Science: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 16

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87Drive

67Stillness

468Wonder

Q1543

WonderScience

Sharks have swum the oceans for more than 400 million years — appearing before the first trees grew, and possibly before Saturn's current rings formed.

Sharks arose over 400 million years ago, while the earliest true trees came later, around 380 million years ago. Saturn's bright rings may be younger still — some evidence suggests the current ring system is only a few hundred million years old, so dinosaurs might have looked up at a ringless Saturn. Sharks have outlasted several mass extinctions, quietly persisting while the world rearranged itself around them.

PalaeontologyRead card

Q1544

WonderMind

Across decades of psychiatric records, researchers have found very few confirmed cases of schizophrenia in people born completely blind — one of the strangest open questions in medicine.

The clearest evidence comes from Western Australia, where Vera Morgan's team followed every one of 467,945 children born between 1980 and 2001. Around 1,870 went on to develop a psychotic illness — but not one of the 66 children born with cortical blindness did. The numbers are small, so nobody is calling it settled. One leading explanation is that schizophrenia involves the brain trusting its own predictions over the evidence of the senses; sight is our dominant prediction machine, so a brain that never built a visual model may be protected from that particular failure mode. It is a rare case where an absence — of cases, of vision — may be a clue.

Schizophrenia Research (2018)Read card

Q1554

WonderScience

Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Virginia, was struck by lightning seven separate times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one. It cost him a toenail, his eyebrows, and several hats set on fire.

Sullivan worked in Shenandoah National Park, high ground in a region of violent summer storms, which goes some way to explaining the first strike or two. Seven is another matter — the odds of being hit even once in a lifetime are roughly one in fifteen thousand. He grew wary of storms and reported that people began to avoid standing near him. He kept the burnt hats. Guinness still lists him as the human being struck by lightning more times than any other on record.

Guinness World RecordsRead card

Q1555

WonderScience

For centuries nobody knew where birds went in winter — theories included hibernating in mud and flying to the Moon. In 1822 a stork landed in Germany with an African hunting spear through its neck, and the question was settled.

The bird had been speared in central Africa, survived, and completed its migration north with 80 cm of wood still through it. Germans call it the Pfeilstorch — the arrow stork. Until then, even serious naturalists had proposed that swallows overwintered in lake mud, and one seventeenth-century Englishman argued birds flew to the Moon. Roughly two dozen more arrow storks have turned up since, but the 1822 bird is the one that changed minds. It is still on display in Rostock, standing calmly with the spear through its neck.

University of RostockRead card

Q1556

WonderHistory

In January 1919 a storage tank in Boston burst and released two million gallons of molasses. The wave was eight metres high, moved at around 56 km/h, and killed twenty-one people.

The tank had leaked so persistently that locals collected the drips, and it had been painted brown to hide the seepage. When it gave way it flattened buildings and buckled the elevated railway. Molasses is a non-Newtonian fluid: it moved fast enough to outrun people, then thickened as it cooled, so rescuers had to cut victims free. The court case that followed ran for years and helped establish that companies must answer for the structures they build. Residents insisted the harbour smelled sweet on hot days for decades afterwards.

HistoryRead card

Q1564

WonderHistory

In the 1920s young women painted glowing radium dials onto watches, shaping their brushes with their lips as instructed. When they began to fall ill, their fight for compensation helped create modern workplace safety law.

Radium paint made dials readable in the dark, and the work was well paid and thought glamorous — some workers painted their nails and teeth with it for a night out. Their employers knew the danger and protected their own chemists while telling the women it was harmless. Five of them, the 'Radium Girls' of New Jersey, sued while gravely ill. Their case established that workers could sue employers for occupational disease, shaped the safety standards that followed, and later informed the protection of Manhattan Project staff.

Labour historyRead card

Q1565

WonderSpace

In 1977 an Ohio radio telescope picked up a narrow, powerful signal from the direction of Sagittarius. The astronomer checking the printout circled it and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin. Nothing like it has been heard since.

