‘Say, does that cloud look kind of fat?’
Q. What’s the weight of that fleecy cloud drifting across the sky?
A. That’s what meteorologist Margaret LeMone wondered as she set out to “weigh” a smallish cumulus cloud over the Plains east of Boulder, Colorado, says John A. Adam in “A Mathematical Nature Walk.”
It helped that in many regions west of the Appalachians, U.S. highways mark the land into squares a mile by a mile. This particular cloud had a ground shadow about .6 mile by .6 mile and was about as high as it was wide. This made for a nice even kilometre by a kilometre by a kilometre, or 1 cubic kilometre, or a billion cubic metres.
Typically, each cubic metre of cloud contains half a gram of liquid water, so this cloud totaled about 500,000,000 grams, or 500 metric tons (1,100,000 pounds).
By comparison, a Boeing 747-400 jetliner with a full load of passengers and fuel has a maximum takeoff weight of 400 metric tons (880,000 pounds). “So even a moderate-sized puffy cloud weighs more than a fully laden Jumbo! Of course, there would be a bit more room to move around in an aircraft the size of a cloud.”
Q. What was different about healthy 17-year-old San Diego schoolboy Randy Gardner when he awoke at 6 a.m. on December 28, 1963?
A. He didn’t go back to sleep again until the morning of January 8, 1964 – that’s 11 days without sleep! These 264 hours remain the longest scientifically verified period without sleep, breaking the previous record of 260 hours.
For the final three days, Stanford University’s William Dement stayed awake with Gardner, who experienced mood swings, memory and attention lapses, loss of co-ordination, slurred speech and hallucinations. “Otherwise, he was just fine. His first sleep after the 11 days lasted just 14 hours,” says Graham Lawton in “New Scientist” magazine.
Gardner took no stimulants during his “wakeathon” but did have people around to help him stay awake. Without this, sleep would have become nearly irrepressible within 48 hours.
Sleep-deprived people slip in and out of subtle “microsleeps” – seconds of sleep that may go unnoticed, often with eyes open. Microsleeps aside, how long could Gardner have continued? Nobody knows, but it is known that sleep deprivation is eventually fatal.
Rats kept awake die after two weeks, less time than it takes them to starve to death. There are no records of a human intentionally kept awake to that point, but the hereditary disease “fatal familial insomnia” suggests that an ultimate limit does exist.
“The disease eventually robs victims of the ability to sleep, bringing on death within three months.”
Q. We spend six years of our lives doing this, 70 percent of the time feeling bad, pursued, trying but failing, often over and over, occasionally exhilarated, and no one is quite sure why. The whole experience is perplexing and confusing. We do it in our sleep, most often unaware, though once in a while we “wake up” even without awakening, becoming “lucid.” Here we are not just actor but playwright, steering the drama closer to our heart’s desire. By now, don’t you know what’s going on?
A. Right, this describes the marvelous, much-remarked altered state of human dreaming, done 5-6 times every night, totaling 1.5-2 hours from sleep to waking. On rare occasions we become so lucidly self-aware that we realize “it’s only a dream” even as the action unfolds.
Q. When will a flying speck of paint no bigger than a grain of salt hit with the force of a bullet?
A. When it’s orbiting Earth at 18,000 mph amid thousands of tons of space litter including defunct satellites, exhaust particles, space station trash, and fragments of weapons tests, says Sharon McGrayne in “365 Surprising Scientific Facts, Breakthroughs and Discoveries.”
A paint chip left a pea-sized cavity in the front window of the space shuttle Challenger on its second flight. Radar and optical telescopes now track some 10,000 large objects, but there are another 70,000-150,000 untrackable fragments from 1-10 centimetres across, according to the Second European Conference on Space Debris.
An orbiting marble-sized object carries energy equivalent to a 400-pound safe falling off a 10-storey building, says University of North Carolina astronomer Wayne Christiansen. “However, the safe would crush you flat like a bug, the marble would likely explode on impact, leaving a ghastly crater.”
Q. In an Age of AIDS and Hepatitis B, aren’t dead bodies pathogenic “bombs” threatening the funeral industry?
A. Fears are great, says Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D., in “Death to Dust,” but public health statistics show no elevated AIDS risk among embalmers, and only 13 percent greater Hepatitis B incidence, even though they are exposed to the virus twice as often as the general public.
The numbers could be improved further if more workers followed the “universal precautions” of gloves, masks, waterproof gowns and eye coverings and got Hepatitis B immunization.
“Dead bodies present fewer risks to the living than do other people,” said a San Francisco General Hospital former Chief of Pathology. “There are several advantages to being dead...you don’t excrete, inhale, exhale, perspire.”
Q. You might not think of the tongue as a multitasking organ, but think again. How many of these tasks can you identify?
A. The tongue’s 16 muscles allow it to bend into practically limitless shapes for chewing, swallowing and carrying on a good conversation, says Jocelyn Rice of “Discover” magazine.
The longest human tongue on record stretched 3.86 inches from lip to tip. The surface of the tongue is studded with hundreds of small bumps called papillae that contain the taste buds for transmitting sweet, sour, salty or bitter flavours to the brain, aided by a quart of saliva pumped out each day.
Supertasters seem endowed with an overabundance of papillae, while smokers apparently have flatter papillae and a reduced blood supply.
This drool-worthy organ also helps in licking your wounds, based on Dutch researchers having identified two healing compounds in human saliva.
In a pinch, the tongue can even assist with vision and mobility, as engineers are refining tongue-enabled systems to help blind people see and paralyzed people operate a wheelchair.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at Strangetrue@cs.com
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