Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 38

Editor’s note

Wonder

Selected for evidence, scale, close looking and clear explanations of unfamiliar subjects.

WonderTechnology

When an oxygen tank exploded 320,000 km from Earth, three astronauts sheltered in a lunar module built for two. Engineers on the ground had to make its square air filters fit round sockets, using only what was aboard.

Carbon dioxide was climbing towards lethal levels. A team at Mission Control was handed a duplicate of every item on the spacecraft and told to build an adapter from it — the answer used plastic bags, cardboard from a flight manual, tape and a sock, read up to the crew step by step over the radio. It worked. The lunar module, never designed as a lifeboat, kept three men alive for four days, and all three came home. NASA called it a successful failure.

NASARead card

Q1620

WonderSpace

Many astronauts report the same experience on seeing Earth from space: a sudden, overwhelming sense that the planet is small, fragile, and has no visible borders. Researchers call it the overview effect.

The term was coined by the writer Frank White in 1987 after interviewing astronauts who kept describing the same shift. Accounts recur across nationalities and decades: a strong feeling of connection, an impatience with conflict, and a lasting protectiveness towards the planet. Several astronauts have returned to become environmental campaigners. Psychologists have since studied it as a form of awe — a state that reliably makes people feel smaller and more generous at the same time.

Space psychologyRead card

Q1621

WonderTechnology

In 1938 a chemist opened a cylinder of gas that weighed full but released nothing. He sawed it open and found the gas had turned itself into a white, slippery powder that almost nothing would stick to: Teflon.

Plunkett was working on refrigerants at DuPont. The tetrafluoroethylene had polymerised on the cylinder walls into PTFE, a substance so unreactive that acids do not touch it and so slippery it is among the lowest-friction solids known. Its first serious use was in the Manhattan Project, sealing equipment against ferociously corrosive uranium compounds. Frying pans came much later, after a French engineer's wife suggested putting it on cookware. Plunkett always described it plainly as an accident.

Invention historyRead card

Q1622

WonderHealth

In the early 1990s a Welsh trial tested a new compound for angina. It did little for chest pain, but the men in the study were oddly reluctant to hand back the leftover tablets. The drug was renamed Viagra.

Sildenafil was designed to relax blood vessels and improve blood flow to the heart. It underperformed on that measure at Pfizer's trial site in Merthyr Tydfil, and the study was heading for closure when nurses reported the persistent side effect volunteers were declining to discuss in detail. The company changed direction, and it was approved in 1998. The same molecule is also used, under a different name, to treat pulmonary hypertension in babies — the use it was closest to being designed for all along.

Pharmaceutical historyRead card

Q1623

WonderFood

In the 1930s Ruth Wakefield chopped a bar of chocolate into her biscuit dough expecting it to melt through. It did not. The chunks held their shape, and the chocolate chip cookie existed by accident.

Wakefield ran the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts and was a trained dietitian, not a novice — the story that she was out of baker's chocolate and improvised is probably tidied up in the retelling. What is certain is the result was wildly popular. She sold the recipe to Nestlé; the widely repeated detail that she was paid one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate is disputed. Nestlé printed the recipe on its packaging, where a version of it remains today.

Food historyRead card

Q1624

WonderHistory

In 1590 an English relief ship reached the colony at Roanoke and found it deserted — houses dismantled, no bodies, no sign of struggle. Carved into a post was a single word: CROATOAN.

Governor John White had sailed to England for supplies and was delayed three years by war with Spain. He had agreed with the settlers that if they moved they would carve their destination, and add a cross if they left under duress. There was no cross. Croatoan was a nearby island and the name of a friendly people, which points to the least dramatic and most likely answer: they were absorbed into a local community. A storm forced White home before he could sail there, and he never returned.

HistoryRead card

Q1625

WonderHistory

In 1959 nine experienced Russian hikers cut open their tent from the inside and fled barefoot into −25°C. All died. The case stayed unexplained for sixty years.

The details fed decades of theory: some bodies had serious internal injuries but no external wounds, one was missing her tongue, and traces of radiation were found on clothing. Explanations ranged from avalanches to weapons tests. In 2021 researchers using models originally built for animating snow in films showed that a rare slab avalanche on that specific slope could produce exactly those crushing injuries — and would push people to cut out and run. Not everyone is convinced, but it is the first account that fits the evidence.

HistoryRead card

Q1626

WonderScience

Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh spent thirty years trying to destroy one another — bribing crews, stealing fossils, dynamiting their own sites so the other could not dig them. Between them they named around 130 new dinosaurs.

The feud filled American museums and gave the world Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus and Allosaurus. It also produced spectacular sloppiness: Marsh built an Apatosaurus with the wrong skull, an error that stood in museums for decades, and Cope once assembled a plesiosaur with its head on the tail. Both men ruined their finances and reputations, and both died with far less than they started with. Palaeontology got its golden age out of two men who could not stand each other.

