Science

WTF Fun Fact 12957 – The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Rhyming

A recent publication reports that a neuroscientist who suffered a series of strokes and seizures couldn’t stop rhyming and rapping after his recovery.

The rhyming neuroscientist

Of course, the neuroscientist’s name has been withheld to preserve his privacy, but a Feb 2022 piece in the journal Neurocase titled “The neurologist who could not stop rhyming and rapping” (cited below) says he is 55 years old.

In the abstract, author Mario Mendez states that “His strokes included right posterior cerebellar and right thalamic infarctions, and his subsequent focal-onset seizures emanated from the left frontotemporal region.

The urge to rap

The abstract goes on to describe the aftermath of his strokes:

“On recovery, he described the emergence of an irresistible urge to rhyme, even in thought and daily speech. His pronounced focus on rhyming led him to actively participate in freestyle rap and improvisation. This patient’s rhyming and rapping may have been initially facilitated by epileptiform activation of word sound associations but perpetuated as compensation for impaired cerebellar effects on timed anticipation.”

We still don’t know the underlying mechanisms that cause a person’s brain to develop linguistic dysfunctions after an injury such as a stroke. Some strokes affect the ability to speak or understand language, while others cause brain injuries with more unique symptoms. The irrepressible urge to rhyme is certainly a unique one!

Other post-stroke rappers

In 2019, The Atlantic published a piece on a 50-something man who couldn’t stop rapping after a stroke – and it’s likely the same person.

Dr. Sherman Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation and was in excellent health before he was plagued by blackouts and then a grand mal seizure and series of strokes. Then: “His personality also seemed to change. He suddenly became obsessed with reading and writing poetry. Soon Hershfield’s friends noticed another unusual side effect: He couldn’t stop speaking in rhyme.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “The neurologist who could not stop rhyming and rapping” — Neurocase

WTF Fun Fact 12956 – Witzelsucht, a Joke Addiction

Have you ever met anyone who couldn’t stop telling jokes, even if no one else found them funny? Maybe they had Witzelsucht.

What’s a joke addict?

In 2016, neuroscientists Elias Granadillo and Mario Mendez published a paper titled “Pathological Joking or Witzelsucht Revisited” in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences that described two patients with damage to their brains suffering from joke addiction.

They explained that “impaired humor integration from right lateral frontal injury and disinhibition from orbitofrontal damage results in disinhibited humor.” Two men were used as an example.

Compulsive jokesters

According to Discover Magazine:

“Patient #1 was a 69-year-old right-handed man presented for a neuropsychiatric evaluation because of a 5-year history of compulsive joking… On interview, the patient reported feeling generally joyful, but his compulsive need to make jokes and create humor had become an issue of contention with his wife. He would  wake her up in the middle of the night bursting out in laughter, just to tell her about the jokes he had come up with. At the request of his wife, he started writing down these jokes as a way to avoid waking her. As a result, he brought to our office approximately 50 pages filled with his jokes.“

“Patient #2 was a 57-year old man, who had become “a jokester”, a transformation that had occurred gradually, over a three period. At the same time, the man became excessively forward and disinhibited, making inappropriate actions and remarks. He eventually lost his job after asking “Who the hell chose this God-awful place?” The patient constantly told jokes and couldn’t stop laughing at them. However, he did not seem to find other people’s jokes funny at all.”

Diagnosis: Witzelsucht

Apparently, both men displayed signs of something called Witzelsucht, “a German term literally meaning ‘joke addiction.'”

“Several cases have been reported in the neurological literature, often associated with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. Witzelsucht should be distinguished from ‘pathological laughter‘, in which patients start laughing ‘out of the blue’ and the laughter is incongruent with their “mood and emotional experience.” In Witzelsucht, the laughter is genuine: patients really do find their own jokes funny, although they often fail to appreciate those of others.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “‘Joke Addiction’ As A Neurological Symptom” — Discover Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12954 – Is the Soul Weighing 21 Grams a Lie?

