māori settlers.

393. Apr 10: 1995: David Hahn tried to build a nuclear reactor in his shed for a boyscout badge. The backyard became a Superfund cleanup site, due to the mass of radioactive substances.  h/t @lockwooddewitt!

394. Apr 11: 1783: a lawsuit in the French city of Arras concerned neighbors demanding the removal of a lightning rod! The neighbors of the rod owner were concerned that it was improperly installed, and would actually increase the danger to their homes; apparently stories of “malfunctioning” lightning rods were common in the years immediately following its introduction.  The defense lawyer for the lightning rod owner was none other than Robespierre, who would be a main driving force of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

395. Apr 12:  Headline:”Sex with wife leads to scientific breakthrough“. via  @stevesilberman!