Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (30 page)

Only two mammals are native to Hawaii: the hoary bat and the monk seal. The rest were imported from somewhere else.

Ka Lae, on the Big Island, is the southernmost point in the United States.

Between 1934 and 1955, there was not a single bank robbery in Hawaii.

75 percent of Hawaii's population lives on the island of Oahu.

First Mates

Early in their marriage, Lou Henry Hoover and her husband Herbert spent several years in China. When in the White House, they sometimes spoke Chinese to thwart eavesdroppers.

Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, bred silkworms in the White House to weave her own silk cloth.

Lucy Hayes, wife of Rutherford, was the first First Lady to earn a college degree. This was in the 1850s, when most women didn't even graduate from high school.

Betty Bloomer was a dancer with Martha Graham's dance troupe, a model, and a retail fashion coordinator. We know her better as Betty Ford.

Claudia and Thelma were the real first names of back-to-back First Ladies, but they were known as Lady Bird Johnson and Pat Nixon.

Edith Roosevelt, Teddy's First Lady, was proficient at stilts. In fact, every member of the family had a pair for walking tall in the halls of the White House.

Martha Washington owned a parrot that her husband George couldn't stand. (And vice versa.)

Julia Tyler was John Tyler's second First Lady. His first wife of 29 years died during the second year of his presidency.

Every First Lady since Barbara Bush has appeared on
Sesame Street
.

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THE HANGIN' JUDGE

From 1875 to 1896, Judge Isaac “Hanging Judge” Parker had jurisdiction over western Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Parker was infamous for his severity. During his tenure on the bench, Parker sentenced 160 men to death, and 79 of them were hanged. His courtroom, jail, and gallows were known as “hell on the border.”

Expendable Organs

APPENDIX

Only some mammals have an appendix—rodents, rabbits, marsupials and primates (including humans). Located near the junction of the small and large intestines, it is a no-longer-useful stump of a much larger pouch.

What it's for:
The appendix was once part of a larger cellulose-digesting pouch left over from ancient times when humans were mostly herbivores.

Why we can do without it:
Although some scientists have recently speculated that the appendix might carry a reservoir of useful gut microorganisms, humans can certainly live without it. When an appendix gets infected and bursts, the spread of toxic fluid can kill the patient. It's also possible to get appendix cancer.

Side effects of removal?
A small number of patients may develop infections or have reactions to anesthesia, but compared to the risks of not taking out an infected appendix, the risks are pretty low.

TONSILS

Every year about 530,000 kids under the age of 15 have their tonsils removed. It's one of the most common organ removals, and probably the oldest. A Hindi medical guide from about 1000 BC holds the first known instructions for doing a tonsillectomy: “When troublesome, they are to be seized between the blades of a forceps, drawn forward, and with a semicircular knife, a third of the swelled part is removed.” Roman doctors in the first century AD also debated whether full or partial removal was best.

What they're for:
Tonsils are specialized lymph nodes that help filter bacteria and viruses out of the blood.

Why we can do without them:
When they get infected, tonsils can cause sore throats and apnea, but if they're removed, other lymph nodes take over their function.

Side effects of removal?
About one in 15,000 patients dies from bleeding, reactions to anesthesia, or airway obstruction. In a few
patients, throat problems get worse. A review of 7,765 research papers in 2009 found that the positive effects in kids were generally modest and short-lived.

ADENOIDS

In a way, the adenoids are sort of the tonsils of the nose—they rest in the base of the nose and trap germs. When infected, they can impair nose breathing and increase chronic infections and earaches. They are often removed at the same time as the tonsils.

What they're for:
Filtering bacteria and viruses.

Why we can do without them:
For babies under one year of age, the adenoids are an important part of the immune system, but after that age, they become increasingly irrelevant.

Side effects of removal?
See tonsillectomy, above. Recent studies have also called into question the effectiveness of adenoid removal for preventing respiratory infections. Even for the condition most helped by an adenoidectomy—snoring and near-suffocation caused by sleep apnea—some patients saw no improvement afterward.

GALLBLADDER

The gallbladder sits just under the liver.

What it's for:
To store bile from the liver that's released as needed to digest fatty foods.

Why we can do without it:
Your gallbladder can get blocked by stones, creating a backup and infection that can be life-threatening.

Side effects of removal?
The bile constantly goes directly from the liver to the small intestine without the gallbladder acting as a gatekeeper. Rarely, patients experience frequent or constant diarrhea from that.

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Camel humps don't store water.
They store fat, which allows them to go for weeks without food in the desert. As the fat gets used up, the humps get floppy and bounce from side to side.

Five Connecticut Firsts

      
1.
On January 28, 1878, the world's first telephone exchange opened in New Haven. If you had a phone, you could ring the operator to connect you to any of the other 21 phone owners in town.

      
2.
Seeing the number of Yale football players who got injured during practice, a young divinity student at Yale named Amos Alonzo Stagg created the first-ever tackling dummy. No dummy he, Stagg went on to become a college football coach.

      
3.
State residents claim that Connecticut is where cattle branding got its start in the United States. Why? Apparently Connecticut farmers were required by law to mark all their pigs, which led them to do it to their cattle, too.