There’s no reliable way to weigh the human “soul,” though one person has tried. Still, the myth that the soul weighs 21 grams and that scientists have confirmed it still persists. And that’s because of a movie.

The weight of the soul

“21 Grams” is a 2003 film starring Sean Penn in which he plays a mathematician who experiments to find the weight of the human soul. It’s based on a story about a scientist, to some small extent, but the movie is pure fiction.

The man who attempted to weigh the human soul was a physician named Duncan MacDougall from Dorchester, MA. He assumed that if humans had souls in their bodies, those souls must weigh something. Therefore, upon death, the soul leaves the body and a person’s corpse should therefore be lighter.

In 1907, he wrote about his effort: “Since … the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death.”

A flawed experiment

According to LiveScience, “MacDougall teamed up with Dorchester’s Consumptives’ Home, a charitable hospital for late-stage tuberculosis, which at that time was incurable. MacDougall built a large scale, capable of holding a cot and a dying tuberculosis patient. Tuberculosis was a convenient disease for this experiment, MacDougall explained in his paper, because patients died in ‘great exhaustion’ and without any movement that would jiggle his scale.”

We’re already on shaky ground here, but it gets worse.

“MacDougall’s first patient, a man, died on April 10, 1901, with a sudden drop in the scale of 0.75 ounce (21.2 grams). And in that moment, the legend was born. It didn’t matter much that MacDougall’s next patient lost 0.5 ounce (14 grams) 15 minutes after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 0.5 ounce and then 1 ounce (28.3 g) a minute later. MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale wasn’t well calibrated, in part due to a ‘good deal of interference by people opposed to our work,’ which raises a few questions that MacDougall did not seem eager to answer in his write-up. Case 5 lost 0.375 ounce (10.6 grams), but the scale malfunctioned afterward, raising questions about those numbers, too. Case 6 got thrown out because the patient died while MacDougall was still adjusting his scale. MacDougall then repeated the experiments on 15 dogs and found no loss of weight — indicating, to his mind, that all dogs definitely do not go to heaven.”

Despite being a poor experiment with few samples in which his own first result was undermined by everything that came after it, he sent in his write-up to the journals American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and his results were also reported in the New York Times.

No one except a sheep rancher in Oregon has ever tried to replicate the experiment, for ethical reasons.

So science has neither determined the existence of a soul nor its weight. — WTF fun facts

Source: “How much does the soul weigh?” — LiveScience

WTF Fun Fact 12947 – Only Humans Have Chins

We found this hard to believe at first, but it’s the little details that matter when it comes to anatomy. As an anatomical feature, only humans have chins.

That seems surprising if you’ve ever rubbed your pet under their little “chin.”

What’s a chin?

While we basically all call the bottom of the face a “chin,” a chin is technically a bone formed at the apex of the lower jaw. And a chin is a bony protrusion that juts out in a way that is only seen in human skulls.

According to Smithsonian Magazine (cited below): “Even chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest genetic cousins, lack chins. Instead of poking forward, their lower jaws slope down and back from their front teeth. Even other ancient hominids, like the Neanderthals, didn’t have chins…”

Ok, so maybe anatomical technicalities aren’t really that amazing, but what is interesting is that the chin protrusion doesn’t really serve a purpose. No one knows why humans even have chins.

Why do chins exist in humans?

Of course, once anthropologists and evolutionary biologists realized this bit of human uniqueness, they set about trying to explain why we evolved chins. Maybe it’s to help us chew food? Maybe it helps us speak?

Nope. Those ideas have all been largely debunked. The chin is in the wrong place to help reinforce the jaw for chewing. Our tongues don’t seem to generate enough force to require a chin to help us speak. If the chin developed to help us find mates, then it would only appear in one gender.

The list of reasons the chin doesn’t need to exist goes on and on.

According to Duke University’s James Pampush, the chin may not actually serve a purpose at all. This would make it a “spandrel” – “an evolutionary byproduct left from another feature changing.”

