Braintainment january february 2015

Page 1

for knowledge

jan/feb 2015

the magazine that surprises

Conquering Everest What make Sherpas super climbers?

p.36

Just an

illusion?

Why do our eyes play tricks on us and make us see things that aren’t there?

p.62

Science, technology, archaeology plus • • • • •

Buzz Aldrin, the forgotten sidekick Shaken baby syndrome Chuck Norris makes you fat Extreme cosmetic makeovers And how many Lego blocks does it take to link London to New York City?

VOL 05 ISSUE 01 JAN/FEB 2015

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How to

GET SMART

Stay ahead of the pack. Train your brain and increase your intelligence by 20% p.20

Red Alert

Is this woman gunning for your man? p.6

PLUS p.XX S 20 PAGE s of Quickie and Q&As

Trunk Call

Getting the message loud and clear from Mars and comets p.12


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Focus Flashpoint

uge bolts of lightning strike the small H US town of Chautauqua, New York. US scientists have warned that global

warming will significantly increase the frequency of lightning strikes. The research was carried out with the help of data from a US network of lightning detectors. The team says they have calculated how much each extra degree in temperature will raise the frequency of lightning. “For every two lightning strikes in 2000, there will be three lightning strikes in 2100,” said David Romps at the University of California, Berkeley. As well as more wildfires, each lightning strike – a powerful electrical discharge – sparks a chemical reaction that produces a ‘puff’ of greenhouse gases called nitrogen oxides.

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braintainment@panorama.co.za @braintainmentza

This month ON THE COVER Reaching out to space

How do we communicate with Mars and comets? Page 12

Learning curves

I

am not sure about the status quo in schools nowadays, but when I was preparing for the real world many moons ago, you could easily pick out the smart students from the rest of the bunch. For starters, they were placed in the more prestigious learning classes based on the results of an IQ test. I have never been a fan of such methods to measure your intelligence. I’m of the opinion that they are subjective – you cannot measure every individual based on the same set of questions. In fact, it was Albert Einstein who once said that everyone is a genius but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it is stupid. IQ tests aside, the smart ones in my school always acted the part. They lugged a haversack filled with all their text- and workbooks every day, regardless of whether they were required on that day. They were always neatly dressed, on time and didn’t care if others made fun of their glasses that had lenses as thick as Coke bottles. Neither were they put off by being heckled at for being a ‘nerd’. Homework was always completed while others, including myself, were conjuring up excuses such as “my dog ate it” or “I had to attend my grandmother’s funeral yesterday.” I must have created and killed at least 10 sets of grandparents during my schooling career. They were diligent in their studies while others crammed every fact about the Cold War into their heads the night before the history exam. These learners were confident on the day that report cards were handed out, while the rest of us were already planning to run away from home before our parents saw the red circle around our mathematics marks. What made them so smart? Contrary to popular thinking, they were not necessarily born geniuses, but simply diligent learners who mastered certain habits that allowed them to excel academically. Times have changed and with it came new methods of getting more out of your grey matter. On page 20, we give you 8 proven ways to increase your intelligence by a credible 20%. Put them into play and get your year started off on a higher grade. Enjoy your read. Gerard Peter Editor-in-chief 2

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School’s in

Master 8 ways to boost your intelligence by 20%. Page 20

On top of the world

What makes the Sherpa people such great highaltitude climbers? Page 36

Plus

Buzz Aldrin’s fall from grace, shaken baby syndrome, quickies, questions and answers, brain candy and would you lie to an avatar? From page 6

HEALTH

That itchy feeling

Why can’t you resist the urge to scratch an itch? Page

14

NATURE

Save the rhino

Why is rhino horn more expensive than cocaine? Can we save this animal from extinction? Page 30 VISUAL

Close up

What do your clothes reveal under an electron microscope? Page

26

CRIME

No child’s play

Does shaken baby syndrome actually exist?

Page

40

Red alert

The hunt for rhino has taken on ridiculous proportions. Page 30


SCIENCE

Extreme makeover

Beauty treatments that even Joan Rivers would be afraid of. Page

42

HEALTH

Suck it up

What lies inside your vacuum cleaner? Can you get rid of dust mites permanently? How often should you clean your floors? Page 46 TECHNOLOGY

Absurd arithmetic

How many Lego blocks will it take to connect London and New York City? Page 52

Eye spy Why do we see faces in lifeless objects? Page

62

HISTORY

The second man

Did the media ruin Buzz Aldrin’s life?

Page

62

Just an illusion?

PLUS

Focus Inbox Quickies Q&As Brain candy

How to get even smarter than you already are. Page 20

56

PSYCHOLOGY

Why do we see faces in inanimate objects?

Genius in the making

Page

1, 60 4 6, 72 16, 66 70

A crying shame?

Are many people wrongly imprisoned for shaking their infant to death? Page 40

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Vagrant machine

Meet the robot that hitchhiked across Canada. Page 75 21/2015

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for knowledge

the magazine that surprises

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SOUTH AFRICAN EDITION PUBLISHER Urs Honegger EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Gerard Peter MANAGING EDITOR Deanne Dudley SENIOR SUB EDITOR Vanessa Koekemoer SUB EDITORS Noleen Fourie, Nicolette Els TRANSLATION EDITOR Elsje Calkoen

Braintainment magazine is read from the cover right through to the back page. And by the way, I love the outlook page at the back, what an innovative idea! Indeed that is exactly where I start with my mag, automatically paging from the back to the front! I’m pleasantly surprised that at last there is a magazine catering for people like me. Elmarie Ferns, via email

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Flocking together

Please don’t scream sex

7 Hi Braintainment. Here’s some constructive criticism. Your readers like your magazine because it is interesting and not typically commercial. There is no need to bold the word ‘sex’ to attract attention like most other magazines do. Please avoid commercialisation; the market is overflowing [with such magazines]. Your photography is always top notch. The bee article (Nov/ Dec) was really good and insightful. I also enjoyed the headache article and was happy that you answered the woodpecker question. Alicia Cloete, via email

A winner on both sides

7 I am addicted to your magazine. Thank you for a unique magazine with something on everything. Unlike most other mags where there could be 1 or 2 articles one would find of interest and the rest just be paged over, every issue of my Outlook

WETEN ALLES WAT JE MOET

IN 1 PAGINA

’S HIGHLIGH THIS ISSUE

GE TS ON 1 PA

INDEX

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Riddle me this

it will take to many Lego blocks We crunch the Ever wondered how and New York City? connect London numbers. Page 52

Get smart

by your intelligence Want to increase in 8 easy steps. 20%? Find out how Page 20

Forgotten hero for made a giant step Buzz Aldrin may have shambles. that his life was a mankind, but after Page 50

Plus

Why do we see a robot a lift home? ed, would you give s? And more … Your questions answer such good climber What makes Sherpas a.co.za. faces in objects? braintainment@ panoram Any questions? Mail 80

4

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.............. 80 Index page ................ ............ 75 Archaeology ................ ......6,42 Auto ................................ 35, 72, 77 Body ................ 8, 26, 50, 73. 76 Geology ...................... .... 70 ................ Gaming ................ ... 71 Gadgets ................................ 12, 36 Health ................................ ..... 64 History ................................ ... 11 ................ Lifestyle ................ ..... 28 Nature ................................ ............8 Paleaontology ................ ...10, 58,74 Psychology ................ , 75 .............72 Science ................ ........ 11, 74 Technology ................ 6, 20, 34 Space ........................... ....... 73 Sport ................................ ....... 46 ................ ................ Visual

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ter Dust bus substances are What harmful vacuum trapped inside your cleaner? Page 46

7 Our school campus is situated in a conservancy and we are very fortunate to see many different species of birds flying around, feeding and sometimes nesting. One of the more common species is the hadeda ibis. During one of our conservancy walks where we spotted a hammerkop on its nest and some red-wing starlings nesting on top of a light fitting, one of the class commented that he had never seen a hadeda nest or their young. After this comment we kept a good look-out for hadedas nesting but have still not been able to spot one, even though we have a large number of these birds on our campus. Please tell us what a hadeda nest looks like and where would we find them? PS: My classes love your magazine and we have a box full of past issues that the pupils enjoy reading through. They all agree that you should be publishing monthly or even every fortnight. Dan Henry Mathematics and Science Departments Crawford Prep La Lucia Every fortnight? We would love that although our scribes will have to put in double the overtime they do right now. A hadeda’s nest is a basketshaped platform of sticks and twigs placed 1 to 12m (usually 3 to 6m) above the ground or above water on a horizontal tree branch, in bushes or on manmade structures such as telegraph poles, dam walls or pergolas. It is lined with grass and lichens. Based on your description of the campus, you should be able to spot a nest


Questions, suggestions or observations? Share them with us: A A

Editor, Braintainment, Private Bag x4, Kyalami, 1684 A Twitter: @braintainmentza Email: braintainment@panorama.co.za

Please include your name and address. The editor reserves the right to shorten and edit letters.

