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    Uncle John's Facts to Go: Mad Science
    Uncle John's Facts to Go: Mad Science
    Uncle John's Facts to Go: Mad Science
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Uncle John's Facts to Go: Mad Science

    By Bathroom Readers' Institute

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    About this ebook

    A collection of crazy science facts on everything from rocket ships and death rays to atoms, experiments, and bizarre scientists.

    From the amazing to the amusing, this byte-sized collection will bring you the inside stories behind earth-shattering discoveries, accidental inventions, and outlandish studies. Featuring Uncle John’s most mind-bending science articles—along with a few all-new “experiments”—this book will make you think, make you laugh, and make you ask yourself, “What the heck were they thinking?”

    Get ready to cackle like a mad scientist as you uncover the truth about . . .

    ·      The mystery of Tesla’s death ray machine

    ·      How to reanimate the dead

    ·      The next space race: Interstellar travel

    ·      Serendipity: The origins of the microwave oven and Silly Putty

    ·      The eccentric Dr. Einstein

    ·      The simple science behind nuclear fission

    ·      “Pigeons’ Ability to Discriminate Between Monet and Picasso” and other strange-but-true studies

    ·      Toilets in Spaaaaace!

    And much, much more
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781626861596
    Uncle John's Facts to Go: Mad Science
    Author

    Bathroom Readers' Institute

    The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

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      Book preview

      Uncle John's Facts to Go - Bathroom Readers' Institute

      IT IS ROCKET SCIENCE!

      We begin with some random tales of rocket scientists—and not-quite-rocket scientists—culled from the BRI archives.

      BUT IT’S DEFINITELY NOT BRAIN SURGERY

      In 2001, Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-SD) held a press conference to explain his dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush’s proposal for an orbital missile defense system. Committing billions of dollars to a concept that may or may not be practical or doable is something that I am mystified by, he said. It just seems like common sense. I mean, this isn’t—this isn’t rocket science here. Then Daschle paused for a second as the reporters all started laughing at him. He then quickly added, "Now that I think about it, it is rocket science."

      SPACE JAM

      It’s the world’s only soft-rock band made up entirely of former astronauts. All six members of the group flew on the NASA space shuttle program in the 1980s and ’90s. They play mostly love songs about space and alienation. Max Q refers to the maximum air pressure experienced in the shuttle moments after blastoff. The band’s founder, Robert Gibson, says that the band is a lot like the shuttle itself: It makes lots of noise but no music.

      PIGEON-GUIDED MISSILES

      In 1944, the U.S. National Defense Research Committee, looking to step up the navy’s attack capability against German battleships, hired renowned behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner to help develop a missile-guidance system. Skinner devised a method whereby a missile’s flight could be directed by trained pigeons riding in the nose cone. The pigeons would watch the target on monitors and then be conditioned with food rewards (Skinner’s specialty) to keep the target centered on-screen by adjusting the missile thrusters with beak-activated switches. Project Pigeon was scrapped when the navy realized that its existing mechanical guidance systems were accurate enough for the task. Skinner later complained, Our problem was that no one would take us seriously. But there were practical considerations as well. Training and sustaining the pigeons was expensive and time-consuming, and the birds were, sadly, not reusable. The project was briefly revived in the early days of the Cold War but never caught on.

      A GLASS HALF FULL

      On April 1, 2005, NASA posted a link on its website that read Water on Mars, something that scientists have spent decades hoping to find. Was the search finally over? Not quite—when you clicked on the link you were taken to a photograph of a glass of water…carefully perched atop a Mars candy bar. (Look at the date of the article again if you don’t get it.)

      LUNCH IN SPACE

      Despite the best efforts of NASA food scientists, what passed for food on early spaceflights…wasn’t. Astronauts had to eat cubes textured like dog biscuits, freeze-dried powders as appetizing as dust, and tubes of gluey stuff that was like toothpaste…without the pleasant minty flavor. That may be why astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich aboard a Gemini flight in 1965. Fellow astronaut Gus Grissom ate it, but Young was officially reprimanded. NASA must have been pretty upset by the unauthorized sandwich—Young was the first astronaut to be reprimanded for anything.

      ARREST ME, WILL YOU? BWA HA HA HA!

      Late one night in November 2008, police in Hackney, England, saw some suspicious activity through the window of a building: Men were wearing white lab coats, flashing colored lights, and strange fluids were gurgling in glass bottles and tubes. The police raided the room and arrested the ringleader, 29-year-old Richard Watson, on charges of terrorism. The cops then evacuated the entire area and called in the bomb squad. There were a ridiculous amount of police there, Watson later said. Why ridiculous? As he’d tried to explain (for the hour he was handcuffed to a van), he was simply having a Mad Scientist theme party. The equipment was fake and the chemicals were just food coloring, bicarbonate of soda, and vinegar. Watson was later freed without charges.

      Saturn’s rings will eventually disappear.

      THE IG NOBEL PRIZES

      Not smart enough to win a Nobel Prize? Don’t feel too bad—there’s still the Ig Nobel Prize. The science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research awards them each year at Harvard University to researchers whose achievements in science, medicine, or technology cannot or should not be reproduced. Bonus: If you win, your prize is handed to you by a genuine Nobel laureate!

      IG NOBEL PRIZE: Public Health (2001)

      AWARD-WINNING TOPIC: A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample, by Chittaranjan Andrade, et al. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, June 2001.

      Translation: "We studied nose-picking behavior in a sample of 200 adolescents from four urban schools."

      FINDINGS:

      • Nose picking is common in adolescents…Almost the entire sample admitted to nose picking, with a median frequency of four times per day.

      • Nearly 17% of subjects considered that they have a serious nose-picking problem.

      • Nose picking may merit closer nosologic scrutiny.

      IG NOBEL PRIZE: Psychology (1995)

      AWARD-WINNING TOPIC: Pigeons’ Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso, by Shigeru Watanabe, et al. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1995.

      FINDINGS:

      • Pigeons successfully learned to discriminate color slides of paintings by Monet and Picasso. Following this training, they discriminated novel paintings by Monet and Picasso that had never been presented during the discrimination training.

      • The pigeons showed generalization from Monet’s to Cezanne’s and Renoir’s paintings (all Impressionist painters), or from Picasso’s to Braque’s and Matisse’s paintings (Cubists and Fauvists).

      • Upside-down images of Monet’s paintings disrupted the discrimination, whereas inverted images of Picasso’s did not.

      IG NOBEL PRIZE: Public Health (2000)

      AWARD-WINNING TOPIC: The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow, by Jonathan Wyatt, et al. The Scottish Medical Journal, 1993.

      FINDINGS:

      • Three cases are presented of porcelain toilets collapsing under body weight, producing wounds serious enough to require hospital treatment.

      • The excessive age of the toilets was a causative factor.

      • As many such toilets get older, episodes of collapse may become more common, resulting in further injuries.

      IG NOBEL PRIZE: Psychology (2001)

      AWARD-WINNING TOPIC: An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children, by Lawrence W. Sherman. Child Development, March 1975.

      FINDINGS:

      • "A phenomenon called group glee was studied in videotapes of 596 formal lessons in a preschool. This was characterized by joyful screaming, laughing, and intense

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