“In the chin’s case, it could be the result of the human face shrinking over time as our posture changed and our faces shortened, or a remnant from a period of longer jaws.”

Of course, there’s really no way to prove the chin serves no function since you’d have to reject every possible hypothesis first.

It looks like we may just have to live with the mystery. — WTF fun facts

Source: “A Chin-Stroking Mystery: Why Are Humans the Only Animals With Chins?” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12939 – Moonquakes

We’ve all heard of earthquakes, but it hadn’t really occurred to us that seismic activity would occur on other celestial bodies. Now that we think about it, it makes sense. And, of course, they wouldn’t necessarily be called “earth”quakes. On the moon, they’ve named them “moonquakes.”

Data on moonquakes?

In 2006, NASA (which is cited below) reported that a Notre Dame professor named Clive R. Neal (who was an associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences – the department has since changed its name a bit) came to a surprising conclusion.

Neal and a team of 15 other researchers looked at data from the Apollo mission, and told scientists that the data pointed to something interesting. At NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) meeting in League City, Texas in October 2005, he announced that “The moon is seismically active.”

That might not seem important because: 1) the team was never on the moon themselves to feel a moonquake, and 2) it’s not like buildings are going to come crashing down if there’s a huge moonquake. However, people like Elon Musk are talking more and more about building structures on the moon and increasing human activity there. If that happens, structures will have the be built to stand up to moonquakes (which we don’t know all that much about).

Types of seismic activity on the moon

According to the research team, there are at least 4 different types of moonquakes (revealed by the data they assessed):

(1) deep moonquakes about 700 km below the surface, probably caused by tides
(2) vibrations from the impact of meteorites
(3) thermal quakes caused by the expansion of the frigid crust when first illuminated by the morning sun after two weeks of deep-freeze lunar night
(4) shallow moonquakes only 20 or 30 kilometers below the surface.

The team said: “The first three were generally mild and harmless. Shallow moonquakes on the other hand were doozies. Between 1972 and 1977, the Apollo seismic network saw twenty-eight of them; a few ‘registered up to 5.5 on the Richter scale,’ says Neal. A magnitude 5 quake on Earth is energetic enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster.”

The last thing we want to hear if we decide to visit the moon is that any event out of our control could be a “doozy.” And these shallow moonquakes sound potentially deadly:

“Furthermore, shallow moonquakes lasted a remarkably long time. Once they got going, all continued more than 10 minutes. ‘The moon was ringing like a bell,'” Neal said.

Imagine the insurance premium on that moon house!

What else is interesting about moonquakes?

While we have plenty of aftershocks on Earth, earthquake vibrations from individual events usually last around 30 seconds – or 2 minutes, tops. That’s because of something called chemical weathering (as Neal says) – energy moves across minerals in the earth, and those deaden the vibrations relatively quickly. Not so much on the moon:

“The moon, however, is dry, cool, and mostly rigid, like a chunk of stone or iron. So moonquakes set it vibrating like a tuning fork. Even if a moonquake isn’t intense, ‘it just keeps going and going,’…And for a lunar habitat, that persistence could be more significant than a moonquake’s magnitude.”

Moon structures will have to be built of flexible materials so that they can move with the vibrations (that way they don’t crack). But first we need to know a lot more about engineering details like the maximum fatigue threshold needed so we can build those materials. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Moonquakes” — NASA

WTF Fun Fact 12934 – Axolotl Brain Regeneration

In an amazing evolutionary feat that we wish were available to many of the humans we know, it turns out the salamanders known as axolotls can grow back parts of their brains. Axolotl brain regeneration is just another one of this creature’s amazing regenerative abilities.

Axolotl body regeneration

According to IFL Science (cited below), the initial discovery is an old one:

“The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is an aquatic salamander renowned for its ability to regenerate its spinal cord, heart and limbs. These amphibians also readily make new neurons throughout their lives. In 1964, researchers observed that adult axolotls could regenerate parts of their brains, even if a large section was completely removed. But one study found that axolotl brain regeneration has a limited ability to rebuild original tissue structure.”