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Join our social media network today.

The flip side

7 Some 15 years back when a rookie in Port Elizabeth, I attended a video talk by an American Indian Creek wise man. His story was more or less the same as in the article in the Nov/ Dec issue. His observations were not scientific but based on his knowledge of ancient redskin history. What he referred to was up in ancient Egypt and the Northern Cape/Kalahari. It was a long time back and I don’t remember much more. His point was that according to the knowledge of the ancients the

polarities have reversed quite a number of times. The bottom line is the world’s rotation will stop and start the other way almost overnight. The different earth strata beneath us have different specific gravity and will en masse slow and stop at different velocities. The seas not controlled by any specific structures will not stop moving. Our beloved country will be facing the combined volumes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The safest place to be will be somewhere in Western Europe moving east towards Alaska.

This could happen at any time. Perhaps it may not be wise to publish this letter as people may panic. Your comment in your ed’s note referring to Mr Sulu may be appropriate and a ticket to Mars quite handy. I like your magazine, great articles, and a fresh, more challenging outlook. Keep it up. Donald Kirsten, via email Hey Donald, we thought we’d publish your letter so that people have a heads-up and can start saving for that ticket to Mars.

Growing older

7 How do the police change photos of missing children to make them look like adults? Hachonda Chungu, Zambia

very soon. Just keep your eyes fixed on the trees. The same nest site is usually used year after year, though not necessarily by the same breeding pair. What’s more, the hadeda ibis is a social bird usually seen in pairs or in small groups of between 5 and

30, and seldom as a single individual. Occasionally, it can form flocks of about 50 to 200 individuals. Got a pic of a hadeda nest? Mail braintainment@panorama.co.za

Most police forces employ forensic artists. They use the same image editing programs that a photographer uses to remove spots from your face or to change the shape of the nose a little. To age a face realistically the artist must know a lot about the anatomic structure of the face and how it changes over the years. A child’s face can change completely because of the growth of their bones and the loss of their baby teeth. Often children’s photographs of other members of

Comments taken from our Facebook polls Would you live on Mars? 7 Vera van Staden Not at all. Too far from the sun! 7 Shelley Pope No thanks, no oceans, blue skies or atmosphere 7 Brian van der Merwe Much as the idea seems appealing, for me NO. No trees, no blue sky, I assume. I like Earth If you were a superhero, what would you use your powers for and what name would you give yourself? 7 Monica van der Westhuizen I will use it to cope thru [sic] my day with 4 kids and to run all my and their errands and call myself supermom. Wait, I’m already doing that without a superhero suit. Follow us on Twitter @braintainmentza. Facebook: facebook.com/pages/ braintainment-magazine the family are used. The way their facial expressions have changed through the years could be the starting point for a reconstruction.

British toddler Madeleine McCann who disappeared in 2007 at the age of 3 in Portugal could possibly have looked like this 9 years later.

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Quickies 7TECHNOLOGY

Keep walking

it has found a movement that allows it to walk in a straight line. That’s handy because a robot that can adapt to new circumstances has a much longer lifespan. The walking robot is based research done on animals that get injured and lose a limb. They often learn very quickly how to keep moving with the remaining limbs after losing a leg. GETTY

ven when broken, the robot developed by American researchers at the University of Wyoming still works fine. The 6-legged robot teaches itself to walk again if one of its legs malfunctions. How? As soon as its original walking movement doesn’t function any longer, the robot tries a whole series of new ways to walk. It will do this until

The blue pigment acts as a filter against UV rays.

GETTY

E

UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

Damage is simulated by disengaging one of the robot’s legs.

Ahead of Shorts the curve The most important ingredient of an egg shell is calcium carbonate. A The shell forms 10% of the entire egg. A There are thousands of little air holes in the shell of an egg. Oxygen can enter and carbon dioxide can exit through these holes. A

7NATURE

Sun affects egg shell colouring

W

hy do birds’ egg shells have different colours? And why do some have more spots than others? This has to do with not only camouflage, but also the effects of being exposed to the sun. According to British biologists from the University of London, egg shells serve as protection against the ultraviolet rays from the sun. 6

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The delicate tissue of the unborn chick can’t be troubled with that. The researchers studied the UV transparency of 75 different egg shells of wild birds in a museum collection. They also found that egg shells are darker in colour when the breeding season of the birds is longer.

7PSYCHOLOGY

Red alert

W

hen a woman wears a red dress, other women might sooner think that she is flirting than when she is wearing a white dress. This is according to psychologists from the University of Rochester (USA). In a test they showed females photographs of their peers in dresses and the judgement of the test persons was very clear: the women dressed in red portray more clearly that they are flirting. This also led at once to more negative remarks about the femininity of those in the photographs. The test persons were also very clear even when the women were shown wearing red blouses. They would rather not leave their partners alone with a woman in a red blouse.

From previous research it became apparent that men think that women in red clothing are on the hunt.


7ANTHROPOLOGY

Less testosterone spells more tolerant societies Shorts eople have to be able to work and interact with one another to keep a growing and civilised society intact. This seems to work reasonably in many places in the modern world, but it was different in the old days, according to anthropologists from Duke University (US). This has to do with the level of testosterone in our forefathers’ blood, according to the American

Homo sapiens of the old days (left) and today (right).

researchers. Modern man has been on this planet about 200,000 years. It was only about 50,000 years ago that we started making advanced tools and art. This went hand-in-hand with the change of man’s skull appearance. Skulls became more round with less pronounced eyebrows, and this indicates a lesser amount of testosterone in the blood. Anthropologists think that this makes for a friendlier personality and with that a tolerant society.

Testosterone is derived from the Latin word for testicle: testis. A Men make testosterone in the adrenal glands and the testicles. A Women also make this male hormone in smaller amounts. This often happens in the adrenal glands and the ovaries. A There is a connection between aggressive behaviour both with men and women with a raised level of testosterone. A

DUKE UNIVERSITY

P

Ahead of the curve

If fossils can be spread via meteorites to the moon, could life then also be transported from planet to planet?

7SPACE

Are there fossils on the moon? Earth. Similarly, earthly material could also land on the moon in special cases. Would possible fossils survive the impact? The researchers made ‘meteorites’ from ice and gravel with fossils of diatoms (single-cell algae with an external

skeleton). The chunks were shot at an extremely high speed (5km per second) at a bag of water to simulate the impact of a meteorite on the moon. The skeletons were damaged but still recognisable as fossils after the impact. NASA

T

here was probably never any life on the moon. Yet, there might be fossils on the moon. This conclusion was made by British researchers at the University of Kent. Sometimes meteorites from the moon or Mars are found on

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7


MARK WITTON

Quickies

7PALAEONTOLOGY

Early dinosaur species lived in a herd P

beginning of the Jurassic Age. More importantly, palaeontologists from the Natural History Museum in London didn’t just dig up one of these species in Venezuela, but 4 at the same time. It was a

herd animal, suspect the researchers. And that is remarkable, because up to now it was thought that the first dinosaur species only started to live in groups towards the end of the Jurassic Age, tens of

millions of years later. However, that is not the only reason why this find is important. The animals also lived around the equator in South America, dispelling claims that there were no dinosaurs roaming that area.

The Laquintasaura venezuelae mostly ate plants, but probably also small animals like insects. A The animal is named after La Quinta, the rock formation in the Andes where the species was discovered. A Teeth from other meat-eating dinosaurs were also found on the spot. A

ANP

ictured here is Laquintasaura venezuelae. Until recently it was mostly an unknown dinosaur species. It stood on its hind legs, was about 1m long and lived about 200 million years ago at the

Ahead of Shorts the curve

7PSYCHOLOGY

Avatar makes you more honest

D

Apparently we will tell all our secrets to an animated head. 8

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o you tell the truth if you have to fill in your alcohol consumption on a form? Or do you lie a little? Many people do the latter. Researchers from the National Centre for Credibility Assessment (part of the American Ministry of Defence) know what to do with that. They don’t ask such questions on paper, but have people questioned by an avatar on a screen. The researchers asked 120 test persons about their alcohol and drug usage, spiritual health and possible criminal past. People more often admitted alcohol use and spiritual problems to an animated head on a screen than when filling out a form, it appeared. They were, however, just as (dis)honest about drug usage and crime when employing both methods.


