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Chapter 25 SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING You may ask, "of what tangible use is science?" You may wish less of taxpayers' money was spent in pursuit of answers to questions which you don't care about. Science does eventually lead to very tangible, personal results. Here's the most profound example: A hundred years ago, Americans worked an average of 73 hours per week. Americans now work an average of about 35 hours per week. Still, you may not care personally about science. Let the scientists discover things; let the engineers work out ways to use these new discoveries. To a degree, I agree. But, my research has discovered that scientists are both a great boon to society and a great danger. I think you'll find this chapter interesting enough to provoke the latent scientist within you. "What scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying." - Nikita Khrushchev Science Behind Warfare Before the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert on on July 16, 1945, some of the scientists working on the bomb thought there was a three in one million chance that an atomic bomb might melt down the entire earth - yet they went ahead and tested that first atomic bomb. Windows were broken 125 miles away from the first atomic test blast. If the test had been in Disneyland, windows in Mexico would have broken from the noise. "It is the great public which is demanding the utmost of secrecy for modern science in all things which may touch its military uses. This demand for secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civilization not to learn the progress of its own disease." - Norbert Wiener At Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee is a special 20-foot long cannon that spits out dead chickens at 700 miles per hour. Why? This gun tests fighter jet canopies against impact with birds. Scientists, And Their Work A student at Iowa State University wrote to 37 scientists who had published research studies. He requested their data for verification. Five did not answer, and twenty-one of the so-called scientists said that their data was lost or that some accident made it unaccessible. There are almost five million United States patents. The 1,300 patent examiners receive twelve thousand letters per day. The record holder is Thomas Edison who had over 1,000 patents. There are over 1.5 million scientists in America. Approximately 400,000 of these folks are involved in the life sciences, and 80,000 are in earth science. One out of every 162 Americans is a scientist. Only 13 percent of scientists are women. The Soviet Union spends 4.6 percent of their gross national product on scientific research. In the United States the figure is only 2.5 percent. Life Sciences Scientists tested vision in men with tight collars and ties and found significant improvement in these mens' vision when they loosened their ties and unbuttoned their collars. A teaspoonful of soil may contain 100 million bacteria. Some scientists trained a bunch of flatworms to react in a special way to light. They noted how long it took the worms to learn, then they cut the worms up and fed the pieces to another batch of untrained worms. After their meal, the new worms were taught the same lesson. The second batch learned much faster. Wondering if this were a fluke (no, they were plenaria), some other scientists tried similar experimentation with mice. A batch of mice were trained to run a maze. Then their brains were removed, an extract was made from these brains and fed to another, untrained batch of mice. Once again, the new mice learned the maze much more quickly, up to twice as fast. German researchers trained honey bees to expect food at a certain time every day. Then they cut off the bees' heads and transplanted a part of their brains into the brains of other bees. The bees with the brain transplants then expected the food at the same time of day. Nerve messages move at 240 mph. Your brain is mostly water, 80 percent. Your blood actually is less fluid (or more solid) than your brain. Your brain uses 25 percent of all the oxygen that you breathe. If you could harness the power used by your brain, you could power as a 10-watt light bulb. Neanderthal men had brains larger than than ours. You may have a true split personality. According to one school of thought, the left hemisphere of your brain may tend toward acceptance and positiveness while the right hemisphere is more concerned with negative and avoidance thoughts or behaviors. We remember one trillion things in a lifetime. A researcher has succeeded in mending broken spinal cords. He broke the backs of ten rats. They were then exposed to high pressure oxygen and injected with DSMO (dimethyl sulfoxide). Two of the rats could walk again; six showed some signs of nerve re- growth. (It is important to note that the experiments were done as soon as the injury happened. The results would not be as encouraging on rats who had received the injuries at some time in the past.) In a scientific study, children were told to imagine that they were wearing heavy mittens. The temperature of their fingertips went up. Evidently, your kidneys use more energy that your heart. The kidneys use twelve percent of your oxygen, yet the heart only requires seven percent. If you stretch out all the DNA in one of the cells from your body, it would be about six feet long. There are about three billion pairings of atoms, or specific bits of information. Scientists are trying to make a total map of the human code, like blue prints. With such a map, they could eventually cure many problems by simply looking on the map to see where things started going wrong, and make a potion to fix it. So far, of the three billion bits, they have mapped approximately 35 million. So, they are roughly one percent finished with the job. In France, a scientist put electrodes and a radio transmitter into a trout's brain. A computer reads and decodes the signals. The trout reacts strongly to tiny amounts of pollution in its water. The fish can