Regenerating the brain

At the Treutlein Lab at ETH Zurich and the Tanaka Lab at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, researchers are trying to figure out just how complete axolotl brain regeneration is. For example, one question is what types of brain cells are they able to replace?

One of the authors of a recent study noted in IFL Science that looking at brain cells was the key to understanding the regenerative process:

“In our recently published study, we created an atlas of the cells that make up a part of the axolotl brain, shedding light on both the way it regenerates and brain evolution across species. Why look at cells? Different cell types have different functions. They are able to specialize in certain roles because they each express different genes. Understanding what types of cells are in the brain and what they do helps clarify the overall picture of how the brain works. It also allows researchers to make comparisons across evolution and try to find biological trends across species.”

Axolotl brain mapping

The research team uses a specific type of RNA sequencing to get snapshots of brain samples. More specifically, they focus on the telencephalon (the region that contains the brain’s neocortex – the seat of behavior and cognition). The cells in this area are highly diversified.

By identifying the genes that are active when cells such as neurons replicate or turn into other cell types, the researchers can get a sense of how more mature cells form in the axolotl’s brain form over time.

The real test comes when the researchers inflict an injury on part of the brain, damaging some cells, then checking in later to see if they’ve regenerated.

And they found that in about 12 weeks, most of the axolotl’s brain cells have been replaced by new ones. The cells even reformed neuronal connections.

Can axolotl brain regeneration research help humans?

Even if you don’t care about axolotls, the research is important for the future of human brain research. There are many diseases that affect cognitive capacity (not to mention the role of aging on the brain). Understanding the process by which the axolotl’s brain regenerates could someday help up apply this knowledge to humans. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Axolotls Can Regenerate Their Brains – These Adorable Salamanders Are Helping Unlock The Mysteries Of Brain Evolution And Regeneration” — IFL Science

WTF Fun Fact 12924 – The NASA Artemis I Mission

The NASA Artemis 1 mission is scheduled for September 3, 2022. But even if it’s scrubbed due to weather or technical issues, whenever it does launch it will be history-making.

What’s significant about NASA’s Artemis I mission?

For starters, Artemis I is the most powerful rocket ever built. NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS), as well as the Orion spacecraft (which is also being tested), are integral parts of NASA’s plan to send people back to the Moon and further into space than ever before. If the technology is successful, it will show that we can build a sophisticated spacecraft capable of carrying humans back to the Moon.

And if Artemis I goes out without a hitch, it will carry the first woman and the first person of color to ever set foot on the moon in a few years.

This mission was supposed to happen a few years ago, but politics and the pandemic got in the way.

the NASA Artemis 1 mission is set to last 6 weeks. After reaching orbit, it will perform a trans-lunar injection and deploy 10 satellites plus the Orion spacecraft, which will enter retrograde orbit for 6 days. The hope is that the Orion will return to Earth after its mission and splash down in the Pacific Ocean without burning up on re-entry.

NASA tried to launch the mission on August 17, 2022, but had to scrap it after a series of delays during pre-flight testing. On August 29, the second try was capped after an issue with the core stage. Hopefully, the third time is the charm.

How can you watch the NASA Artemis I launch?

If you’re reading this before Saturday, September 3, 2022, at 2:17 EST, you can watch the launch for free online. NASA’s live streams (and pre-launch briefings are linked here).

According to IFL Science (cited below): “The rocket will launch from the historic Launch Pad 39B (Apollo and Skylab both launched from here) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday, September 3. The launch window opens at 2:17 pm EDT (7:17 pm UTC) and will stay open for two hours, though it’s likely the launch will take place as soon as the window opens.”