TAG Heuer Boutiques; Sandton City & V&A Waterfront. Also at selected fine jewellers nationwide. For further information please call 011.669.0500. www.picotandmoss.co.za

TAG HEUER FORMULA 1 CALIBRE 16 Formula E is the first all- electric racing car that combines the best of motorspor ts technology and the latest improvements in clean energy. Like TAG Heuer, Formula E is an avant- garde technology which never cracks under pressure.


Quickies Did Hobbit have Down’s syndrome?

A

t first researchers thought that the now extinct species in the genus Homo called Homo floresiensis were simply very small in stature. Now, scientists from Pennsylvania State University (USA) think that a 15,000-year-old skeleton, dug up in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores, suffered from Down syndrome. Nicknamed Hobbit or Flo, the 1m-tall human had both a skull and thighs that were too small to be that of Homo sapien. Years after the discovery some researchers already suspected that the small skull indicated the presence of a nerve disorder called microcephaly, instead of being an indication that the skeleton was of an unknown human kind. The American scientists who re-measured the body parts say that the brain of the Hobbit man was still a little larger than first assumed. And this points to, just like flat feet and short thighs, characteristics of Down syndrome. The Down patient was a loner: the relation between the bones that were found in nearby skeletons was different.

PETER SCHOUTEN/AFP/ANP

7ARCHAEOLOGY

This is how Hobbit was presented to the world in 2004. 7NATURE

FRANS LEMMENS/HOLLANDSE HOOGTE

Trunk smells really well T

Run for your life

W

ant to stay fit but don’t feel like running for hours? This is not necessary, according to researchers from Iowa State University (USA). According to them, 5 to 10 minutes of running per day is enough to 10

reduce the risk of heart disease considerably. They studied the health and possible cause of death of 55,000 people and compared runners to non-runners. Runners have about 45% less change of

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dying of a heart disease than non-runners. It didn’t make any difference whether they ran 3 hours per week or less than an hour. Recreational runners live on average 3 years longer than nonrunners.

MINDEN PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

7HEALTH

heir extremely large smell organ could possibly be a hint. But researchers of the University of Tokyo (Japan) have found another clue that elephants have an extremely good sense of smell. From the mammals they studied, elephants are without doubt number 1 if we are talking about olfactory receptor organs. The researchers found nearly 2,000 different genes related to smell in the African elephant. This suggests that this animal is capable of recognising a vast repertoire of smells. By comparison rats have about 1,200 and dogs about 800, while humans have to make do with only 400.


7TECHNOLOGY

T

Ahead of Shorts the curve A Perovskite can transform energy into light (like in an LED light for example) and transform light into energy (in solar cells). A The efficiency of the substance in solar cells has improved in 2 years as much as silica in 20 years. A Perovskite is named after Lev Perovski, the founder of the Russian Geographic Society.

certain crystals that you can make with carbon, lead and halides (certain salts). The perovskite lights can be on the market within 5 years, according to researchers.

NASA

he raw material perovskite already spelled promise in the development of solar cells. Now, scientists of the British University of Cambridge found that the by-product crystals that stem from perovskite are a good light source in LED lights. An LED lamp takes its light from the crystal that it contains. It emits light when you push a current through. A layer of perovskite only has to be 15 nanometres thin to emit brighter light than an LCD monitor. That is very thin, considering that 667,000 of those layers fit in a centimetre. Perovskite is also cheaper than the materials that we are now using in LED lights. Perovskite was discovered as a mineral in the Russian Ural Mountains in 1839. It is also the name of

7SPACE

How will we breathe on Mars?

L

One would almost be jealous of such a nose.

iving on Mars is not a farfetched idea, but how will we receive the oxygen we need to survive on the red planet? The thin Mars atmosphere consists almost completely of carbon dioxide. NASA wants to send a robot vehicle to Mars with a special instrument that will be capable of transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide. This can only be done with the help of a little electric current (electrolysis), whereby an oxygen molecule is released from the carbon dioxide. It is still an experiment, but it is possible that one day there could be a real oxygen factory on Mars. This is handy, because then ‘Martians’ won’t have to rely on oxygen brought in from Earth. They can use the Mars oxygen to breathe, but it can also be used as part of the rocket fuel that is needed to take off from the planet.

GETTY IMAGES

Lighting material


Space

A message to Mars can take more than 20 minutes to transmit

Yoohoo, can you hear us? It’s no longer breaking news that little robot rovers are currently exploring the landscape of Mars. But how do scientists communicate with them from Earth? 7 TEXT: MARK TRAA

A

red dot in space. It’s nothing more than that. It’s a pinpoint. Mars is very, very, very far away. The planet is around 225 million kilometres away from Earth. Talking to astronauts on the moon was already difficult − the radio signal would travel for more than a second. And then it also took a few more seconds before you received an answer. Talking to astronauts on Mars is going to be a challenge. The radio signal can take up to 21 minutes when the planet is furthest away from Earth; a distance of about 400 million kilometres. However, scientists are not too perturbed about this challenge. After all, a manned Mars mission is still far away in the future. But we do ‘talk’ with Mars. Little robot vehicles are driving around. This includes American Opportunity (since 2004) and Curiosity (since 2012). There is lots of radio contact with these because the vehicles need to receive driving instructions, the measuring devices have to be controlled and photos have to be sent to Earth. So how does that work?

A A matter of timing Communication between Earth and Mars is mostly a matter of timing. A Mars rover has various antennae to ensure communication. They can ‘talk’ directly with Earth but also send their signals to a satellite that orbits Mars. The latter is preferred because uploading to a satellite is quicker. The satellite saves the message (measuring data and images) of the rover and sends everything to Earth on the first possible opportunity. This sending ‘home’ can only be done when Earth is in the visor of the satellite. There can also not be any obstacles in the path of the signals. When the satellite is flying behind 12

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Mars, no communication is possible. The sun and moon can of course also get in the way. The sun produces rays that can cause static on the ‘line’ with Mars. No communication was possible with Curiosity for a month in April 2014 because Earth, the sun and Mars were in line with one another. This only happens once every 2 years.

A Antennae cover the sky The signal of a Mars rover is picked up by a super-sensitive dish antenna after a very long journey through space. There are 3 such antennae − Madrid (Spain), Goldstone (California) and Canberra (Australia). Together they form the Deep Space Network that maintains communication with other spacecraft in deep space. Their location was chosen so that together they ‘cover’ the sky completely. Now it can never happen that a signal from Mars (or anywhere else in space) is missed because the antenna happened to be on the ‘wrong’ side of Earth. The slowness of the ‘conversation’ between Earth and Mars can’t be changed; radio waves do not travel faster than light. It’s little wonder that the flight directors drive slowly and carefully with the little rovers. Curiosity has an average ‘speed’ of about 30 metres per hour. Satellites have taken detailed photos of the terrain; all bumps and cracks in the surroundings are seen on these. The vehicles usually drive on a pre-programmed route every work day. These commands are sent the day before from Earth and received by the rovers when ‘waking up’ in the Mars morning. It all sounds pretty exciting. We wonder when we will be driving a 4x4 on the dunes of the Red Planet. 7 braintainment@panorama.co.za

Canberra

Madrid

Goldstone

The signals from Mars are received at 3 locations on Earth.


GETTY IMAGES

Comet probe has own Twitter account n 12 November last year, history was made when Philae, a robotic lander, successfully landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (67P), more than 10 O years after departing Earth. This was the first ever controlled touchdown on a comet

nucleus. Philae is tracked and operated from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. Several of the instruments on Philae made the first in situ analysis of a comet, sending back data that will be analysed to determine the composition of the surface. The data streamed back may only make sense to scientists but you can still keep abreast of Philae’s activities via its own personal Twitter account. @Philae2014 began tweeting 2 days after its landing. Its first tweet was: “I did it! I became the first spacecraft to land on a comet & study it! But it’s not over yet.” Working on Mars is tough. Rover Curiosity ploughs its way up the steep side of Mount Sharp according to instructions that it has received from Earth.

Madrid The radio signal is a 21-minute journey.