History of scienceRead card

Q1627

WonderNature

In 1945 a Colorado farmer beheaded a cockerel for dinner and the bird got up and walked away. Mike the Headless Chicken lived another 18 months, fed by pipette, and toured the country.

The axe missed most of the brainstem, which controls breathing and heart rate, and a clot sealed the artery so he did not bleed out. One ear and much of the stem stayed attached, so basic functions carried on. Lloyd Olsen fed him milk and water through an eyedropper and took him on tour, where thousands queued to see him. He died in a motel when Olsen could not find the feeding equipment in time. The town of Fruita still holds a Mike the Headless Chicken festival each spring.

University of UtahRead card

Q1628

WonderHistory

In 1938 a radio drama told American listeners that Martians were landing in New Jersey. The story that it sent the country into mass hysteria is largely a newspaper invention — very few people actually panicked.

Ratings show the audience was small; the popular show on a rival station took most listeners that night. Newspapers, losing advertising to radio, ran hundreds of stories about mobs and suicides that could not be verified afterwards. Some listeners were certainly alarmed, and a few rang the police — but nothing like a national stampede. The tale endured because it is a better story than the truth, which is itself a decent lesson in how panics get made.

Slate / SmithsonianRead card

Q1629

WonderSpace

Before John Glenn orbited Earth in 1962, he did not trust the electronic computer's numbers. He asked for Katherine Johnson to work the trajectory by hand — and said if she agreed the figures were right, he was ready to go.

Johnson was one of NASA's 'human computers', a Black mathematician working in a segregated division at Langley. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's flight, Glenn's orbit and later Apollo 11, and helped work out the return path that brought Apollo 13's crew home. She kept working at NASA until 1986, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and became widely known only late in life, after the book and film Hidden Figures.

NASARead card

Q1630

WonderFood

In 1894 two brothers running a Michigan sanitarium left boiled wheat standing for a day. It went stale, and rolling it produced flakes instead of sheets. Breakfast has never recovered.

The Kelloggs were trying to make an easily digestible food for patients. The staleness had let the moisture distribute evenly, so each grain flaked separately under the rollers. Patients loved it. The brothers then fell out badly: Will wanted to add sugar and sell it widely, John thought that betrayed the health mission, and they spent years in court over the family name. Will's company became Kellogg's, and the accidental flake became one of the most eaten manufactured foods on Earth.

Food historyRead card

Q1631

DriveLanguage

The Japanese word joins iki — life — with kai — worth. It names whatever makes your days feel worth living, and in Japan that is usually something small and ordinary: a garden, a grandchild, the walk to the shop.

The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya gave the word its serious treatment in her 1966 book On the Meaning of Life, written after years working with patients at a sanatorium. For her ikigai was not a plan or a purpose to be solved, but the quiet sense that your days point somewhere worth waking for — and she found it in people whose circumstances were desperately hard. If you have ever come across a four-circle diagram promising to locate your ikigai where passion, skill, money and the world's needs overlap, that is a separate idea: it was drawn by a British blogger in 2014, adapting an earlier diagram about finding your purpose. The Japanese original asks far less of you, and gives more back.

Japanese psychologyRead card

Q1634

DriveArt

Cataracts turned Claude Monet's world muddy yellow and red. He kept painting the water lilies anyway, and after surgery in 1923 restored his sight, he went back and reworked canvases he had made half-blind.

Diagnosed in 1912, Monet described colours losing their intensity and reds looking muddy; he began labelling his tubes and keeping a fixed order on his palette so he could paint by system rather than by eye. Some canvases from those years are startlingly hot in tone. He resisted surgery for a decade, terrified it would ruin what vision he had, and finally had a lens removed in 1923. Seeing clearly again, he destroyed some of the works and reworked others. The great Orangerie panels were finished in this period.

Art historyRead card

Q1640

WonderLanguage

In Kuşköy, high in Turkey's Black Sea mountains, villagers developed a whistled form of Turkish that carries for kilometres across the valleys. UNESCO added it to its endangered heritage list in 2017.

Kuş dili, bird language, is not a separate tongue but Turkish itself, with the vowels and consonants converted into pitched whistles loud enough to cross terrain that would take an hour to walk. Full conversations are possible: news, invitations, warnings. Research has found that listeners process it using both brain hemispheres, unlike spoken language, which leans left. Mobile phones have done what geography never could, and speakers are now mostly older — which is exactly why UNESCO listed it as in need of urgent safeguarding.

UNESCORead card

Q1645

WonderLanguage

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr in Queensland describe everything by compass direction — the cup north of you, an ant on your south-east leg. They keep an accurate sense of bearing at all times, indoors and in the dark.

The discovery, made by Stephen Levinson and John Haviland, upended an assumption that egocentric terms like left and right were universal. Speakers of such languages perform far better than English speakers at dead reckoning, and appear to run a constant background calculation of orientation from childhood. Similar systems exist in Tzeltal in Mexico and in some Austronesian languages. It is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the language you speak can shape the mental habits you carry.