The Big Ear telescope was scanning for narrowband transmissions — the kind nature rarely makes and technology often does. The signal lasted 72 seconds, exactly the window Big Ear could observe one point of sky, and it sat close to the frequency of hydrogen, a plausible channel for anyone trying to be heard. Jerry Ehman's red-pen 'Wow!' gave it its name. Repeated searches have never recovered it, and recent work suggests a natural source — a cloud of hydrogen briefly lit up. Probably not aliens. Still unexplained enough to keep the file open.

Ohio State UniversityRead card

Q1573

WonderSpace

In 1967 a PhD student found a pulse in her data repeating every 1.3 seconds — so regular it was half-jokingly labelled LGM-1, for little green men. She had discovered pulsars. The Nobel went to her supervisor.

Bell Burnell was analysing miles of paper chart from a radio telescope she had helped build at Cambridge when she noticed a bit of 'scruff' that kept returning. It proved to be a neutron star spinning several times a second and sweeping a beam past Earth — a lighthouse the size of a city, made of collapsed stellar matter. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, not to her. She has consistently declined to be bitter about it, and in 2018 gave a $3 million prize away to fund physics students from under-represented backgrounds.

Astronomy historyRead card

Q1574

WonderScience

In 1896 Henri Becquerel planned to test whether sunlight made uranium salts glow. Paris clouded over, so he shut everything in a drawer. Days later the photographic plate was fogged anyway — the uranium had been shining on its own.

His hypothesis was wrong in the most productive way possible: he thought sunlight was required, and the experiment proved it was not. Uranium emitted something entirely by itself. Marie and Pierre Curie took up the work, named the phenomenon radioactivity, and the three shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. A week of bad weather in Paris opened the door to nuclear physics, medical imaging and radiotherapy — and to a century of learning, painfully, how to handle what was found.

Physics historyRead card

Q1576

WonderScience

In 1965 a chemist produced a liquid so cloudy and thin that the technician refused to spin it. She insisted. The fibre that came out was five times stronger than steel by weight — Kevlar.

Kwolek was at DuPont looking for a fibre strong enough for lighter tyres. The batch looked like a mistake — normally the solution should be clear and syrupy. She persuaded a reluctant colleague to run it through the spinneret anyway, and it did not break. Kevlar now appears in body armour, helmets, cables, aircraft and gloves, and is credited with saving thousands of lives. She never personally profited much from the patent, which belonged to her employer, and spent her later career encouraging girls into chemistry.

Invention historyRead card

Q1577

WonderHealth

Cattle in 1930s America were bleeding to death from spoiled hay. The chemical behind it became a rat poison — and then warfarin, the blood thinner that has kept millions of people from having strokes.

A Wisconsin farmer drove through a blizzard in 1933 with a dead cow and a bucket of blood that would not clot, looking for someone who could explain it. Biochemist Karl Link traced it to mouldy sweet clover, which produces an anticoagulant. Sold first as rat poison — rats die of internal bleeding — it was later found safe in controlled human doses. President Eisenhower was given it after his heart attack in 1955, which did much for its reputation. It remains one of the most prescribed drugs in the world.

Medical historyRead card

Q1587

WonderScience

After surgery in 1953, Henry Molaison could no longer form new long-term memories. He met his doctors afresh for fifty years — and in doing so became the most important patient in the history of memory research.

An operation to control severe epilepsy removed much of his hippocampus on both sides. It stopped the seizures and stopped his memory. Crucially, he could still learn physical skills — practising a tracing task, he improved daily while insisting each time he had never done it before. That split proved memory is not one system but several, stored in different places, and it underpins nearly everything we now know about how remembering works. Only after his death was his name published; in life he was known simply as H.M.

Neuroscience historyRead card

Q1591

WonderSpace

In 1908 something detonated over Siberia with enough force to flatten roughly 2,000 square kilometres of forest. More than a century on, no impact crater has ever been found.

