Funnest. Facts. Ever.

Geomagnetic Reversal and the collapse of the Earth’s magnetic field

The Earth’s magnetic field has always given scientists a lot to think about. Shortly after composing his special relativity paper in 1905, Einstein said the origin of the magnetic field was one of the great unsolved problems of modern physics. It turns out the existence of a self renewing magnetic field can be explained by dynamo theory, based on the convection of liquid iron in the outer core of the Earth (or any body, for that matter). However, the field is still providing fodder for scientific minds.

For one thing, it does not stay still. The Magnetic North Pole has been moving recently at a rate of about 40km per year. Also, every once in a while it completely reverses direction. Scientists are able to determine past orientations of the magnetic field through paleomagnetism, the study of the field preserved in magnetic minerals over time. Because lava flows from the Earth hotter than the Curie temperature (the temperature above which minerals lose ferromagnetic ability), then cools through the Curie point, the iron in lava will record the current orientation of the field. The discovery of regular and continuous magnetic stripes across the ocean floors indicate past orientations and reversals. The field has reversed tens of thousands of time since its formation, at considerably varied intervals.

Like the field on Earth, the Solar magnetic field also undergoes spontaneous reversals, however the reversals occur at regular 7-15 year intervals and the magnetic field of the sun increases in intensity during a reversal, whereas on Earth, reversals occur during periods of low strength. The magnetic field of Earth started decreasing in intensity about 150 years ago, and since then it has gotten about 10-15% weaker, and it has been accelerating in recent years. If this continues, the dipole field could temporarily collapse by 3000 to 4000 CE. Although the field has been declining continuously over the past 2000 years from a maximum 35% above the modern value, this rate of decrease and current strength are within a normal range of variation as shown in past magnetic field recordings.

In evidence of past reversals, scientists have been unable to identify specific effects on biological life. Close ancestors of modern humans clearly survived many reversals, and fossils have revealed no extinctions as a result of field reversal. However, the magnetic field on Earth serves as a shield against charged particles of the solar wind. The magnetosphere of Earth and other planets is concentrated on the side facing the sun, and drawn out very long on the opposite side to deflect solar particles in the area they are most concentrated. Thus, it is hypothesized that a collapse in the field could lead to a sharp increase in the amount of radiation that people receive from the sun, which already accounts for about 7.5% of radiation exposure every year. One fairly obvious feared repercussion of this is higher cancer rates. Furthermore, many species use the magnetic field to navigate- including migratory birds, whales, salmon and bees, to name a few.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_fieldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversalhttp://www.theozonehole.com/magnetic.htmhttp://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002236.htmlhttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0909_040909_earthmagfield.html

Swine Fleux, Part Deux

The H1N1 virus has not only been sustained in pigs since the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, but has also been circulating through humans as part of the regular seasonal epidemics of influenza. On February 5, 1976, a soldier died at Fort Dix, and the cause of his death was found to be a new strain of swine flu. This strain appears to have been isolated to Fort Dix, but it drew a lot of attention to another strain of influenza A (H3N2) that was circulating, and due to the similarities to the 1918 flu pandemic, health officials urged Gerald Ford to vaccinate every person in the United States against swine flu. Eventually the vaccination got underway on October 1st, and within 10 days, 40 million people (24% of the US population) had been vaccinated.

However, the deaths of three senior citizens (which were actually unrelated to the vaccine) and a number of reports of Guillain Barré syndrome (GBS), led to widespread disdain for the vaccination. GBS is a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder, and according to science writer Patrick di Justo, “the public refused to trust a government-operated health program that killed old people and cripple young people.” In the end, only 33% of the population got immunized. However, there were about 500 cases of GBS that were likely caused by an immunopathological reaction to the 1976 vaccine, resulting in 25 deaths, more than were caused by the swine flu.

But, back to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, survivors included Woodrow Wilson, Walt Disney and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In recent years, some scientists have come to believe that FDR’s paralysis was caused not by polio, but in fact by Guillain Barré syndrome, but due to the low profile of GBS at the time, coupled with his physician’s expertise in polio, he was misdiagnosed.

Since when does a flu name have to be PC?

Swine Flu is rare in humans, in order for it to spread among people, the strain has to mutate into one that can pass between humans, which rarely happens. The 2009 flu outbreak in humans that is widely known as “swine flu” technically is not swine flu. It is due to a new strain of influenza A virus subtype H1N1 that derives from one strain of human influenza, one strain of avian influenza, and two separate strains of swine influenza. It has not been isolated in swine. Swine flu is a descendant of the 1918 deadly fatal H1N1 strain of influenza known as the Spanish Flu which caused between 20 and 100 million deaths over the course of 2 years. In 1918, these symptoms were so severe that they were often misdiagnosed as dengue, cholera or typhoid. An observer noted, “One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial hemorrhages in the skin also occurred.”

Between a quarter and a half a million people die each year from regular influenza epidemics, but the concern over swine flu stems from its novelty as a descendant of Spanish flu, transmission from human to human and high mortality rate in Mexico. Researchers fear that it could mutate into something as deadly as the Spanish flu.

Despite no evidence of presence of this virus in swine anywhere in world, Egypt’s parliament called for the nation’s 250,000 (or 350,000) pigs to be killed immediately, claiming the farmers need no recompense because they can sell the meat from the pig, obviously having forgotten what they learned in high school economics. Many Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates ban pigs entirely because they are considered unclean and Islam forbids the eating of pork. One Islamic militant website had comments saying swine flu was God’s revenge against infidels. But what isn’t these days?