LinguisticsRead card

Q1646

WonderLanguage

When Nicaragua opened its first schools for deaf children in the 1980s, the pupils had no shared language. Within a few years they had spontaneously created one — with grammar the adults had never taught them.

The children arrived using improvised home signs, unintelligible to one another. Thrown together, they built a shared pidgin — and then the younger intake did something remarkable: they regularised it, adding consistent grammatical structure their older schoolmates had not used. Each new cohort of young children made it more systematic. Linguists including Judy Shepard-Kegl and Ann Senghas documented it as it happened, making it the only time a human language has been observed being born. It suggests grammar is something children impose, not merely absorb.

LinguisticsRead card

Q1647

StillnessLanguage

Tsundoku is the practice of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. The word carries no reproach — it combines 'piling things up' with 'reading', and Japanese usage treats the pile as fairly harmless.

It appears in print as early as the 1870s, originally as a mild joke about scholars whose collections outran their reading. The affection in it is the point: a stack of unread books is a record of intentions, curiosity and optimism, not a moral failure. The writer Umberto Eco kept a library of tens of thousands of volumes and argued the unread ones were the valuable part — a private reminder of how much there is still to know. English borrowed the word only recently, which suggests the need was there all along.

JapaneseRead card

Q1648

StillnessMind

Forgetting why you came into a room is not age or distraction. Passing through a doorway signals to the brain that one episode has ended, and it quietly files away what you were holding.

Experiments by Gabriel Radvansky and colleagues had people carry objects between rooms, and again across the same distance within one room. Recall dropped only when a doorway was crossed — including in virtual environments, and even when participants walked back to where they started. Memory appears to be organised in event chunks, and a boundary such as a door tells the mind the previous chunk is complete. Later work suggests the effect is smaller in very familiar rooms, but the mechanism holds: your memory is keeping the current scene, not a continuous tape.

Psychology researchRead card

Q1651

WonderMind

Patients told outright that they were being given inert pills — no deception at all — still improved in trials for chronic back pain and irritable bowel syndrome. The effect survived knowing.

Ted Kaptchuk's group at Harvard ran the first trials, handing patients bottles labelled 'placebo pills' and explaining plainly that they contained no active drug. Symptoms still eased, more than in patients given nothing. The likeliest explanations involve expectation, the ritual of treatment and the attention of a clinician, all of which have measurable effects on symptom perception. It works on subjective symptoms such as pain, fatigue and nausea — not on tumours or infections. It is a real effect with strict limits, and it is not a substitute for treatment.

Harvard Medical SchoolRead card

Q1653

DriveMind

Doing someone a kindness makes you warmer towards them, not just the other way round. Benjamin Franklin used it deliberately on a political rival — he asked to borrow a rare book, and made a lifelong friend.

Franklin described the tactic in his autobiography, noting the old maxim that someone who has already done you one kindness will be readier to do you another. The usual explanation is cognitive dissonance: having helped a person you disliked, the easiest way to make sense of your own behaviour is to decide you must quite like them. Laboratory studies in the 1960s found the pattern held. The practical lesson is counterintuitive but useful — a small, specific request can build a relationship faster than an offer of help.

PsychologyRead card

Q1660

WonderHealth

Bone is not inert scaffolding. Cells are constantly dissolving old bone and laying down new, so the skeleton you have now is largely not the one you had a decade ago.

Osteoclasts break down bone tissue and osteoblasts rebuild it, in a continuous cycle that repairs micro-damage and releases calcium when the body needs it. The process responds directly to load: bone laid under strain gets stronger, which is why weight-bearing exercise builds density and why astronauts lose it rapidly in weightlessness. The balance tips with age, with breakdown outpacing rebuilding, and that shift is what osteoporosis is. The turnover rate varies by bone type, but the whole skeleton is substantially replaced over roughly a decade.

Human biologyRead card

Q1661

WonderHealth

Chronotype — the body clock that makes early mornings easy or brutal — is substantially heritable and shifts predictably with age. Teenagers really are wired to sleep later, and it is not laziness.

Large genome-wide studies have identified hundreds of variants associated with being a morning or evening person. The clock also drifts across a lifetime: it runs later through adolescence, peaking in lateness around nineteen or twenty, then gradually earlier through adulthood. Schools that have shifted start times later report improved attendance and grades. Evening types living on an early schedule accumulate what researchers call social jetlag — a chronic mismatch between body clock and alarm clock, linked to poorer health outcomes.

Circadian researchRead card

Q1664

DriveHealth

Doctors were certain stomach ulcers came from stress and spicy food. Barry Marshall thought a bacterium caused them, could not get anyone to listen, and swallowed a dish of it to prove his point. He became ill within days.

In 1984, working in Perth with the pathologist Robin Warren, Marshall could not find an animal model and could not persuade the field. So he drank a broth of Helicobacter pylori. He developed gastritis, proved the bacterium colonised a healthy stomach, and treated himself with antibiotics. The implication was enormous: a disease affecting millions was curable with a short course of pills rather than managed for life. He and Warren received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005.

Nobel PrizeRead card

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