Science

WTF Fun Fact 12581 – The Shrinking Human Brain

All jokes about human intelligence these days aside, it’s true that humans have smaller brains than ever before.

The human brain has been shrinking in size for tens of thousands of years (so we can’t blame video games or reality TV or politics). According to anthropologists, the brain volume of Homo sapiens has decreased by about 10% over the last 40,000 years.

We’re used to hearing about the increasing size of brains as humans evolved, but that is a trend that goes back millions of years in human evolution.

And to be fair, our brains may be smaller today, but they are still about 3x bigger than other primates based on body weight.

Anthropologists estimate the brain sizes of our ancestors by measuring the amount of room in the skull. The oldest ancestors of humans had brains the size of a modern chimp’s. The skull cavity could hold about 1.5 cups (to put it in quantities that are easier to picture).

Then, between 2 and 4 million years ago, craniums (and therefore brains) got bigger, distinguishing humans from other primate ancestors. They could hold about 2 cups.

If you go back “just” 1 million years (to our ancestors Homo erectus), their brains could hold 4 cups. And Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (going back about 130,000 years) had craniums that could hold 6 cups.

So if you go back far enough, you see that brain size did increase, up to a point. After that, they began shrinking in size.

Today, the average human brain holds around 5.7 cups. But why? We can only make assumptions.

For starters, human bodies got smaller once the Ice Age was over, and so did skulls and brains.

But Discover Magazine claims that the most convincing hypothesis comes from anthropologist Brian Hare, which he calls “survival of the friendliest.”

This hypothesizes that Stone Age societies valued different, more domestic traits – specifically, ones that made humans more social. Social behavior is regulated by hormones that also affect brain and body size. So when we selected for these behaviors (by breeding with more social humans), we also chose genes that made bodies and brains smaller.

A reduction in skull and brain size isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may be that we needed less brain volume as we began to live in collectives, cooperate, and rely on our communities. In other words, now we share the burden of survival with others, so our brains don’t have to hold every element of survival. – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age” — Discover

WTF Fun Fact 12579 – Viruses Aren’t Living Things

There’s really not that much disagreement in the scientific community – in fact, what constitutes being “alive” is more of a philosophical question. But at some point, it’s both helpful and fascinating to think about what really counts as “being alive.”

In many ways, viruses simply don’t make the cut, even though we talk about them as if they were alive. But that’s because we tend to use metaphors of living things to describe them.

Why not? Well, here are a few reasons:
– They cannot carry out any metabolic processes on their own (generally the definition of being alive)
– They cannot reproduce on their own, only replicate within a host cell.
– They don’t have ribosomes (in fact, they don’t even have cells)
– They cannot produce energy or control the environment in which they exist (only replicate in it).
– They cannot independently form proteins from messenger RNA
– They’re just so darn small (which, to be fair, is not a big part of the argument but something to consider).

In the end, they are just a jumble of protein and RNA that needs a spark of life from somewhere else to do anything at all.

Of course, there are some arguments to the contrary. Those who believe viruses should be considered living things point out the following:
– They have genomes
– They can evolve
– Under the right conditions, they do have the ability to reproduce (even if it’s not on their own)

So perhaps viruses are in between somewhere, only being alive when they can reproduce. That’s something to consider, but only for fun really, since the answer won’t help us solve our viral issues. – WTF fun facts

Source: “Are Viruses Alive?” — The University of Texas at Austin Biodiversity Center

WTF Fun Fact 12570 – The Telephone’s Real Inventor

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was one of a handful of men who were working on a machine that transmitted vocal communications telegrphically. But we only remember him because he got to the patent office first (and he was already a well-known inventor).

Historians and government officials have since reexamined the research and found that Bell wasn’t actually the first to create the world-changing technology. That honor goes to an Italian-American immigrant and mechanical genius from Florence, Antonio Meucci.

In fact, in 2002, U.S. Congress recognized an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell. The Guardian reported, “Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognize a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.”

“It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged,” the resolution stated. (You can read the resolution (107th Congress, H Res 269) on Congress.gov.)

While you might think there was a mad dash to the patent office, it’s actually the case that 16 years went by between Meucci’s demonstration of his “teletrofono” in New York in 1860 and Graham’s 1876 patent.

However, it was Bell’s telephone design that ended up being used to create the first telephones, so he does deserve some pretty massive credit. It’s just that Meucci deserves some and well and never really gets it.

The title of the most annoyed competitor of Bell’s likely goes to Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College. He actually sent his lawyer to the patent office on the same day. Bell’s lawyer got to the desk first on February 14, 1876. His filing was the fifth entry of the day, while Gray’s lawyer was 39th. The U.S. Patent Office awarded Bell with the first patent for a telephone (US Patent Number 174,465).

