Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (27 page)

PLEASE PASS THE DIRTY SCALPEL

It wasn’t until the 1860s, when French biologist Louis Pasteur proved that germs caused diseases, that hospitals even considered sterilizing their surgical instruments. Before that, doctors believed that infections just sprang up spontaneously. It didn’t occur to them that using unwashed scalpels on multiple patients might be part of the problem.

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Thumper:
Your heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood every day…and 48 million gallons in a lifetime.

Ouch! Leeches have three sets of jaws and 60 to 100 teeth.

It’s might actually be good for you.

I
T’S GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN

In 2007, researchers at England’s University of Northumbria conducted a study on the effects that chewing gum has on memory. Seventy-five people were given a memory test, and 25 of the participants were also given gum to chew. The findings: on average, the gum-chewers had 35 percent higher scores. The scientists think it’s because the activity of chewing gum slightly raises the heart rate, which increases blood flow to the brain.

IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR EYES

Chopping onions makes you cry because cutting into the vegetable releases enzymes into the air. Those enzymes dissolve in the water of your eyes, converting the enzymes into sulfuric acid—a painful substance that makes your eyes water. Some professional chefs chew gum to avoid the pain. The chewing makes you breathe through your mouth, which in turn makes you breathe in more of the fumes, keeping them out of your eyes.

Q: Why did the student refuse to accept an unsharpened pencil?
A: She said it was totally pointless.

IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR TEETH

Forget what grown-ups have told you: your teeth actually benefit from chewing gum…as long as it’s sugarless. Chewing gum makes your mouth produce saliva, which cleans your teeth.

IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR EARS

As a plane becomes airborne, the pressure inside it drops. Why? Air pressure is lower at higher elevations.

But going from one level of pressure to another can make people sick. So planes that fly higher than 3,000 feet use air-pressurization systems inside their cabins. Sometimes, though, those fancy systems don’t get the air pressure quite high enough. The result: some passengers get painfully blocked-up ears. The best way to relieve this is to gently force air out of your ears. And the best way to do that is to chew gum. The motion moves your ears and pushes the air out. Ah, relief!

We’ll admit it, some teachers are cool, and here’s one we especially like. Every summer, he welcomes a few unusual guests into his home—wild bears.

M
OUNTAIN MAN

For most of his life, Charlie Vandergaw was a high-school science teacher in Anchorage, Alaska. But in the mid-1980s, he retired and bought 40 acres of land in the Alaskan wilderness. There, he set up a homestead called Bear Haven, with just a small main house and a couple of outbuildings. He has no phone, no Internet, and no TV. To reach his property, he has to fly there in a small plane because the closest road is more than 20 miles away. But Vandergaw’s not starving for company. He’s made some unusual friends—the black and grizzly bears who live nearby.

THE FIRST: BIG JACK

Vandergaw didn’t always love bears; at one time, he hunted them. But one summer day in the 1980s, he met a bear whom Vandergaw says “wanted me for a friend.” The black bear crawled across the yard on his belly, so Vandergaw did the same. Eventually, they got close enough to touch noses, and Vandergaw named the bear Big Jack. He started feeding Big Jack when he came by.

Soon, other bears began showing up on Vandergaw’s property—more than 10 in all. There’s Walt, a 500-pound black bear who ambles through the front door most mornings to say hello. Annie and her cub Peanut like to climb trees on the property. And Cookie is an enormous grizzly who loves to play. Vandergaw says, “She’d come in and just play with the irrigation system and I’d feed her. She eventually let me feed her out of my hand.”

World’s largest wind farm: The Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas.

BRING IN THE LAW

Feeding bears by hand, though, is illegal in Alaska. In fact, feeding any wild animal is against the law there. Authorities worry that feeding wild animals makes them feel too comfortable with humans, which also makes them more willing to come into areas where people live.

New Zealand’s kiwi bird is about the size of a chicken, but its eggs are 10 times larger.