detect as little as 1/1,000,000,000 of one gram of a pesticide in a liter of water. More trout like this one can be used as pollution meters. All you would have to do is let them swim in questionable water, and tell us what they think about it. There are plants with a body temperature just like birds and mammals. Skunk cabbages can have an internal temperature 25 degrees higher than their surroundings. The angle of the branches from the trunk of a tree is constant from one member to another of the same species. Furthermore, that same angle is represented in the veins of that tree's leaves. You can figure out which way is south if you are near a tree stump. The growth rings are wider on the south side. Trees sweat. Up to 1680 gallons of water evaporate off a large oak tree per day. If you decide to water your trees with a garden hose, it will take over five hours to make up one tree's daily water use. The telegraph plant has leaves that move themselves continuously in calm weather as if they were fluttering in the breeze. Some plants can see. They have the ability to detect blue light with little yellow receptor cells that have transparent windows over them, much like eyes. These cells send signals to other cells near the base of leaf stems that cause the leaves to turn the correct way to follow the sun, thereby insuring the plant can absorb as much sunlight as possible. This has been proven. What has not yet been proven is that plants think and feel. Of course, they probably don't, but it has not been disproven either. Robert Falls is a researcher who has managed through gene- splicing to create cedar and poplar trees with square trunks. These will mean less wasted wood at the mills when lumber is cut. Bees may have a true sixth sense, one that people probably do not have: They have magnetic crystals in their abdomens with which they may feel direction relative to the earth's magnetic field. Mosquitoes like the scent of estrogen, hence, women get bitten by mosquitoes more than men do. Only female mosquitoes bite people. The smallest tools ever made are glass micropipette tubes used for surgery within a single cell. The Earth and Its Weather There are 1.3 billion cattle in the world, and they all belch. This is a serious problem! Each of these cattle burp up about 8 ounces of methane per day, which totals 1/3 million tons. According to one scientist's calculations, this is enough methane to ruin the world's weather by raising the temperature 5 degrees within 60 years, due to the greenhouse effect. 1816 was known as the year without a summer. The weather was unusual that year. In the Eastern United States and in Europe there were days when the temperature was below freezing in every month of the winter, spring, summer and fall. You've probably heard all the horrors of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is a situation in which the world will warm up due to carbon dioxide, other gases or dust blanketing the atmosphere. Solar heat will get in, but not out. Some of the normal amount of reflected radiation will be trapped. With just a small change in temperature, the weather could change drastically, causing worldwide crop failure or worse problems. If we have a major greenhouse effect, and several scientists predict just that, then all the ice in Antarctica would melt. 25 percent of all the land in the world would be under water. The oceans would have to rise only 240 feet to do this. What your mother never told you is that perhaps all the scientists are making lots of political noise over nothing. The counter indications for a giant ungreenhousing Rx are as follows: * According to scientists, the warmest weather within several thousand years occurred between 1890 and 1945. The weather is now slowly declining into another ice age. Perhaps we will soon need a greenhouse effect. * With more carbon dioxide in the air, crop yields will increase because plants thrive in an atmosphere rich in CO2. * If we have global warming, some of the polar ice will melt, resulting in water over a larger amount of the earth's surface. This water will evaporate, causing more world-wide rain, much to the satisfaction of drought-stricken Californians. * Any slight change in weather is likely to rearrange the places where rain falls. Californians say that their drought is the result of the greenhouse effect. But we cannot tell whether it may rain more or less in the Imperial Valley, Hawaii, or the Sahara. * One scientist, Sherwood Idso, of the United States Water Conservation Laboratory, has studied the data from seventy reports, and predicts that increased carbon dioxide in our atmosphere might actually cause a cooling trend. * Because of deforrestation in the Amazon and many other parts of the world, the earth reflects more heat and light. Bare earth reflects better than trees. This is called the Albedo Effect, which would cause a cooling trend perhaps equal to or greater than a greenhouse warming. According to a Russian study of Siberia where quite a bit of logging is going on, it is one-half degree colder there than it would have been if the forest had been left alone. If you totally flattened the world, dug up the mountains and put the dirt into the ravines, the entire earth would become covered with two miles of water. The Atlantic Ocean gets wider by a little more than one inch every year. All except three percent of the world's total water is ocean. It would take half a trillion tons of coal to produce as much energy as the earth gets from the sun's radiation each day. Niagra Falls has moved about ten miles upstream in the last 10,000 years. The falls are eroding at the rate of 5 feet per year. If you get into the bottom of a well or a tall chimney and look up, you can see stars, even in the middle of the day. As seen from television, we tend to underestimate the power and size of volcanoes. In 1883, a volcano blew up in the Dutch East Indies. The sound it made could be heard in Thailand, 3000 miles away. The dust thrown into the atmosphere made a band in the sky that surrounded the world. On the Big Island of