Some historians actually claim that Bell knew what was happening and may have bribed someone at the patent office to doctor documents showing his patent came in first, but we’ll probably never know. – WTF Fun Fact

Source: “Who is credited with inventing the telephone?” — Library of Congress

WTF Fun Fact 12567 – The Origin of the Countdown

3…2…1…we have liftoff. NASA may not have stolen the words for their spaceship launches, but they did lift the idea from a sci-fi film.

Of course, countdown clocks allow everyone involved to ensure they’re on the same page at the same time, but a big part of the countdown is building suspense for those watching. And that’s why NASA decided to make the final countdown a major part of their televised launches.

But they didn’t come up with the idea on their own. Like so much technology, the concept originated in a 1929 sci-fi film titled Frau im Mond by Fritz Lang. Even more unexpected – it was a silent film!

The idea for the story came from the novel Die Frau im Mond, by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife at the time). According to Atlas Obscura: “The book, which follows a group of backstabbing moon prospectors, is a rollercoaster ride of love triangles, business intrigue, and lunar gunfights…” 

Lang needed the film to be a hit. The “talkie” was becoming more and more popular, so he needed a way to make his silent films just as engaging. That’s when he settled on the countdown. (Another fun fact: before Die Frau im Mond, books and movies that involved a shuttle launch usually used countUPs.)

Atlas Obscura explained further how this influenced NASA: “The film’s space advisors brought lessons they learned from the film set back with them to the Society for Space Travel, where they found that loudly timing launches to the second was not only dramatic, but helpful. When NASA launched its first successful satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, newsreels broadcasting the event breathlessly announced, ‘the moment is at hand, the countdown reaches zero!'”

The breathless countdown worked for Lang – his was the highest-grossing film of the year in 1929. And we can’t imagine a NASA launch without the countdown (something we completely took for granted). – WTF Fun Fact

You can check out the film scene yourself (and no, that’s not the original music!):

Source: “NASA Stole the Rocket Countdown From a 1929 Fritz Lang Film” — Atlas Obscura

WTF Fun Fact 12565 – The World’s Largest Waterfall

You’ll have to travel to the place where the cold water of the Nordic Sea meets the warmer water from the Irminger Sea if you want to catch a vague glimpse of the world’s largest waterfall. The only problem is, it’s underwater.

Because the cold water is dense, it sinks below the warm water and spills over an undersea cataract all the way down to the ocean floor. It’s so big that the downward flow is estimated at over 123 million cubic feet per second. Denmark Strait cataract is around 11,500 feet long (with the next largest being Angel Falls at a mere-by-comparison 3,212 feet).

It also carries an estimated 175 million cubic feet of water per second. For perspective, that’s equivalent to around two thousand Niagaras Falls. – WTF Fun Fact

Source: “Where is Earth’s Largest Waterfall?” — NOAA

WTF Fun Fact 12560 – The First Fingerprint Conviction

In 1910, Clarence Hiller confronted an intruder in his home, tackling him as both men fell down the stairs. Hiller was then shot, and the suspect ran away.

Paroled 6 weeks prior, Thomas Jennings was convicted of the crime. He was stopped by police when they saw he was wearing a bloody coat. But that wasn’t what got him convicted.

While investigating the scene of the break-in, police noticed that the intruder had grabbed a freshly-painted railing while boosting himself into the Hiller family’s window. They cut off the piece of the railing as evidence and presented it in court, comparing it to Jennings’ fingerprint.

Criminal justice scholars have proved that the way we use fingerprint evidence is not always in the best interests of justice, nor are fingerprints always accurately interpreted. In fact, our fingerprints even change over the course of our lifetimes, so an old fingerprint may rule out an actual criminal caught decades later.

But in 1910, this type of evidence was a first for a criminal case and the jury needed to be convinced that each person’s fingerprints are unique. Unfortunately for Jennings, that proof came from his defense attorney.

W.G Anderson rightly questioned the use of such poorly-understood evidence to convict a person, but it was his own fingerprint that would convince the jury of his client’s guilt.

Anderson challenged the forensic experts to lift his fingerprint from a piece of paper. They did. But his big plan was to solicit fingerprints from the general public to show just how shoddy the science of fingerprinting was. Alas, we do all have unique fingerprints and while there are often problems in our interpretations, this little experiment did nothing but convince the jury that fingerprint evidence was solid.

Of all the fingerprints collected, none looked like Anderson’s. The jury voted unanimously to convict Jennings, who was sentenced to hang.

