While Thomas Crapper was indeed a 19th century plumber in England, he did not invent the modern flushing toilet. That honor goes to Sir John Harrington who came up with a prototype for Queen Elizabeth I’s palace in the 16th century. Also more than 60 years before Crapper was even born, Alexander Cummings received the first patent for a flushing toilet in 1775.

Thomas Crapper was an interesting man though. He became an apprentice plumber in his teens and owned his own plumbing business by 25. He did come up with several patents for improving plumbing, some of which were for flushing. So was it merely an ironic coincidence that a man by the name of Crapper did a lot of work on toilets? Yeah, probably so.

Now is it possible that the term “crapper” being synonomous for toilet originated because this guy was a well-to-do plumber? You might think so, but it’s not likely. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says the term dates back to 1846, well before Thomas became the master plumber that we all know and love him for.

Sources: toiletmuseum.com, urbanlegends.about.com/od/factoid1/p/thomas_crapper.htm
Image source: nodrips.blogspot.com/2011/01/toilets-in-age-of-thomas-crapper.html

The general answer is no, as there are no permanent residents of Antarctica. Several contries however, do maintain permanent research stations with scientists and support personnel that number up to 5,000 in the summer and about 1,000 in the winter. Most researchers do not stay through the winter but those that do are typically there on one-year assignments.

The United States has two primary bases there: Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and McMurdo Station.

An interesting aside: the South Pole has no solar time so a station there could theoretically be in any of the world’s 24 time zones. They use New Zealand time (UTC +12) since all flights to the continent come from Christchurch.

Image source: http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/antarctica/antarctica.jpg

The speed of light, typically noted as c in math and physics formulas is 299,792,458 meters per second (186,282 miles per second). Note, this figure is for the speed in a vacuum as light will propagate at different speeds through different mediums.

Here’s the speed of light compared to other fast things (in miles per hour):

Unmanned spacecraft, Helios 1 and 2. 157,082 mph. Light is 4,269 times faster than the fastest vehicle ever built by man.

Manned spacecraft, Apollo 10. 39,665 mph. Light is almost 17,000 times faster.

Jet, SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s fastest jet has traveled at 2,193 mph. Light is 305,799 times faster.

Sound: 768 mph. Very much slower than light. 873,000 times slower.

World’s fastest car, Bugatti Veyron. 267 mph. Pretty fast, but compared to light, it’s 2,511,673 times slower.

World’s fastest bird, Spine-tailed Swift, 171 mph. This is crazy fast for a bird. But almost 4 million times slower than light.

World’s fastest mammal, the cheetah has been clocked at 71 mph. 9.4 million times slower than light.

World’s fastest insect, the dragonfly. One species has been measured at 36 mph.

World’s fastest man, Usain Bolt. While faster than anyone else on the planet at 23 mph, he’s still 29 million times slower than light.

Source: www.spyderwood.com

The short answer: no. Is it possible that of the seven billion people in the world, all sleeping at some point during a 24 hour period, some might accidentally eat a spider during their sleep? Sure, it’s possible but very unlikely.

The source of this urban legend is generally unknown but a plausible explanation (from snopes.com) is this. In the early days of the Internet, a columnist named Lisa Holst wanted to prove a point that many people would believe all sorts of crazy things if they saw it in a list of “facts,” that had been emailed to them. She completely made up a list of false facts to prove how easily they would be accepted by a certain number of gullible recipients in the (then relatively new) world of email. One of her facts was that the average person swallows X number of spiders in their sleep every year.

I believe this fact (that a columnist made this up) to be much more likely than the fact that anyone ever swallows a spider in their sleep. However, doing a quick search for a writer named Lisa Holst, or the computer magazine she wrote for in 1993 “PC Professional” turned up empty. Well, not completely empty. There were a lot of results, but they were all related to the fact that Lisa Holst supposedly fabricated this list. There was nothing that linked to any of her other writing, or even to a real magazine called PC Professional.

So the general consensus is that the fact that people eat spiders in their sleep is a myth. But the origin of the myth is quite possibly a myth as well. Go figure.

And for just a little extra fun… when I first read this question, I immediately thought of the guy in the lunatic asylum from Bram Stoker’s, Dracula. He was eating flies but decided it would be better to just eat the spiders who ate the flies. Kind of a two-for-one deal. Anyway, here’s a clip from the 1931 version of the movie. Eating Spiders, Dracula, 1931

Cross Sections of a hair and follicle. Source: www.ohiohealth.com

To understand this, we should first answer what causes hair color to begin with. All hair, whether on your head, your arms, or your cat’s tail has pigment cells called melanocytes. These melanocytes produce a pigment called melanin- more specifically, the chemicals eumelanin and pheomelanin. Hair with more eumelanin will be darker (brownish to black) and hair with more pheomelanin will have a red/orange/yellow tint. Hair with less of either will be lighter.

These melanocytes also pass this pigment to cells called keratinocytes (which produce hair’s main component, the protein keratin). When the keratinocyte cells die, they keep the melanin which is what is visible and gives hair its color.

As we get older, the melanocytes get less active, thus producing less pigment and making your hair lighter. Eventually all the melanocyte cells die and there are none left to produce any color.

So what are the factors that control this production of pigment? Many are genetic. Alleles of the recently-discovered MC1R gene have been shown to produce red hair in mammals. Other genes, many as yet unidentified, are likely responsible for other hair colors. According to Laurence Meyer, a dermatologist at the University of Utah, “Generally speaking, among Caucasians 50 percent are 50 percent gray by age 50. There is, however, wide variation.” Of course, these percentages are different for different ethnic groups, which further emphasize the role genetics play in the color of your hair.