      
4.
Connecticut was home to the first place where a hamburger was served between two pieces of bread (and oldest still-existing hamburger stand) in the United States: Louis' Lunch, New Haven, opened in 1895.

      
5.
The
Hartford Courant
, established in 1764, is the oldest still-published newspaper in the United States.

Don't Steal Our Butter, Butterfly

People in the Middle Ages in Europe believed that butterflies were fairies in disguise, fluttering by to steal their dairy products.

In the early 1700s, butterfly collector Lady Eleanor Glanville was declared insane after an entomologist testified, “None but those deprived of their Senses would go in Pursuit of butterflyes.”

There are 15,000 to 20,000 species of butterflies in the world—4,000 are in the South American rain forests alone.

Like bees, butterflies pollinate plants.

Some butterflies have ears on their wings.

Butterflies suck nectar from flowers using their proboscis, which works like a straw. When not in use, it curls up so it's out of the way.

The scales on a butterfly's wing overlap like roof tiles.

Lolita
writer Vladimir Nabokov was also a compulsive butterfly collector and researcher.

Bad Movie Science

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
(2004)

Premise:
The Gulf Stream, an Atlantic ocean current that helps regulate Earth's temperature, has become so affected by global warming that it essentially stops. The ocean suddenly rises and massive icy tidal waves flood New York City. Within days, North America is a frozen wasteland.

Bad Science:
Global warming can have a detrimental effect on the oceans, but it can't stop the Gulf Stream that fast. Even if it could, in order for New York City to flood like it did in the movie, the entire continent of Antarctica would have to melt. For that to happen, all of the sunlight that hits Earth would have to be collectively beamed at the South Pole…for three years.

THE MATRIX
(1999)

Premise:
After the machines take over the world, the human resistance “scorches the sky” to block out the machines' power supply—sunlight. So the machines use the humans for power, keeping them alive in a vegetative state while subjecting their brains to a life simulation. The machines “liquefy the dead so they can be fed intravenously to the living.”

Bad Science:
Neither the machines nor the humans know much about sustainable energy production. Blocking out the Sun would just destroy Earth's biosphere; the machines could easily build solar panels in space to get all the power they need. Second, human energy is inefficient—only about 35% of the energy from food converts to mechanical energy. And feeding humans to humans can lead to a disease called kuru, which causes insanity—and would screw up the simulation.

THE CORE
(2003)

Premise:
This big-budget action flick stars Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank. After Earth's inner core suddenly stops rotating, the planet's magnetic field collapses. This allows the Sun's microwaves to penetrate the atmosphere and cause havoc on the surface. Humanity's only hope is a ragtag group of scientists who must travel
down to the center of the planet in an experimental vehicle. Their plan: detonate several nuclear bombs in the hopes of “jump-starting Earth's engine.”

Bad Science:
If Earth's core—which spins at 550 mph (although the movie says 1,000 mph)—suddenly stopped rotating, all of its rotational energy would be released up into the mantle, and then to the surface, causing a massive earthquake that would last for years. Also, microwaves couldn't fry the surface; they're too weak, and they aren't even affected by magnetic fields. And as far as building a ship that can withstand the immense pressure inside Earth to detonate nuclear bombs that will jump-start the core…we don't have nearly enough room to go into how impossible that is.

WATERWORLD
(1995)

Premise:
The surface of Earth has been completely covered in water. In one scene, the Mariner (Kevin Costner) swims around an abandoned underwater city that's revealed to be none other than Denver, Colorado, once known as the “Mile-High City.”

Bad Science:
If the temperature of Earth increased 8°F, sea levels would rise by three feet due to melting polar ice caps, which would be ecologically catastrophic. But sea levels could never rise to the point where Denver was completely submerged—the city's elevation is 5,280 feet. If all the world's ice melted, the oceans would rise 250 feet, submerging many coastal cities, but not Denver.

THE HAPPENING
(2008)

Premise:
(If you haven't seen this and don't want to have the “twist ending” spoiled, stop reading!) Throughout the movie, some unknown force is causing people all over the northeastern United States to spontaneously kill themselves. The cause is revealed to be trees—angry, angry trees. Retaliating en masse against humans for polluting the planet, the trees emit neurotoxins called pyrethrins, which scramble the brain and lead to suicide.

Bad Science:
Pyrethrins come in very small quantities (in liquid form) in chrysanthemums native to Australia. And the liquid can be toxic, which is why it's used in pesticides. But trees could never emit suicide-causing neurotoxins.

Just Nuts!

In the nut biz, almond meats are categorized by four sizes: light, middling, good, and heavy.

The Bible mentions only two nuts by name: pistachios and almonds.

Buckeyes got their name because early settlers thought the nut looked like the eye of a deer.

The Turks claimed that horse chestnuts cured their steeds of excessive flatulence.

Pecans are the only nuts native to the continental United States.

The almond tree is a member of the rose family.

A chipmunk can store about a teaspoon's worth of nuts in each cheek.

It takes 300 pounds of pressure per square inch to break a macadamia nut's shell.

George Washington Carver, best known for his work with peanuts, also invented 75 uses for pecans.

Cashews are related to both mangoes and poison oak.

Because an unshelled walnut looks a little like a brain, the nuts got a reputation for being a good “brain food.”

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