Also, check out Discover magazine’s worst 5 government responses, including (but not limited to!) (spoiler alert) a ban on cheek kissing in Lebanon:http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/30-the-five-worst-government-responses-to-swine-flu/

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jc_pijXYi6E50wDepameI2ZTf9iAD97S7UPG2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1

Sucked out of the airlock? It’s cool. (pun!)

If you were exposed to a vacuum, you would not explode, you would not freeze and your blood would not boil. The water on the tongue, in the nose and in the eyes would boil away, which actually happened in 1965 when a space suit failed and and the astronaut within was exposed to a near vacuum during an experiment (although he passed out after about 15 seconds, he survived to tell the tale). If you tried to hold your breath, your lungs would rupture, but otherwise, you would survive until you ran out of oxygen, probably a minute or two later. Eventually, you would freeze, but your body temperature would only drop this low after your oxygen had already run out.

Pick a card, any card

Think about how many ways there are to order a deck of cards. It’s going to be 52 * 51 * 50 * … * 1, right? That is, 52! or 52 factorial. This ends up being approximately 8 x 10⁶⁷. This number is so incredibly massive, we can hardly begin to understand what it actually means. Lets compare it to some other big numbers. The universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. This is on the order of 10⁹. Big whoop. But come on, that’s in years! Ok, let’s translate it to seconds, in which case it’s about 4 x 10¹⁷ seconds. Still not even close. But, there’s a lot of people in the world (7 billion to be way generous). Let’s imagine they’ve all been shuffling decks, at a rate of 1 shuffle per second (assuming 1 shuffle is enough to produce a new random order, which it is not- decks start to become random after about 5 riffle shuffles, and are truly random after 7- if the technique is good), coming up with a new order every second, since the beginning of the universe. This would produce 3 x 10²⁷ orderings. Still 10⁴⁰ short. Probability of any two randomly selected decks being the same is 1/(52!)², or 1.5 x 10^-136. This means that every time you shuffle a deck of cards, with at least 7 good riffle shuffles, you are more than likely creating a unique ordering in the history of the universe. Pretty neat, right? 

This is the actual number of possible deck orders: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. It is not small.

By the way, the lower bound for the number of possible permutations of a chess game is thought to be around 10¹²⁰. The estimated number of atoms in the entire universe is 10⁸⁰, which doesn’t even come close.

Heh. You said “Hadron.”

This fact was written in Fall 2007, before the LHC came online and then went back offline- a few of these facts were composed as part of an earlier science fun fact series. These ones also lack sources, because I’m too lazy to go back and source them.

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, currently under construction, could allow scientists to create a tiny black hole as often as every second. Fear not, however, scientists claim that the chance of a black hole escaping to swallow the Earth “is totally miniscule.” Stephen Hawking calculated that due to the radiation they emit, black holes of this (very small) scale would lose more mass than they absorb, and thus evaporate within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

However, even if Hawking was wrong, and the black holes survived, most would be traveling fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity. If you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would get trapped orbiting the Earth, and they would be so tiny that each one would only be able to gobble up about 100 protons per year. As such, it would take longer than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material. Phew.

What is the deal with Gotham being a name for New York?

Gotham is a village in Nottinghamshire, England. The “Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham” (1540… or maybe 1460) was a collection of stories published as a chap book (cheap book sold by traveling salesmen) where each story described the villagers undertaking some ridiculous task. In “The Cuckoo Bush of Gotham”, the villagers are trying to build a fence around a tree to contain a cuckoo bird. When the bird flies away, the villagers bemoan the fact that they did not make the fence higher. In another tale, the villagers are drowning an eel as punishment to the eel for killing their fish. The book provides no explanation for this behavior, but folklore speaks to this.

The story has it that King John either wants to build a road or hunting lodge in Gotham, and the villagers wished to prevent this, as either would be an imposition on the town. As insanity was believed contagious, when the king’s messengers arrived and witnessed the spectacle of the town, the King wished to avoid exposing himself to the madness. In later versions of the book, the word Wise replaced the word Mad in the title. King John’s harsh taxation made popular stories of common men subverting the monarch- one of the best known stories to emerge from King John’s reign is that of Robin Hood.

Washington Irving, reminded of these stories of villagers of foolish ingenuity, first attached the name to New York City in the November 11, 1807 issue of Salmagundi, his periodical that satirized New York culture and politics.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gothamhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham,_Nottinghamshirehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Men_of_Gothamhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/myths_legends/england/nottingham/article_1.shtml http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/645945/Wise-Men-of-Gotham

Twainism

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” I first heard this expression at a sailing regatta in the Bay Area, where many of us were underdressed for the strong winds and cold water. The regatta officers were encouraging us to suit up, and used this quote, oft attributed to Mark Twain, to motivate us. However, a searching of Twain’s work, including his writings and private letters, turns up no evidence of this.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp

Grow a Gros Michel!

Each banana of a particular variety (the cultivar we currently enjoy is called the Cavendish) is genetically identical to all others. Before the 1950s, the most popularly consumed banana was the Gros Michel or “Big Mike,” but because of the lack of diversity, bananas are not well protected against diseases, and Big Mike, which was bigger and by all accounts tastier than the Cavendish, was wiped out by the Panama Disease (starting in 1920). The ensuing banana shortage was the inspiration for the 1923 song, “Yes! We have no Bananas.”

Although the Gros Michel is not viable for commercial purposes, it is not extinct. With seeds, you could grow a Gros Michel. What a dream.

U-Boat

U-Boat comes from the German word for submarine, Unterseeboot, or undersea boat, as it literally translates. U-boot is the German abbreviation, and U-boat is the anglicized version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat