20 Things You Didn't Know About... Sex
3 Believe it or not, biologists cannot agree on the reason for sex either.4 The standard evolutionary argument is that the mixing of DNA between two members of a species introduces more variation into the gene pool. But asexual reproduction is far more efficient...12 When the mood strikes a male Muscovy duck, the corkscrew-shaped embodiment of its excitement shoots to a fully extended 8-plus inches in just 0.36 second.13 Battle of the sexes: The corresponding female organ is also corkscrewed—but in the opposite direction...Image: iStockphoto
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20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science
Fraud
1. What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent ’fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.5 If caught stealing someone else’s ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.8 Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, generally considered the greatest physics text ever written.9 Other legends who seem to have altered data: Freud, Darwin, and Pasteur.10 And Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s famous pea-breeding experiments—the foundation of modern ideas of heredity—are suspiciously good, matching his theory of genetic inheritance a little too well.18 Write what you know: Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser resigned last year after he was found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct. Now he’s working on a book, reportedly titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.
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20 Things You Didn't Know About... Math
5 Sometimes the oddest bits of math often turn out to be useful. Quaternions, which can describe the rotation of 3-D objects, were discovered in 1843. They were considered beautiful but useless until 1985, when computer scientists applied them to rendering digital animation.8 Kurt Gödel, the renowned Austrian logician, made math a lot more confusing in 1931 with his first incompleteness theorem, which said that any sufficiently powerful math system must contain statements that are true but unprovable. Gödel starved himself to death in 1978.19 Graduate student George Dantzig arrived late to statistics class at Berkeley one day in 1939 and copied two problems off the blackboard. He handed in the answers a few days later, apologizing that they were harder than usual.20 The “homework” was actually two well-known unproven theorems. Dantzig’s story became famous and inspired a scene from Good Will Hunting...
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20 Things You Didn't Know About... Clouds
4 So much for People Power. After reviewing 40 years of cloud-seeding efforts in an area north of Israel, researchers at Tel Aviv University have concluded that seeding doesn’t actually produce additional precipitation (pdf).12 Highest of them all: 50 miles up, noctilucent, or “night shining,” clouds glow an eerie bluish white. They are invisible by day, but after sunset they catch solar rays shining from far below the horizon.13 Noctilucent clouds seemed to first appear after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and are now a common sight.18 In 1959 Lt. Col. William Rankin was flying his F-8 fighter jet over a cumulonimbus when the engine failed. He parachuted out and spent the next 30 minutes bounced around inside the storm. Amazingly, he survived.19 In 2007 German paragliding champion Ewa Wisnierska experienced “cloud suck.” While gliding under a cumulonimbus, she was pulled upward to 32,000 feet. She blacked out due to lack of oxygen but regained consciousness at roughly 23,000 feet.Image: A lenticular cloud over the Tararua Mountains in the North Island of New Zealand. Courtesy: NASA
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20 Things You Didn't Know About... Alcohol
iStockphoto1. Sobering disclaimer: The family of compounds known as alcohols are all toxins that can kill you, whether instantly, quickly, or gradually.2. Yet one of them—ethyl alcohol, or ethanol—is a staple of the human diet. Archaeologist Patrick McGovern speculates that fermented beverages were made as early as 100,000 years ago, when people first spread out of Africa.3. The seeds Johnny Appleseed sold to farmers throughout Ohio and Indiana produced apples that were inedible, but perfect for making hard cider.4. According to the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, our zest for alcoholic beverages derives from our distant ancestors’ impulse to seek the ripest, most energy-intensive fruits.5. Designated driver at the zoo: The Malaysian pen-tailed treeshrew routinely chugs the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a night in naturally fermented nectar, and yet it remains fully functional.6. For a treeshrew, that is...
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