Curiosity

QUEST

Satellite

EXTRA INFO Tinyurl.com/pratenmetmars: information about the current American Mars research. 21/2015

13


Health

It is always annoying, but sometimes an itch can also be useful

What’s that itch? An itch can be annoying and drive you downright crazy. So, what brings about an itch and when does it become unbearable? 7 TEXT: MARK TRAA / ILLUSTRATION: BARBARA MOGET

The reason it exists

ow an itch stimulus is formed precisely is still not quite clear. We do know that the so-called ‘itch nerves’ are located in the 2 upper H layers of our skin. These are activated when the substance histamine is

released. This mainly happens in the case of an infection. Still, this does not explain the different kinds of itches. Skin diseases such as psoriasis or eczema and insect bites or lice also make you itch. Scratching is the natural reflex to deal with an itch. This can cause such a relief that the pleasure centre of our brain does not allow us to stop scratching. And then things can go wrong, because more irritation is caused when you scratch your skin open. Many people with a chronic itch often find themselves in an ‘itch-scratch cycle’ that can be almost impossible to break. Fortunately, an itch is also good for something. With our itch sensors we register that foreign objects, such as insects, have landed on our skin. It also indicates when there is something else that doesn’t belong, like chemical substances. This is useful because then we can try to remove it before it causes harm. Furthermore, an itch can also be a symptom of a disease. Various disorders of the organs, such as liver and kidney failure, cause an itch. The doctor might only discover these much later if the itch signal is not there.

Close to desperation

rurigo nodularis is something you don’t want to have. It is extreme, P relentless itching that can drive you

crazy. It can start with an insect bite, an allergy or sometimes spontaneously. You start to scratch and then greyish brown boils form that itch terribly. People suffering from this disorder are desperate and often get depressed. It is unclear why some get Prurigo nodularis and others don’t. Anaemia and kidney failure 14

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are believed to play a role. It is known that people with dry skin or eczema suffer more often. The scratching exacerbates the condition. Hard and thick spots on the skin form and these also start to itch. Creams, hormone injections and light therapy are used as treatments, but these don’t always help. The best remedy against Prurigo nodularis is not scratching. And this might be the most difficult of all.


Itchy hole

A

lengthy article about an itch appeared in the New Yorker in 2008. It was about a woman with a chronic itch. She had tried everything to get rid of it, without any results. She scratched continuously, also at night, without realising it. She told the magazine that one morning she felt fluid running down her face. It was greenish in colour. Guess what? She had scratched the same spot on her head during the whole night in her sleep

and a hole had appeared. It was brain fluid that had run down her face. Yes, this also gave us shivers when we read it. But can we really scratch through our skull? The author of the article was a surgeon. He thinks that the scratching had caused an infection which made the skull bones softer. This made it possible for the finger to dig deeper and deeper. And indeed create a hole.

An itchy nose in space

e simply scratch our nose when we have an itch. It’s difficult to even imagine not being W able to reach up and scratch that itch. But

astronauts have a problem when they carry out space walks. They wear a helmet and they can’t take it off just because they happen to have an itch. So what can they do about it? Already back in 1969 and 1971 at the time of the American moonwalks they came up with a solution. A piece of rough tape was stuck on the inside of the space helmet. The astronauts could rub their itchy noses against this. Nowadays, they have something similar in the same spot: a piece of foam. It’s really handy for an itchy nose, but the astronauts will have to wait a little longer until they can take their suits off should the need arise to scratch a different part of the body.

Fear of animals

Annoying mosquito

t is not the bite of the that gives us an itch, Ibutmosquito rather the tiny little bit of

mosquito saliva that enters our skin because of the bite. Our body’s defence system reacts when strange proteins invade our body. People who are bitten more often have less of an itch − the immune system gets used to it. Like it or not, it is not a good idea to scratch a mosquito bump. This only spreads the saliva further. And scratching it open is no good at all. It can get infected because of dirt and this will only aggravate the itch.

here are people who regularly feel that there are insects on or T under their skin. Such people fall into

the category of suffering from a strange disorder. This disorder is called formication, and is usually accompanied by an itch, tingling or burning sensation. For some patients this sensation is so realistic that they are convinced the insects are really there. Better yet, some are convinced that they have seen the insects walk. Nothing needs to be wrong with you to suffer from formication. It can sometimes even start with the onset of menopause. But it also occurs when you have a skin disorder or if you have been exposed to poisonous substances. Formication is also a side effect of some drugs and medicines, such as Ritalin. 7 braintainment@panorama.co.za 21/2015

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Q&A Questions & Answers

Got questions you’ve been carrying around for years? Braintainment answers them! Mail your questions to braintainment@panorama.co.za

When does a war become a world war? Fabian Moodley, Durban

T

here is no set definition. A world war is where many countries take part, whereby the superpowers are involved. It takes place on several continents. The term was first used at the beginning of the 20th century, even before the

First World War started. The label has since only been put on 2 wars. Still, the Napoleonic Wars between 1804 and 1815 could also pass for a world war, seeing that many countries from various continents took part.

France fought against the rest of the world during the Napoleonic Wars.

Does the iceberg that sank the Titanic still exist? Cronje du Toit, Benoni

GETTY

o, that iceberg melted a long time ago. When the Titanic hit the iceberg it had already drifted so far to the south that it was not going to stay frozen. Most icebergs that break off from Greenland’s glaciers don’t even get that far. Only 1% reaches the Atlantic Ocean. The rest have already melted in the relatively warm

water. The collision with the ship accelerated the melting process. A part of the ice broke off so the warmer water reached the core of the iceberg faster. The iceberg that was responsible for the sinking of the Titanic probably disappeared in the water about 2 weeks after the sinking of the giant cruise liner. ANP

N

Can you adopt a grown-up? Dennis Viljoen, Pretoria

Y

Perhaps Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie might one day also add a grown-up to their family. 16

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GE TT Y

es, you can, although this rarely happens. A case in point is in the Netherlands in 2000. A 22-year-old woman who had already lived with a foster family since her third birthday wanted to be adopted by the same family. Because this had never happened before the judge had to be consulted to find out if this was at all possible. The Amsterdam court decided that it was allowed. From then the laws of many countries, including South Africa, have allowed for the adoption of an adult.


123RF

Why is the key to take you to a new line called ‘enter’ or ‘return’? Simone Harris, Cape Town

FLASH

About 40,000 icebergs break off from the Greenland glaciers every year. A The iceberg that the Titanic crashed into probably came from Ilulissat, also known as Jakobshavn. A The biggest iceberg ever was spotted in 1987. It originated from Antarctica and was about 6,350 square kilometres in size. A

85% of icebergs originate from the fjords on the west coast of Greenland.

How can it be P that petroleum, derived from natural sources, is bad for the environment?

etroleum is a fossil fuel that is formed when large quantities of dead organisms, usually zooplankton and algae, are buried underneath sedimentary rock and subjected to intense heat and pressure. This results in a concentrated carbon bomb. Not much will happen when it remains deep underground. But drilling for petroleum also pumps the carbon into the air in a very short time in the form of carbon dioxide. It creates an imbalance in the carbon levels on earth. And this leads to climate change. A high concentration of petroleum in the sea, caused by an oil spill for example, also has disastrous results. The sticky oil floats and takes a long time to go down. This has disastrous consequences for fish, birds and other animals that are exposed to it. Just because it is a natural product does not Zaf Khan, Verulam mean it can’t cause any damage.

riginally, enter and return were actually 2 different keys. The name ‘return’ stems from the era of typewriters. This key would move the carriage with the roll where the paper was inserted, back to the next line. The enter key was originally the ‘OK’ key in various applications. To enter means to enter into something or somewhere and that is exactly what the OK key does. The 2 keys have been merged in word processing programs. It takes you to the new line and its other function means you agree with the command.

Q&A

Q&A

GETTY

O

FLASH

Saudi Arabia is the largest producer of petroleum, followed by Russia and the USA. A South Africa consumes the second largest amount of petroleum in Africa, behind Egypt. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that our country’s total oil consumption was 616,000 barrels per day in 2013. A The demand for petroleum will exceed the supply after 2030. A

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Q&A

GETTY

Questions & Answers

Got questions you’ve been carrying around for years? Braintainment answers them! Mail your questions to braintainment@panorama.co.za

The peace sign owes its fame to the antinuclear demonstrations of the 60s.