Around 80 million trees went down, all pointing away from a single centre. The likeliest culprit is a small asteroid or comet fragment perhaps 50–60 metres across that burst in the atmosphere before reaching the ground — which is why the trees fell but nothing dug a hole. The region was so remote that no scientific expedition arrived for nineteen years. Had it come down hours later, with Earth turned a little further, it could have struck a major city. It remains the largest impact event in recorded history.

NASARead card

Q1596

WonderScience

In 1879 a researcher working on coal tar derivatives went to dinner without washing his hands and noticed his bread tasted sweet. He traced it back to the laboratory bench and found saccharin.

Fahlberg went back and, in an act of research technique no laboratory would permit today, tasted his way along the bench until he found the compound — around 300 times sweeter than sugar. He patented it without crediting his supervisor Ira Remsen, who was quietly furious for the rest of his life. Saccharin's moment came with sugar rationing in both world wars. The same story recurs: aspartame and sucralose were also found by chemists who licked something they should not have.

Chemistry historyRead card

Q1600

WonderMind

Two brothers adopted separately at birth met at 39 and found they had both married women named Linda, divorced, remarried women named Betty, named their sons James Alan, and owned dogs called Toy.

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer became the founding case of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which went on to follow more than a hundred separated pairs and found striking similarities in personality, taste and even mannerisms. The caution is real: some of the coincidences are less astonishing than they sound, since both were given the common name James by different families, and researchers who go looking for matches will find some. What survived scrutiny is the broader finding — that heredity shapes personality far more than mid-century psychology assumed.

Minnesota Study of Twins Reared ApartRead card

Q1602

WonderHealth

In 1854 a Soho cholera outbreak killed hundreds in ten days. John Snow mapped every death, saw them cluster around a single water pump, and persuaded the parish to remove its handle. The outbreak stopped.

Nobody yet accepted that water carried disease; the consensus blamed bad air. Snow's map of Broad Street, with a black bar for each death, is the founding document of epidemiology and one of the most influential graphics ever drawn. He also spotted the exceptions that proved him right — the local brewery workers, who drank beer, were untouched. The authorities put the pump handle back once the panic passed. Snow died four years later, before his idea was generally accepted.

London MuseumRead card

Q1605

WonderHistory

The New York Sun ran six articles claiming a great telescope had revealed the Moon's inhabitants: bison, unicorns, and winged humanoids the reporter called man-bats. Circulation soared. None of it was true.

The series was attributed to the real and respected astronomer John Herschel, then observing from South Africa and quite unaware. Written by reporter Richard Adams Locke, probably as satire on extravagant scientific claims, it was read as fact and made the Sun one of the best-selling papers in New York. There was no dramatic retraction; the paper simply moved on. Herschel was reportedly amused at first and tired of the questions later. It remains the template for every viral fabrication since.

HistoryRead card

Q1607

WonderScience

In 1912 an English gravel pit produced 'Piltdown Man' — the missing link between apes and humans. It took until 1953 to establish it was a medieval human skull joined to an orangutan jaw, filed down and stained.

It was believed partly because it flattered: it placed the earliest Englishman in Sussex and matched the assumption that a big brain evolved before an upright jaw — which is the wrong way round. Genuine African fossils were dismissed for decades because they did not fit Piltdown. Fluorine dating finally exposed it. The forger has never been identified with certainty, with suspects including the solicitor Charles Dawson who found it. It is science's most useful embarrassment: proof that the method eventually catches its own errors, if slowly.

Natural History MuseumRead card

Q1617

WonderNature

Old Tjikko looks like an ordinary small spruce on a Swedish mountainside. Its root system has been dated to around 9,550 years old — it has been regrowing its own trunk since the end of the last ice age.

The visible tree is only a few hundred years old; the organism beneath it is not. Norway spruce can clone itself by layering, where a branch touching the ground takes root and becomes a new trunk from the same genetic individual. Radiocarbon dating of the root material gave the extraordinary age. It survived the ice age as a low shrub and only grew upright as the climate warmed — a living thing that has been quietly present through the whole of human civilisation.

Umeå UniversityRead 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

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

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

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