In their coverage, The Decatur Herald noted that “the murderer of Hiller wrote his signature when he rested his hand upon the freshly painted railing at the Hiller home.” –  WTF fun fact

Source: “The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence” — Smithsonian Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12556 – Halley’s Anti-Comet Pill

Where there’s fear, there are people willing to take advantage of it for their own gain.

Hundreds of years ago, comets could be a terrifying phenomenon. It looked like the sky was falling, so it’s not surprising that people have long interpreted them as harbingers of doom.

1910 was the first year that people really knew to expect the comet and could convey that to a larger global population. There were still people who remembered seeing it in 1834.

But we still didn’t entirely understand the nature of comets, so people were more susceptible to rumors about their dangers. While they’re all false, some researchers and commentators were happy to propagate rumors that Halley’s Comet had a tail made of a toxic substance that would contaminate the earth.

It was visible to the naked eye beginning on April 15th disappearing on July 5th. But some people weren’t excited to catch a glimpse because they thought it would bring about the end of the world.

The warning from a handful of scientists was rooted in real concerns. It was a close pass, and a previous comet (named Morehouse) had just been studied closely, and scientists found the fail emitted a toxic gas called cyanogen. But that’s no reason to blow it up into a rumor that a high-speed comet full of poison was headed straight for earth.

Famous scientists were asked to debunk the rumor but had a hard time admitting it was entirely impossible (which people needed to hear in order to chill out). Of course, the press coverage of cherry-picked remarks only made the story bigger and the fear worse.

Reactions ranged from hysteria to people selling all of their possessions to others drinking themselves to death in preparation for the end of the world. Some people caulked their windows and did their best to seal every hole in their homes to prevent the entrance of the supposed toxic gas.

In the panic, some charlatans decided to sell an easy cure in the form of a pill. Of course, it was a sugar pill and had no medicinal value, but they failed to mention that part. There was also an anti-Halley’s comet elixir. It’s unclear how much money people make from these quack remedies for problems that didn’t exist but clearly enough to pay for advertising space.

In the end, Halley’s comet passed without incident – and it was barely visible in the night sky. –  WTF fun fact

Source: “Halley’s Comet, Covid-19, and the history of ‘miracle’ anti-comet remedies” — Discover Magazine

WTF Fun Fact 12448 – Killer Vending Machines

In the United States, your chances of dying from a shark attack are roughly 1 in 250 million, statistically speaking. In contrast, your risk of dying from a vending machine-related incident is approximately 1 in 112 million. So a vending machine is nearly twice as lethal as a shark.

No, it’s not because the snacks you find in vending machines are high-calorie pseudo-food. We mean vending machines themselves can kill. Of course, your chance of encountering either may have gone down during the pandemic, but statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a great, big, toothy, man-eating shark.

Shark attacks make the news. Sharks seem dangerous. We’re afraid of sharks. They’ve made movies about how scary sharks are. They had to dedicate a whole week to sharks to show off both their deadliness and majesty. You just can’t say the same thing about vending machines. So sharks live in our imagination as something deadly.

Vending machines, on the other hand, are our friends. If the machines take over, we want them to be the ones that dispense snacks, right?

Ok, this isn’t really about ways you’re likely to die. But think about it – don’t we engage in this reasoning quite a lot? We love it. We throw it around all the time. “I can do X because Y is more dangerous.” That’s actually some deeply faulted reasoning since it ignored just HOW deadly X is (which, in this case, is vending machines).

Vending machines aren’t deadly at all. But they sure sound that way when you compare them to sharks.

And sharks? They get our attention as something deadly, even though, statistically, they aren’t. Especially if you live in, say, Indiana.

Now, we’re not going to insult you by spelling out the obvious social implications here, but let’s just say that next time you want to throw around statistics to prove a point, you might want to make sure they’re helpful. – WTF fun facts

Source: “How Are Sharks Less Dangerous than Vending Machines? An Exercise in Conditional Risk” — Freakonomics

WTF Fun Fact 12443 – Immortal Billionaires

You know what they say about money – “You can’t take it with you.” That saying is supposed to remind us to live our lives and discourage us from hoarding money since it won’t do any good after death.

But what if you have a fortune and you really can’t bear to think of the world without you? Well, if you’re a tech billionaire, you invest some of that money in your immortality.

There are multiple projects underway to study human immortality and extend life led by the likes of Jeff Bezos, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Russian Internet tycoon Dmitry Itskov. Now, not all of them want to live forever, exactly, but they do think that extending life by a decade or so sounds just about right.

We suppose being able to afford everything in life tends to make a person enjoy it more and want to keep the party going. But is it ethical? Will these billionaires share this tech with the rest of us, or will it only be for the rich?

Can the planet really handle a bunch of immortal billionaires? – WTF fun facts

Source: “The Men Who Want to Live Forever” — The New York Times