Where does the peace sign come from? John Steen, Bloemfontein

T

he peace sign is the brainchild of British designer Gerald Holtom (1914-1985) on behalf of a British anti-nuclear weapons committee. The sign is a combination of the letters ‘N’ and ‘D’ from the semaphore alphabet. This is the alphabet used in flag signals in the shipping industry. For the letter ‘N’ someone will hold 2 flags upside down in the V-shape.

The letter ‘D’ is formed by holding 1 flag up and 1 flag upside down. Together they form the tripod of the peace sign. Holtom finished it by drawing a circle around it. ND stands for ‘nuclear disarmament’. Holtom’s symbol became popular and also spread outside the anti-nuclear weapons lobby. It grew into a peace sign recognised worldwide within 10 years.

How do you write a zero in Roman numerals?

How many galaxies are there in space? Mary Smith, New Zealand

S

cientists don’t know how many there are precisely. We can’t see everything in space. However, thanks to powerful telescopes scouting space, researchers now think that there are between 100 and 500 billion. Our Milky Way is one of them. But to make the numbers even more impressive: the Milky Way galaxy contains between 200 and 400 billion stars. So go and figure out how many stars there are in space.

Nicolette van der Spuy, Johannesburg

T

he Romans didn’t have a symbol for zero. They knew the phenomena ‘nothing’ and called that nulla. Sometimes nulla was shortened to ‘N’, but it wasn’t official. Arabic scholars introduced the number 0 to the Western world in 8AD, when the Roman Empire had already 18

fallen. It still took about 500 years before the digit became popular in Europe.

The first zero was found on a manuscript in an Indian temple. 21/2015

The closest neighbour of the Milky Way is the Andromeda Nebula, which is about 2.5 light years away from us.


How much does a human eat during a lifetime? Patrick Moodley, Durban

fish and eggs; and 6,801kg of grains. He will also consume 9,664kg of nuts; 15,545kg of veggies; 3,026kg of oil and fat; and 5,008kg of sugars.

FLASH

About 60% of the US population are overweight. A little less than half of these are obese. A Some 46% of the adults of the world population are overweight. Nearly a quarter of these are obese. A 65% of the world’s population live in a country in which there are more deaths due to obesity than malnutrition. A

Q&A

GETTY

here has never been any research done into how much the average person consumes in a lifetime. Also, this quantity will differ quite a bit depending on whether we are talking about someone in Africa or someone in Europe. Researchers in the US have made a pretty exact calculation of what an average American consumes every year – a little more than 905kg of food. If you take the average lifespan of 78 years into consideration, you would end up with about 70 tons of food for 1 American. The largest part of that is dairy. An average American will eat on average 22,355kg of milk, yoghurt, cheese and ice cream; 8,221kg of meat,

Q&A

T

FLASH

Stars come in various shapes. There are elliptic systems, in the form of an ellipse. A Spiral-shaped systems are also elliptic, but have tails that seem to hang out from the middle. A Barred spiral systems consist of a bar centre and they have tails on both ends.

NASA

A

Americans consume thousands of kilograms of dairy, and ice cream is one of their favourites. 21/2015

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Psychology

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RODOLFO/GETTY

Increase your intelligence by an astouding 20%

Genius

in the making The level of your intelligence largely depends on the genes you are born with. Still, you can pimp up your brain a little. Here’s an 8-lesson crash course on working your way to being the next Albert Einstein. 7 TEXT: MARK TRAA

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Psychology

Do you want to improve your performance at the office? Bad news: practice makes very little difference

LESSON 1

Don’t practise endlessly verybody can be good at something if only they practise enough. We would love to E believe that because it sounds logical.

Practice makes perfect, right? Canadian journalist and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell even produced figures supporting this fact in 2008. He claims that everybody is capable of excelling at a complex skill after 10,000 hours of practice. However, researchers at Princeton University (USA) showed that it is not that simple. The Americans looked at 88 previous studies about the relationship between training intensity and top results. From this it did seem that the statement ‘practice makes perfect’ was right. Whoever trained harder also performed better in general. But this didn’t work to the same degree for everybody. A quarter of the performance differences between gamers was explained by the degree of practice. With musicians this was one fifth. Practice played a smaller role with educational performances: only 4%. In the office practice makes almost no difference in performance: 1%. And the number of practice hours differs immensely: one chess grandmaster hadn’t even clocked 10,000 hours while another practised 24,000 hours. It seems Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule doesn’t hold much water. Whether you are good at something depends only partly on your training. Other factors weigh heavier such as predisposition, motivation and age. Whoever wants to deliver a top result will not just get away by practising endlessly. So don’t put too much energy into it.

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s there any point to learning? Can we make Ihaveourselves smarter by learning or do we to make do with the intelligence level we were born with? It is true that intelligence is mostly hereditary, but that is not the full story. There is always room for improvement to your learning ability, especially if you believe that yourself. Whoever thinks that his brain is ‘complete’ scores worse than a person who is confident that he can still become smarter. This was proven by research undertaken by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University (USA). She discovered that people who think that their intelligence is set in concrete are less successful than people who believe that they can still expand their capacity. According to Dweck it is also not good to tell well-performing people that they are very smart or intelligent. This does not give them self-confidence and could even harm their performance. The ‘complete’ thinkers simply think that they can’t do any better when things go wrong and often bail out. It is better to say that someone still has lots of possibilities for growth. ‘Growth’ thinkers are more inclined to look for situations that they can learn from. This leads to more self-confidence and perseverance.

Endless practising with a Rubik’s cube will help you solve it quicker, but the effect of practising is otherwise rather disappointing.

ALEXANDRA JURSOVA/GETTY

?!

Always room for improvement

CHRIS RYAN/GETTY

F

act: You can’t increase your intelligence by more than 20%. You are born with and will have your level of intelligence for your entire life. We just want to mention this beforehand. Still, it is worth it to work at it a little. Because everybody has to deliver a top result one day – an exam, a presentation at work, a sports match. So what do you have to do (or not do) to reach your peak?


Studying all night will cost you your exam. So don’t do it!

?!

LESSON 3

Get some rest

t has been proven over and over again: people perform better. This goes for Ijustrested about all performances, but especially for

tasks that require immense concentration. Your memory function is not at its best when you haven’t slept enough. Studying until the early hours of the morning is therefore not recommended. Absorbing information before you go to sleep (at a reasonable hour) is smart, according to many researchers. While sleeping your brain goes to work to save whatever has been absorbed in the awake state. This does not mean that you should take your books or work to bed and read until you fall asleep. Rest and regularity are always best.

?!

123RF

LESSON 2

Stop thinking

Coffee will help to keep your brain alert. However, too much coffee will actually have the opposite effect.

ou always put in your best performance, but every now and then you get stuck and Y suffer from a mental block. Whether it’s an

exam, a sports challenge or work performance, it all goes wrong. How is that possible? It has to do with control. You are so busy with keeping everything under control that your brain fails for a bit. It is overloaded. What follows is a performance way below your usual level. The remedy is to stop thinking. Yes, this is easier said than done. Psychologists from the University of Chicago (USA) demonstrated in 2010 that even singing can help prevent the brain from faltering at a critical moment. Anything that stops this paralysing thinking is fine.

Caffeine makes you clever?

I

s there something we can take to give our intellectual performance a boost instantaneously? Caffeine might be the solution. Found in coffee, tea and energy drinks like Red Bull, caffeine raises your alertness and your ability to concentrate. But it is not smart to live on coffee day in and day out. A few cups per day are fine, but more lead to insomnia, heart palpitations and nervousness. Also, you will need more and more caffeine in due course to reach the same effect: your body gets used to it. And it doesn’t really make you smarter. You can absorb more information, but caffeine can’t help you if you don’t understand something. 21/2015

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LESSON 4

Move!

hose in good physical health usually also perform better with their heads. Whoever T as a child and young adult has good motor

co-ordination and a heart that is capable of transporting lots of oxygen-rich blood to the muscles (something that can be improved with physical training) will perform better at school. Researchers at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) discovered this in early 2014. Psychologists from the University of Illinois (USA) say that just walking is fine, after they studied a group of 60-year-olds in 2010. When they walked 3 times a week for 40 minutes at their own pace, their brain capacity improved remarkably.

?!

Having a good memory is great, but you will pay the price on a social level.