References:
About.com: http://chemistry.about.com/od/howthingsworkfaqs/f/why-does-hair-turn-gray.htm
Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-hair-turn-gray
Image: http://www.ohiohealth.com/mayo/images/image_popup/sn7_skinlayers.jpg

Yuri Gagarin was the first person in space when he orbited the Earth on April 12, 1961. He was only 25 years old at the time. Gagarin was a Russian cosmonaut. A cosmonaut is what the Russians call their astronauts. And for you really young readers, a Russian is what we used to call someone who was from what we used to call Russia, or the former Soviet Union.

Yuri’s orbit was made in the Vostok I and took just one hour and 48 minutes to complete. He became an international hero after his flight. For anyone interested, I encourage you to check out Wikipedia’s page on Yuri Gagarin. He was a very accomplished pilot and sadly, was killed in a jet crash when he was only 34 years old.

Yuri Gagarin in his cosmonaut suit

Image sources:

http://un-dx.ucoz.com/yuri-gagarin-news11.jpg

http://www.eliteoftheworld.com/images/gallery/1306195171yuri-gagarin-2.jpg

I saw a couple of good posts on this from astronomycafe.net on their ask the astronomer page. The general consensus of all the answers out there seems to be that we do not know exactly, but there are at least a hundred billion, and possibly several hundred billion. The following is quoted from Astronomy Cafe:

We do not know exactly. Within the part of the universe we can observe there seem to be at least 100 billion, but this could be an underestimate if you include dwarf galaxies that are too far away to be easily seen by even the Hubble Space Telescope.

Imagine looking at a dime about 75 feet away. The Hubble Space Telescope can represent this narrow “keyhole” stretching to the visible horizon of the universe.  This “deep field image” shows hundreds of galaxies in a region only an arcminute across. What is an arcminute? Take the diameter of the full moon, divide it by 30 and that’s about an arcminute. While this is a tiny tiny view of the visible universe, it can give scientists a way to extrapolate and estimate how many galaxies there may be.

Now, even more interesting, the following answer comes from Kathy Wollard’s “How Come?” book. Our galaxy, the Milky Way is an immense spiral galaxy with about 200 billion stars. This number of stars is almost unimaginable to us, but even more astounding is that each star is often trillions of miles from its nearest neighbor star. This is how big ONE galaxy can be. Current theories are that these huge galaxies are probably the result of tens or hundreds of smaller galaxies colliding and becoming one. Of course, a “collision” in this sense actually can take millions of years. The basis of this theory is that when astronomers look far out into space, more than 2 billion light years (which is also looking 2 billion years into the past), they see more small galaxies and fewer big ones.

Imagine this: the light we see coming from a galaxy 2 billion light years away, is 2 billion years old. This is just hard to comprehend.

One of the first microscopes. Image source: http://www.dipity.com

In the late sixteenth century, two Dutch eyeglass makers discovered that objects appear magnified when viewed through multiple convex lenses in a tube. For this simple discovery, Hans Janssen and his son Zaccharias are considered by some to have invented the microscope around 1590. About this same time, another eyeglass maker from Holland, Hans Lippershey came up with the same idea and is also considered by some to be one of the inventors.

“The coining of the name “microscope” has been credited to Giovanni Faber, who gave that name to Galileo Galilei’s compound microscope in 1625. [wikipedia]

Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) is really considered to be the “father of microscopy” when he worked as an apprentice in a dry goods store where magnifying glasses were used to count the threads in cloth. He taught himself new methods for grinding and polishing lenses of great curvature which gave magnifications up to 270 times, the greatest known in that day. These led to the building of his microscopes and the biological discoveries for which he is famous. He was the first to see and describe bacteria, yeast plants, the teeming life in a drop of water, and the circulation of blood corpuscles in capillaries. During a long life he used his lenses to make pioneer studies on an extraordinary variety of things, both living and non living, and reported his findings in over a hundred letters to the Royal Society of England and the French Academy. [source about.com]

My son and me making slime

Every few months or so, my son and I like to make straight-chain polymers out of of polyvinyl acrylic (PVA) and sodium tetraborate. It’s pretty simple to do. You just mix one part PVA with one part dihydrogen oxide. Then make a solution of about 40 mg of Na2B4O7, and 400 cc of more dihydrogen oxide. Then slowly mix this solution into the PVA mixture. Of course, we add a little food coloring for effect. The result is this great fun-to-play-with polymer!

Okay, so Polyvinyl acrylic is just Elmer’s glue. Sodium Tetraborate is household Borax. And dihydrogen oxide is water. And our polymer is more commonly called slime. I figure it’s never too early to start teaching my son the chemistry behind what we we’re doing. In a nutshell, making your own slime is easy. Here are the steps summarized:

1. Pour a bottle of Elmer’s Glue in a bowl. Add the same amount of water. Stir.
2. Put about the same amount of water in another bowl and add a couple tablespoons of Borax. Stir.
3. Add this Borax solution to the glue mixture a little at a time while stirring.

It doesn’t take much to make a nice slimy polymer. Experiment with the volumes and you’ll see how easy it is.

You might think the animal with the longest gestation period would be one of the larger mammals, but in fact it is the Alpine black salamander. It is a viviparous amphibian which lives in the high altitude Swiss Alps. At altitudes above 4,600 feet, it’s gestation period can be up to 38 months. It bears two fully metamorphosed young.