Bear attacks on humans are rare—only 20 people died from bear attacks in Alaska in the entire 20th century. (Between 1975 and 1985 alone, 19 Alaskans were killed by dogs.) But when bears do attack, they usually kill. In 2003, an environmentalist named Timothy Treadwell, who’d been living among wild bears on and off for 13 years, was mauled and killed in Alaska’s wilderness. His story gained national attention because Treadwell had been making a documentary about his experience, and the event scared a lot of people.

So Alaska’s government has been trying to close down Bear Haven for years. Thus far, though, Vandergaw hasn’t budged. He’s heard all the criticisms and agrees that most people (kids especially) should never approach or try to feed one of these animals. His situation is unique, he believes, because he invites the bears to his home, rather than invades their forest territories like Treadwell did. And plus, he isn’t scared of his bears. Vandergaw says, “I don’t even think about being eaten. Why would they want to eat me?”

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BLUE BEARS?

It’s true…sort of. Technically, they’re “glacier bears”—black bears with bluish-black coats. The coloring probably evolved during the last Ice Age (about 18,000 years ago) so the bears could blend into their icy blue habitat in southeastern Alaska. Today, only about 100 of the blue bears exist in the world.

In medieval Britain, dead bodies were often taken to cemeteries along special highways called “corpse roads.”

Have you ever wondered what happens to bodies that are donated to science
?

C
ADAVER CAPERS

Most people are buried or cremated after they die. But some choose to donate their bodies to science. That means they allow scientists and medical students to study them after they’re dead. But Uncle John wanted to know—what exactly happens to the bodies?

MEDICAL SCIENCE

Most bodies donated to science go to medical schools, where students use them to learn medical techniques. Three or four students usually “share” a body. They take turns dissecting it and examining it as part of their medical training. They might practice surgeries or learn how the different internal organs actually look.

Doctors practice on bodies, too. Surgeons who want to learn new techniques use different parts of donated bodies. For example, a doctor who wants to learn how to do a new kind of face-lift would get a severed head to work with. Another doctor who is practicing knee surgery might examine the same corpse’s leg.

DOWN ON THE FARM

“Body farms” are outdoor labs where human bodies are left outside to decompose. Once a body has broken down, scientists study how different conditions might affect it. For example, hot weather will make a body rot faster than cold weather. Crime investigators can then use that information as a model for finding out how long ago a person died and sometimes even whether or not he was murdered.

Forensic entomology—the study of how insects affect human corpses—is a new kind of science being studied at body farms. Forensic entomologists try to determine how long a person has been dead based on the types of insects that live or feed on the bodies. For example, if earthworms are living under a body, that means it’s been undisturbed for at least a week. But if beetles are there, the body hasn’t been moved in months.

CRASH-TEST DEAD DUMMIES

Another use for dead bodies: to test automobile safety. Many car manufacturers start out using plastic crash-test dummies—mannequins with built-in equipment to measure the force of an accident. But the joints of crash-test dummies don’t move the same way human joints do. It’s also hard to tell what kind of injuries a real person might get in a crash by looking at broken plastic. So the car companies also use bodies. Some of the most important advances in car safety—like shoulder seatbelts and air bags—were tested on human bodies.

For vampires only? Phengophobia is the fear of daylight.

David Copperfield? David Blaine? Please! Harry Houdini is history’s most famous magician, and he pulled off some incredible tricks that still astound people today.

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NVENTING HOUDINI

Harry Houdini wasn’t his real name. The kid who grew up to be Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary in 1874, and moved to the United States with his family when he was four. They settled first in Appleton, Wisconsin, and then moved to New York City.

Houdini showed promise as an escape artist and performer at a young age. Sometimes, he broke into locked kitchen cabinets to steal treats. And his first appearance onstage came when he was just nine. He called himself “Ehrich, Prince of the Air” and put on a show in which he swung from a trapeze.

As a teenager, he decided to perform in magic shows for money. He admired a French magician named Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, and friends and family had called Ehrich “Ehrie” when he was a kid. So he put the two together to come up with the stage name Harry Houdini.