LESSON 5

Smart studying

You can’t develop a perfect memory

hether you have to study for a degree or for work, essentially you have to absorb W large amounts of information that you have to

here are people who can recall exactly what they just ‘read’ after T quickly paging through a book. There

reproduce at a certain time. How do you do that most efficiently? Not all obvious methods work equally well. Highlighting text for example. From a large evaluation of study techniques under the supervision of psychologist John Dunlosky of Kent State University (USA) in 2013, it seemed that highlighting or underlining was practically useless. You will not be able to remember things better. You would sooner lose the common connection by highlighting individual words. Another tip is to stop making summaries. There is too little proof that you learn better with these. And reading a text 10 times while hoping that you will remember what is there is also pointless. And then there is ‘concept mapping’: trying to capture your material in little text balloons with lines and other schematic drawings. But it does look more appealing than a white page with words and it is a popular study method. However, according to Dunlosky, firstly it is a lot of work, and secondly there is nothing to be found in a picture. LASER222/GETTY

Exercise makes you smarter; sleeping on a ball doesn’t.

IMGORTHAND/GETTY

Psychology

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are also people who know the thousands of decimals of the pi equation. You would think that this is really handy, but you may not want to trade places. That’s because people with savant syndrome, as the disorder is called, might have a very strongly developed visual cortex (the part of our brain that processes sight), but their brain often fails in other areas. They usually have some form of autism. Daily and social life for ‘savants’ is more difficult than remembering what can be found in a book. Those who have seen the film Rain Man (1988, with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman) know that people with savant syndrome are not always to be envied. A ‘regular’ person cannot train his brain to even come close to what a savant can do. Whoever has the gift of perfect memory cannot extend it that far. Savants can often improve themselves because they can focus really well and can be obsessive about absorbing as much information as possible.


Creatine fails on taste, but it is good for your memory and other brain functions

?!

LESSON 6

Test yourself

S

o how do you take in mountains of information? There is actually no better technique than testing yourself. Learning, after all, works 2 ways: you put the information in your head, but this information also has to come out. According to Jeffrey Karpicke, a psychologist at American Purdue University, testing yourself is much more effective than applying all sorts of complicated methods to fill up your brain. This self-testing could simply be putting your book away and then writing what you can remember. But in the case of a looming exam you can also take a practice test or use previous tests. From many experiments it seems that people who study this way score higher. The memory of the self-tester is trained to find and apply stored information. When you read your study material and do nothing else it becomes just a ‘one-way’, nicely paved road to your brain, but the ‘way back’ becomes a bumpy dirt road. Another proven theory is divided learning. It is about chopping up pieces of the information stream and doing something else in between reading. Most research shows that the material that you study with longer breaks is eventually also remembered the longest.

?!

Fast reading is a myth

I

t would be great if we could read that pile of books twice as fast and also in a way in which it really sinks into our brain. There is a whole host of fast-reading courses that promise the most amazing results – 1,000 words per minute or even more. However, the reality is that our eyes and our brain can only process 300 words per minute on average. Of course there are fast readers, but they usually miss some of the content.

LAUREN NICOLE/GETTY

LESSON 8

Switch off your Facebook

owadays, it is easy to get information. N We simply log on to the internet and hey presto! You have it all at your fingertips.

However, experts can’t agree that the internet makes you smarter. Researchers such as American Nicholas Carr, claim that it makes us shallow and thinks it decreases our ability to concentrate. According to Carr because the internet is such a rich source of information, your brain is actually constantly challenged. The jury is still debating which

camp is right. That said, distraction is never good when performing an intellectual task. This is especially the case for those social media users who can’t resist the temptation to check their Twitter or Facebook accounts in between other activities. And it always takes an effort to switch between two tasks that test your intellectual capacities. It is difficult to switch back to your main task after an interruption. In short: if you have to concentrate in the run-up to a top performance it might be better to unfriend yourself from social media.

?!

LESSON 7

Take a pill

would be great if we could become IWetsmarter by simply swallowing a little pill. would be grateful even if it worked for a

short while, for example during the exam or during an important meeting at work. There is no IQ pill, but there are substances that boost brain function. For example creatine, a substance that you normally absorb when you eat meat. Creatine is good for muscle development and also for your brain’s functionality. This became apparent from a modest experiment at the University of Sydney (Australia) in 2003. Dozens of test persons were given a small amount of creatine in the form of a food supplement. Their memory capacity increased and they scored better on an IQ test than the test persons who had not received creatine. A similar result came from a slightly larger British study. According to the Australian researchers, one could easily take creatine in the run-up to an exam. It is completely legal, and you can buy it in shops where they sell them in large jars. There is a need, however, for more research about the effects of the substance on the brain, especially during long-term use. Some side effects are already known: it tastes terrible and it makes you smelly. Oh well, maybe you’d rather be a smelly smart guy than a dimwit who smells like roses. Creatine can be bought over the counter, but another brain booster cannot. Ritalin is only available by prescription from your doctor. The drug is mostly prescribed to people with ADHD. It makes them more relaxed because it enhances their ability to concentrate. It has a similar effect on people who don’t suffer from ADHD, according to a study by the University of Maastricht (NL) in 2012. They found that Ritalin takers were more capable of remembering words. There are some side effects: headache, suppressed appetite and feelings of nervousness. But most people with an exam or an important presentation at work are probably not going to be worried about that. 7

braintainment@panorama.co.za 21/2015

25


Technology

Take a closer look at your clothes

Cool sweating It is great when your sportswear breathes. That is why this football jersey is made from polyester and cotton. It keeps you cool thanks to the tiny holes in the jersey. 26

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Material world How close have you inspected your sports shirt, a pair of stockings or a raincoat? Using an electron microscope, you can see up to 100,000 times more detail. It can’t see the colours of the objects, however, so you have to colour in the photos yourself. 7 TEXT: CARLIJN SIMONS & MARC KOENEN / PHOTOGRAPHY: SPL / ANP

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Technology

Elastic Nylon stockings are made from polyamide. These are often long, elastic molecules that retain their shape well. You find them in stockings, but also in this thread that is used for surgical sutures (stitches). 28

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Disposable material This mouth guard, made for medical staff, can only be worn once. It doesn’t have to be very sturdy. That is why it is made of a non-woven material called cellulose, which almost all plants produce. The mouth guard is disposable and also biodegradable.

Stuck together The bent hooks (above) are easily caught in the bundle of many small loops (below). The result: a Velcro closing that you can use over and over again.

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29


Nature

Nature conservationists appeal to local heroes to make the Vietnamese more conscious of what poaching does. Here, Vietnamese pop star Hong Nhung is clearly distressed by the death of the white rhino in the background.

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The hunt for rhino has taken on ridiculous proportions

Save the rhino The horn of a rhino is worth more than cocaine. The result: a rhino is killed every 8 hours in Africa. Can we stop this senseless killing? Anouschka Busch finds out more.

F

elix Patton shows us disturbing photos in the bar of the Rhino Watch Safari Lodge in Kenya. They show rhinos killed by poachers. The place where the horn used to be is a bloody mass. The large rhino has been killed only for this small part. “It is the biggest crisis of all time for the African rhino,” says Patton, who works at the lodge. The animals were just recovering from the poaching spree that brought them to near extinction in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But poaching has risen explosively in the last

few years. The numbers from South Africa, where most of the rhinos live, speak volumes. Thirteen rhinos were killed yearly on average between 1990 and 2007 by poachers. In 2008 this number suddenly grew to 83. And last year the sad record of 1,004 rhinos killed was reached.

A More expensive than gold Why has poaching increased? Very simple: big money is paid for rhino horn. At the moment the horn is worth more than cocaine or gold: R600,000 per 21/2015

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AFP/ANP

7 TEXT: ANOUSCHKA BUSCH


Nature

Rich Vietnamese think it is cool to put rhino powder in their drinks

AFP/A GETTY IMAGES NP

Even this does not help against poaching because the remains will grow into stumps that are also sought after.

Horn against cancer?

he horn of the rhino has played an important role in traditional Chinese T medicine for centuries. Not as an

aphrodisiac, as often claimed, but to treat disorders that have to do with a lot of ‘heat’ in the body – like fever and rheumatism. In Vietnam there is also a rumour that a well-known politician might have been cured of cancer thanks to rhino horn. But does it work like real medicine? Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same substance that our nails and hair are made of. It sounds doubtful that it could have any effect whatsoever as a cure. A Chinese double blind study showed that keratin indeed briefly helped in rats with a fever in 1990. But then you might as well take some paracetamol. upper class. Patton calls it ‘the Ferrari factor’. “In Vietnam you don’t show off with an expensive car or a golden watch to show that you have money, but with a piece of rhino horn.”