If all goes well on the NASA Artemis 1 mission, Artemis 2 is set to carry a crew for a lunar flyby in the future, and Artemis 3 will carry astronauts back to the moon five decades after the last Apollo mission. — WTF fun facts

Source: “NASA’s Artemis I Will Make History This Weekend – Here’s How To Watch Live” — IFL Science

WTF Fun Fact 12894 – Firefighters Use Wetter Water

It’s supposed to be one of those “duh” facts that water is wet. But did you know if can technically be “wetter”? Firefighters use “wetter” water to put out fires. This involves using synthetic chemicals to improve water’s ability to put out fires.

Why do firefighters need water wetter?

Some types of fires are so hot that water simply evaporated the moment it hits the flames. Wetting chemicals help increase water’s spreading and penetrating properties.

We’ve long known that fires involving oil and gasoline can’t be put out with a splash of water. Decades ago, fire departments started using chemical and mechanical foam and carbon dioxide to help extinguish those fires.

But even a fire that starts with a match may be hard to extinguish with plain old H2O. The material that’s burning may be too thick and dense for water to penetrate it and extinguish all of the flames, for example.

As a result, fire departments use water-wetting chemicals. These give water properties that allows it to maintain contact with a solid surface or spread out more effectively to address a wider area.

How can you make water wetter?

In firefighting, the purpose of water is to make other things wet. But when water bonds are cohesive, water can bead up and not penetrate the surface of an object. But adding detergents, water becomes wetter, the cohesive forces weaken, and it’s able to make other things wet – which in turn extinguishes a fire.

Wetting agents also reduce the surface tension of water by penetrating the water molecules and making them less adhesive. They can also help increase the evaporation temperature of water. For firefighters, this allows them to get things wetter faster and with less water.

The most common chemicals in wet water are surfactants such as ethylene or propylene glycol. They make water easier to distribute over a surface and better able to flow into things that are on fire. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Fighting Fires with “Wet” Water” — Fire Engineering

WTF Fun Fact 12828 – Walking Sharks

You have to be of a certain age to remember Steve Martin’s LAND SHARK! But when we think of walking sharks, this is where our mind goes. Anything else is simply too terrifying.

Of course, you don’t have to worry about a shark walking down the street. They walk underwater. For now…

Are there really walking sharks?

So, yes, there is a shark that can “walk.” But it’s rare, it’s small, and it’s not out to get you. Sorry to ruin the surprise so early in the explanation.

You may have seen the shark on social media since some guy saw one on a trip somewhere in Indonesia, hadn’t watched enough Shark Week, and then posted a video insisting he discovered a new type of shark. Of course, once marine biologists saw the footage they all said “Yeah, duh, that’s so 2006.” They’ve known about these sharks for a while, discovering them in 2006 in the Bird’s Head Seascape of West Papua, Indonesia.

Conservation International’s Mark Erdmann and his team currently study the walking sharks and their evolutionary origin. (Remember, if humans originated in the wet slime and eventually learned to walk on land, seeing a shark evolve to do the same is extra interesting!). And it turns out there are about 9 species of little sharks that can use their fins to both walk and swim.

So, what’s the real deal with these walking sharks?

According to Conservation News (cited below), these bottom-dwelling sharks “walk” using pectoral and pelvic fins. This allows them to traipse around coral reefs and stick their heads under rocks to look for more food.

Another cool fact about the sharks is that shark geneticists (which is definitely not a job we ever heard about during Career Day) have used genetic samples from shark fins to look at the genomes of these sharks, comparing them to older species to see when each branched off into a new species. In case you didn’t know, sharks are actually older than dinosaurs by about 200 million years. But according to these genetic analyses, walking sharks are only about 9 million years old.

If you’re still more freaked out than fascinated, just not that all 9 species “are found exclusively in a ring around Northern Australia, New Guinea and the satellite islands of Raja Ampat, Aru, and Halmahera in Indonesia.”

If you want to see the walking shark in all its glory, check out the video below:

– WTF fun facts

Source: “Discovery afoot: New study cracks mystery of how ‘walking’ sharks split” — Conservation.org