Hawaii is a volcano that has been active for years, but on a less dramatic scale. There is a continuous river of lava spilling out of the hole and flowing toward the sea. The lava slowly flows across the rain forest and marijuana fields like a jar of spilled honey on a kitchen floor, burning up the trees in its path. Since lava is quite porous, it insulates itself, and therefore the surface cools quickly. The author was delighted to walk on Hawaiian real estate that did not exist the day before. It can be walked on with ordinary sneakers although if you are not careful, sometimes the tread will start to smoke and melt. As you look into the cracks in the new land, you can see a red glow coming from hotter lava only three inches under your feet. This new land is the quietest place on earth. There are no birds, there are not even any trees rustling in the breeze. If the wind is coming from behind, you can walk to within four feet of the lava river and poke sticks into it. They burst into flames instantly. Eight percent of the earth's crust is aluminum. Scientists are pretty well in agreement that California is due for another, even more destructive earthquake within the next 20 years, probably occuring nearer to Los Angeles. This one is estimated to take 14,000+ lives. Earthquakes have been recorded in every state in America. Astronomy The average density of the universe is one atom per cube of nothingness measuring 27 inches on each side. On May 10, 1879, making a deafening roar and giving off tremendous light, a meteor weighing 431 arrived in Estherville, Iowa. It hit the ground so fast that it dug a hole fourteen feet deep. The mathematical probability of a person on earth being hit by a meteorite is that one person will get bonked every 180 years. The earth gains in weight about 1,000 tons daily, due to meteors and other space garbage falling in. Almost all of it burns up due to the friction of air resistance and never hits the ground. Diamonds have been found in meteorites, but they are so small that they cannot be seen with a microscope. Possibly there are millions of tons of diamond dust in space. One night in 1833 there were almost a quarter-million shooting stars. (Don't you wish you were there to see it?) If you could shoot a gun at the sun, it would take the bullet 20 years to get there. The earth orbits the sun at about eight times the speed of a bullet. If you could get in your car right now and start driving non-stop to the moon at 55 miles per hour, you would get there in a little over six months (27 weeks). If your car could get 20 miles per gallon on this trip, you would need 12,500 gallons of gas. I'll bet you don't know what an orrery is! It is one of those things you see in museums that model the solar system. The sun and the planets are made out of various size balls held on wires, and they circle around like the hands of a clock. Orreries are hopelessly out of scale. In reality, if the sun were three feet in diameter, the earth would be the size of a pea. The pea would be circling around the three-foot sun on a wire 100 feet long. This whole thing, with the pea-size earth, and with all the other planets including Pluto would be over ninety miles in diameter. When astronauts landed on the moon, their instruments noticed that because of the impact of their landing the moon rang like a bell for fifty-five minutes. Solar flares can reach more than 100,000 miles away from the sun. On the sun there are hurricanes bigger than 100 earths. During major sunspot activity, compass readings can be inaccurate by as much as ten degrees. All of the radio waves from space ever studied equal less than the power of a single snowflake hitting the ground. There is probably a black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists estimate that the universe is 15 billion years old. By looking far out into space, they can see the past in other places, because light takes time to reach us. An event that happened on the sun nine minutes ago will just be now visible to us. They have just recently discovered a place so far away that it dates back to almost the beginning of the universe. What we see today happened 14 billion years ago. "The materials that make up life are everywhere [in space]. Water is one of the most common molecules in the universe, and the light elements - carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen - are ubiquitous. Many experiments have shown that from these very simple materials you can create the organic molecules for life. It almost, then, becomes a statistical matter: You put the right materials together with an energy source, and things are going to regurgitate and percolate. Eventually the chemistry becomes complex to the point that it begins to control its own future. Then a self-replicating molecule comes into the picture. It is virtually unimaginable that all those stars resembling the sun could form and leave an environment around them so clean there's nothing left to coalesce into smaller "coaly" bodies. So there must be planets around. Many stars will have planets too close, too small, or too far away from them. But those with planets at the right distance will have liquid water on them, and once you have liquid water and all the other stuff, life is going to happen." - Bradford Smith, world-famous astronomer, in an interview by OMNI Magazine Theoretical Science Perhaps the Big Bang (theory of the beginning of the universe) was before the onset of time. Perhaps all matter was clumped together in a great big ball because until the Big Bang there was never any time to spread out. Then time developed, and - bang! If an item moves very, very fast, it becomes smaller and heavier. "General field theory predicts the possibility of at least three more entire spectra. You see, there are three types of energy fields known to exist in space: electric, magnetic, and gravitic or gravitational. Light, X-rays, all such radiations, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Theory indicates the possibility of analogous spectra between magnetic and gravitic, between