A Reserve is poacher’s paradise The next day we are at the Solio Reserve. They have been hit hard by the poachers, who mainly work on moonlit nights when the visibility is good. Patton says, “When you are a poacher and looking for a rhino, then the Solio Reserve is the place to be. About 22% of all Kenya’s rhinos are in a relatively small area here.” There are at least 220 rhinos to be found on 6,900 hectares. There are also 70 rare black rhinos here, of which there are only 5,000 left in the world. Indeed in other places in Africa one has to be lucky to see one when you go on safari. But here we have already seen a whole group of white rhinos, among them a mother with a newborn calf, half an hour into our safari. Even the shy black rhino showed himself at the end of the day.

Black and white ther than the name might suggest, black and white O rhinos are not differentiated on the basis of colour. Both are grey. The most important difference between the white 32

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kilogram. The average horn weighs some 5 kilos, so you do the math. The guilty finger very soon points towards the Chinese with their strange medicinal practises. Still, they don’t seem to be the guilty party this time. Rhino horn is indeed an important part of traditional Chinese medicine (see heading ‘Horn against cancer?’), but the demand for rhino horn has decreased enormously since the Chinese government declared them illegal in 1993. And what is available in China on the black market as rhino horn seems to be, after DNA research, always fake. It is buffalo horn that is melted and moulded into the shape of a rhino horn. So why has the poaching increased by so much from 2008? Research by TRAFFIC, an organisation that keeps an eye on the trade in animals and plants, shed some light as to where the horn really goes: Vietnam. Here the horn is popular as a party drug. Rhino powder has clearing, purifying properties for the body and prevents hangovers, according to the Vietnamese. And it gives you status. Treating your friends to drinks with the extremely expensive rhino powder, preferably shaved off on the spot, is extremely cool among the Vietnamese

and black rhino is the shape of their mouths. The ‘white’ kind has wide lips that are suitable for grazing, while the ‘black’ variety has a pointy mouth that is handy for eating leaves. The

Africans call them wijdlip and puntlip. The British understood wijd (wide) as ‘white’ and called these animals white rhinos. The other species logically became the black rhino.

A Vietnamese woman grinds rhino horn to powder. A De-horning does not work The rhino population in Africa is still stable at the moment. The number of newborn animals and poach victims can be crossed off against each other. But this will not continue for long. The rhino population will decrease by 2016 if we continue at this rate. The rhino will become extinct in 10 years if we don’t stop the poaching, concludes the World Wildlife Fund. Some crazy things have been tried to keep the animals safe from poachers. The rhinos have had their horns removed preventively at some places. This hardly seemed to stop the poachers from killing the animals. Why? Because when you


Fast facts

hinos have been on earth for millions of years. Once there were more than 30 varieties, but R now there are only 5 left. 1. Javanese rhino This species was so common until the beginning of the 19th century that it was not strange to meet one on the outskirts of Batavia (today’s Jakarta). Now it is one of the most threatened of the 5 remaining species. The last 40 live in the National Park Ujung Kulon in Indonesia. Nobody has seen one in real life for the last 25 years. The only proof that they are still there comes from camera traps and footprints.

A slogan on a sign in Hanoi reads: “Rhino horn is not any different from buffalo horn or human hair and nails. Don’t waste your money.”

2. Sumatra rhino Easily recognisable by its armour-like skin, this species used to be found in the whole of South Asia. Today there are only about 3,000 in India and Nepal. Poaching brought them to the verge of extinction at the beginning of the last century, but this has been curbed now. The most common threat is now the monsoon which floods their habitat regularly. 3. White rhino The largest rhino is also almost the largest and heaviest land mammal: only the elephant scores better. The white rhino is the most common rhino with 20,000 individuals. They live mainly in the open savannah of southern Africa. 4. Black rhino With a top speed of 50 km/h per hour, it is the fastest of the 5 species. Once this was the most common rhino and was found all over Africa. Today you will only find it in the bushy areas of South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, Kenia, Tanzania and Uganda. 5. Greater one-horned rhino Also known as the Indian rhino, this species can be found in India and Nepal. Second only in size to the white rhino, it is semi-aquatic and often takes up residence in swamps. They are easily distinguishable by their ‘armour plating’ appearance which are actually folds of skin. They are excellent swimmers and can dive and feed underwater. On land, they can reach speeds of up to 40km/h. Around 2,500 live in the wild today and their numbers are under threat from increased poaching in the region.

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JUSTIN MOTT/REDUX PICTURES/HH

Do poison and colour dyes make the horn less enticing for poachers? Unfortunately not.

de-horn a rhino, you have to leave a little piece of the horn, as blood vessels run through it. This little piece also grows quite quickly. And with today’s prices, even a little stump is already worth quite a bit. Also, de-horning is not exactly animal-friendly. The animals don’t have a horn for nothing. Without it, they can’t defend themselves properly and they lose status in the group. De-horning is also a traumatic experience for the animals. From that moment they associate people with a very stressful event and will behave very aggressively.

A Colour dye doesn’t deter Another attempt to protect the animals

was to poison the horn. Poison was injected together with a dye to warn that the horn could no longer be used. But this method has since also failed. The dye does not spread through the horn as was hoped. It does not reach further than the hole that was drilled into the horn to inject the substance into. It can also be removed easily. Also, as with de-horning, it is an expensive and complicated operation which makes it impossible to apply to all 25,000 rhinos.

A Campaign creates irritation Maybe we can attack the problem at the root. If the Vietnamese are no longer interested in buying rhino horn, the

poaching will soon stop. It seems like the right solution. So ad campaigns were started to convince the Vietnamese of the cruelty and senselessness of the poaching. “This seemed completely ineffective,” says Patton. “People got irritated with the meddling of the Western countries who appeared to dictate to them what to do.” Since then they have tried to speak to the conscience of the Vietnamese in other ways. Well-known Vietnamese and Chinese, like Jackie Chan, were recruited as spokespeople. Social media was also used to have the Vietnamese spread the word themselves. The future will tell how effective that will be. 21/2015

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Nature Religion helps

“With the legal sale of 1 horn we could finance the safety of our reserve for a whole year”

legally. But then for high prices. “If only we could get a little bit of the money that is now involved with the illegal sale, we could accomplish a lot. With the current prices we would only have to sell 1 horn to pay for complete security of the whole reserve for a whole year.”

A Population on safari At this moment all eyes are on the local population in the Solio Reserve, because the poacher gangs can’t do much without local people who know the terrain. So the reserve wants to make the population aware of the long-term value of the animals they are destroying. The Kenyans mostly know the rhino as dangerous and difficult animals that one would rather not have. And poaching for

Hunting prostitutes

hai Chumlong Lemtongthai was sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa in 2012 T for his role in the smuggling of rhino horn. He used the legal South African trophy hunt as cover. Hunters pay large sums of money to shoot and kill an elephant or rhino in a game park. The South Africans became suspicious when lots of 34

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DE AGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES

Hong Kong custom officials seize 33 rhino horns smuggled into the country from South Africa.

years. There were 2 causes: the medicine trade in China and the use of rhino horn for the handles of Jambiyas (traditional daggers) in Yemen. The latter was never a problem before. The horn daggers were destined only for a small elite group. Until oil was found in the Middle East, the average person in Yemen didn’t have money for the luxuriously furnished dagger. But the rhinos were in luck. At the beginning of the ‘80s, the great Mufti of Yemen proclaimed that it was against the will of God to kill an animal for the handle of a dagger. The import of rhino horn was forbidden. From one day to the next there was no more demand for the daggers in that country. China also prohibited the trade in rhino horn in the ‘90s, with the result that there are now again some 25,000 rhinos in Africa.

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A Legalise the horn There are also those who call for the legalisation of selling horn. Nature reserves have enormous stocks of horn from rhinos that were de-horned or died a natural death. The idea is to flood the market so that the price will collapse. Organised crime would then not earn enough money to finance the poachers. And horn would lose its appeal as a status symbol. But it is not certain if that would work. The limited legalisation of ivory has not stopped the poaching of elephants, for example. If the demand appears bigger than the offer, you can make the horn as cheap as you want, but it will not reduce the price in Vietnam. And the legal status will probably only convince more people to buy. Also, fears Patton, a lowering in price could fire up a whole new market of people who can’t currently afford the horn. Patton does like the idea of selling

stream of poaching attacks in the ‘70s and ‘80s reduced the number of rhinos A from more than 70,000 to 3,800 in just 20

hunting licences went to Vietnamese. Further investigation revealed that they were surprisingly often for women: prostitutes were flown in and pretended to be hunters. The Vietnamese took the horn as a hunting trophy for ‘their rhino’ that in reality was shot by a South African hunter. These were then sold at high prices in Vietnam.

