Skulls in the Stars

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!

Whoops — forgot to post the week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts yesterday!  Here they are, in all their odd glory:

382. Mar 30: Ergotism — when eating grain can drive you insane! (and kill you!) The fungus Claviceps purpurea can infect the grain of rye, and it was so common historically that people didn’t distinguish between the fungus and the real grain.  Ingesting it can cause seizures, convulsions and even hallucinations, as well as gangrene leading to loss of limbs. An outbreak of ergotism in 1039 led to a hospital being built in the name of St. Anthony in order to treat the victims, and this led to ergotism being named “St. Anthony’s Fire”.

383. Mar 31: Lineus longissimus — the bootlace worm — 5 to 10 mm in width, can grow at least 98 ft long!

384. Apr 01: One of earliest videogames, Tennis for Two, created on oscilloscope in 1958 to entertain bored visitors to Brookhaven Lab. Tennis for Two was created by physicist William Higinbotham.  Though it was wildly popular during its short run, Higinbotham never patented the idea, apparently because the lab would have owned the intellectual property. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.

385. Apr 02:  In 1798, physicist E-G. Robert made an optical ghost show (phantasmagoria) that convinced the audience they were real ghosts! Robert was, like myself, a physicist specializing in optics.  He apparently saw an early “magic lantern” show and improved the process to the point that he was able to shock and frighten the first audiences of his own shows.

386. Apr 03: In 1650, chemist Robert Boyle paid a man to be repeatedly bitten by snakes to test whether a hot iron rod could cure him. (Fact comes from @history_geek‘s excellent book, Blood Work!)

387. Apr 04: Oersted made the only major sci discovery in front of a lecture audience! Via my own recent blog post on the subject.  Oersted was essentially teaching a class, and decided to test his theory that electricity and magnetism were related.  He had no time to test the apparatus before the lecture, so his classroom became the first place that the link between electricity and magnetism was shown!

388. Apr 05: The Mobius gear!  (h/t @patrickneville & @ktraphagen ) A Möbius strip is a one-sided surface; I discuss them in the context of optics in this earlier blog post.  The idea that such an odd shape could be made into a functioning gear system is simply bizarre.