electric and gravitic, and finally, a three-phase type between electric- magnetic-gravitic fields. Each type would constitute a complete new spectrum, a total of three new fields of learning. "If there are such, they would presumably have properties quite as remarkable as the electromagnetic spectrum and quite different. But we have no instruments with which to detect such spectra, nor do we even know that such spectra exist." "...The very theoretical considerations that predict additional spectra allow of some reasonable probability as to the general nature of their properties..." - quoted from the book, The Day After Tomorrow, Robert A. Heinlein. "Today we know four types of forces - electromagnetic, gravitational, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But the existence of the latter two was not even suspected before this century. I don't believe that we have found all the forces in nature yet. There is probably at least one more type of energy operating at the physical level which serves to support psychic phenomena" - William Tiller" Earliest life may have been catalized from rust. Rust is slow burning, where iron combines with oxygen. Life is slow burning, where various elements combine with oxygen, particularly carbon, just like when wood burns. The Fruits of Technology Chances are, you are within ten feet of Krypton. This gas is in fluorescent lights. Your color TV is a source of some very rare and weird elements. There are europium and yttrium to make the reds, and without cerium the radiation from your set would turn the picture tube glass purple. Bug zappers, those high voltage cages that attract bugs to an ultra-violet light, and then kill them by electrocution, increase the likelihood that mosquitoes will bite you. The light attracts hundreds of bugs to the area, but kills only some of them. The next generation of sunglasses may be eyedrops. The very best sunglasses block only 60 - 95 percent of dangerous ultraviolet rays, but Neville A. Baron has invented eyedrops that block 98 percent of ultraviolet for two to four hours yet do not affect vision. The drops now require FDA approval. Perhaps soon, we will no longer have to cut down trees for paper. Scientists are experimenting with a relative of sugar cane called Kenaf, which can be used for paper pulp instead of wood. This plant is much less complicated to harvest. There is a new alloy of aluminum that dissolves in water. Think of the possibilities! "I've heard it suggested that in the future, instead of commuting to work, some people way be computing to work." - Ronald Reagan History DATES OF INVENTIONS aerosol spray............1926 air conditioning.........1911 anesthesia...............1842 antiseptic surgery.......1867 aspirin..................1889 ballpoint pen............1888 electric motor...........1837 electron microscope......1931 helicopter...............1939 incandescent light.......1879 nylon....................1930 optical microscope.......1590 penicillin...............1929 rocket engine............1926 submarine................1776 television...............1923 thermometer..............1593 vacuum cleaner...........1907 In 1875 the director of the U.S. patent office resigned. He said that there was nothing left to invent. We all credit Thomas Edison with inventing the phonograph and improving electric lights. He also invented wax paper. He claimed that his greatest invention was a machine that would be able to pick up evidence if there was life after death. In the 1920's a radio station in Schenectady, NY built a powerful transmitter. In those days before the FCC regulations, not knowing just how big to make a transmitter in order for the signal to be received some distance away, the station set up to broadcast at 500,000 watts. It requires about one watt to be received four blocks away. This station broadcast at such tremendous power that they could be heard around the world. People in New York didn't even need radios. They could sometimes hear voices transmitting from the station in the fire pit of their furnaces. In Schenectady, light bulbs lit up in people's houses even if they were switched off. Miscellaneous The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did a study of the control rooms of atomic power plants and found some serious ergonomic mistakes. For instance, some gauges are as far away as fifteen feet from the knobs that have to be adjusted while watching the gauges. Some of the gauges furnish misleading information, and some needed information is not displayed at all. As you break a window the cracks made in the glass travel at speeds up to three thousand miles per hour. If you took a glass of iced tea and magnified it until it were as large as the whole earth, each molecule of water would be about the size of a baseball. Diamonds are flammable. I found this item by an unknown author on a computer bulletin board: "A New Biologist was doing an experiment, he took a frog, a tape measure, and a pad and pencil, and an exact-o knife, He set the frog on the table, and slammed his fist down on the table, behind the frog, and said "Frog JUMP!", the frog Jumped, and he took his measuring tape, and measured the distance, and wrote "Frog with 4 legs Jumps 12 feet". he then fetched the frog, and chopped off one leghe put the frog back on the table, and again slammed his fist down on the table and shouted"Frog JUMP!", the Frog again Jumpped,and he again measured and wrote "Frog with 3 legs jumps 8 feet", he got the frog again, chopped off another leg, and went thru the process again, measured it, and wrote"Frog with 2 legs jumps 6 feet", he got the frog, and chopped of another leg, and again repeated the process, the frog jumped, and he wrote "Frog with one leg jumps 3 feet", he took the frog, and chopped off the last leg, he put the frog down, and slammed his fist down on the table, yelling "Frog Jump!", the frog just sat there, again he hit the table "FROG JUMP!", the frog still didn't budge, he dd this a final time, and still the frog didn't move, he took his book, and write, Frog with No legs CAN'T HEAR!"