A Jambiya is carried like this, under the belt. a few days can yield them an income for 2 to 3 months. The Rhino Awareness & Protection Project therefore invites children and their parents from the neighbourhood to meet at the reserve. Many of them have never seen a rhino or lion up close. The idea is that, by giving them a safari, the children develop an emotional bond with the animals. This will hopefully prevent them from turning into poachers when they are adults, while their parents might realise that it’s better to leave the animals alone. 7

braintainment@panorama.co.za EXTRA INFO Get involved in saving the rhino: www. savetherhino.org.


DID YOU KN W? Keep the lid on ...

Are you an Alpha Braaier? The Alpha Braaier retains control of the lid. He is in charge. He is confident that when the fairer sex asks him how the meat is coming along, he has the wow factor and will reveal his perfect creation.

Remember, bragging rights don’t go to those who can spark up the hottest braai that has the neighbours calling the fire department. It’s all about how you use the heat. By keeping the lid on your Weber, you maintain your status as the alpha braaier.

The perfect fire The basic two-zone fire is an efficient charcoal arrangement for a wide array of foods as it combines both direct and indirect heat. Direct heat is great for braaing steaks, chops and hamburgers. Indirect heat is best for larger, tougher foods such as ribs and whole chickens.

Add a little taste Do you love that mucho smoky taste? We all do but your guests at the braai are tired of rubbing their eyes and cleaning up their smudged mascara. What’s more, using the lid enhances the smoky taste and even flavour it by using fuel such as whisky infused woodchips.

The heat is on By keeping the lid on the Weber you turn your cooking system into a convection oven, distributing the heat evenly around the braai. No more partially cooked or partially burned parts of prime cut. You get the perfect result every time.

What’s more, the lid heightens the suspense over what is going on under there.

No more flare-ups – the lid reduces flare-ups while braaing – giving you more time to drink your dop (beer) instead of pouring it on the fire to douse the flames.

Tender and moist meat is the most enjoyable, but often at a braai you find yourself presented with shoe-sole material. Cooking with the lid retains the juices in the meat and more juice means more taste.

Knowledge Profiles are Trade Marked to Panorama Media Corp. contact - sales@panorama.co.za

knowledge profile TM


Culture

Without the Sherpa people, there is no road to the top of the world

Top

guides Last April 16 of them met their death while preparing the path to reach the summit of Mount Everest. They risk their lives so that foreigners can stand on top of the highest mountain in the world. That is what Sherpas do.

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7 TEXT: CARLIJN SIMONS

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“I

t is something incredible,” explains Sherpa Lhakpa Chhering as he sits in a café in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu. “Even if you have been a few times, it still remains a great experience to stand on top of Mount Everest. It’s the world’s highest mountain, the roof of the world. Pain, fatigue, cold and lack of oxygen don’t exist when you stand there. It is a fantastic moment, and for most of them, for Sherpas just as much as for expedition members, it’s a long cherished dream that finally comes true,” he adds. Chhering (23) is a Sherpa, a mountain guide from the Himalayan region. He has been on top of Everest (8,848m) 5 times and has also summited other high Nepalese mountains. There are about 500 Sherpas active as ‘high-altitude workers’ in Nepal. They are tasked with helping all those foreigners who want to climb the high Himalayan peaks and reach the summit safely.

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A Everest is an attraction The Sherpas are an ethnic group of people and not just a group of professional guides. Originally they were Tibetan traders who travelled between Nepal and Tibet over the mountain passes with their goods comprising buffalo skins, salt and wool. They left their homes about 500 years ago to make the definite crossing to Nepal. There they became known as Sherpas, which means ‘people from the east’. A large number of them (they now number about 30,000) settled in the Khumbu Valley in the eastern part of the Himalayas directly at the foot of Mount Everest. They lived off the land and trade, until the mountain they called Chomolungma (holy mother) was proclaimed the highest mountain in the world in 1865. Western mountaineers started appearing in the valley from the beginning of the 20th century. They all wanted to reach the roof of the world and they enlisted the help of the Sherpas. After all, they knew the area and conditions well. Today there are about 300 foreign climbers per year, divided into about 20 expedition teams that attempt to reach the top of Mount Everest. More or less the same number of Sherpas accompanies them on their journey. 0 Apa Sherpa, nicknamed Super Sherpa, holds the record for summiting Everest 21 times.


Culture

There are plenty of Sherpas who vow never to go up again after an expedition 0

A Sherpas hold the records Many Everest records are held by Sherpas, among them the most times to summit (21 times), the longest stay at the top (21 hours) and the fastest climb (8 hours and 10 minutes). Chhering says: “Our bodies are made to climb mountains. Our lungs are larger which makes us suffer less from the lack of oxygen. We can also handle the cold, the snow, the wind and the altitude better because we have been living here for many generations.” However, an expedition is not about setting records. It is about attracting foreign climbers, who pay more than R1 million to reach the top. Every foreign climber is assigned a Sherpa who will be his climbing partner for the next 60 days at the start of the expedition. They will make every climb together; the Sherpa in front, the foreign climber close behind. The Sherpa is responsible for the safety and wellbeing of this partner. He has to keep an eye on his physical wellbeing, check him for symptoms of altitude sickness, take over his luggage if he is too tired to carry it himself and in extreme cases carry him up or down the mountain if he can no longer walk. A Sherpas climb more often There are 5 camps on the way to the summit of Mount Everest where the climbers acclimatise. Base camp is at 5,430m. Camps 1 to 4 are at 5,900, 6,400, 7,300 and 7,900m respectively. Chhering explains: “One of our tasks is to carry all the luggage and equipment. About 8 tons of equipment is taken on an expedition. Carriers and yaks bring tents, sleeping bags, kitchen equipment, food for 2 months, gas bottles, climbing equipment and oxygen tanks to base camp. The expedition member carries his personal belongings from base camp to the higher camps. The rest of the freight is

Career planning

part from growing potatoes and herding A yaks, there is not much to do in the Khumbu Valley where the Sherpas come from.

Most boys choose a career as a mountain guide. They begin, often as teenagers, as carriers on trekking trips. They learn English and how to handle foreign tourists on these trips which are usually not higher than 5,000m. Then, they move on to climbs up to 6,000m. Their first experience as a high-altitude worker is as a carrier on mountains 7,000m and higher. In the meantime they learn the technical tricks of the trade such as serious climbing from their fathers, uncles, brothers and friends who are all mountain guides. They slowly progress to the level of mountain guide on the large expeditions. The highest that they can reach is the position of expedition leader, who takes the lead of the Sherpa team. If the financial situation allows most guides retire, burnt out, around the age of 45.

for our account. Officially we are not allowed to carry more than 12kg per trip. That means that we have to do countless trips between the camps to get everything up there.” The Sherpas climb up ahead to make the camp ready for use before expedition members arrive. They prepare the rock soil with axes until a smooth and even piece is made so that a camp can be built on it. They set up all tents and furnish the kitchen. Then they go down to collect their partner and climb up together.

A Where is it safe? Sherpas don’t only have strong bodies; they also have built-in weather stations. On the basis of their experience they predict what

The Khumbu ice wall is one of the most dangerous parts of Everest. Sherpas test the snow pack for cracks and holes. But there is always a chance of an avalanche, like last April.

The most famous Sherpa ever

made his debut as a high-altitude worker as carrier during an Everest expedition in 1935. He managed to work his way to guide in the years that followed and took part in many other expeditions. It was once said that nobody had spent as much time on the slopes of Everest as Norgay. Hillary hired him because of his wealth of experience and his impeccable reputation. Norgay was hailed as a hero and received medals and tributes from many national and international leaders. Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (right), and Edmund Hillary (left). 38

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HOLLANDSE HOOGTE

herpa Tensing Norgay (1914-1986) gained fame after S he and Sir Edmund Hillary were the first to reach the top of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953. Norgay had already


Seasonal workers

here is only work for a few months each year for a Sherpa. The strong winds that blow on Everest make this mountain completely impassable for about 250 days per year. The wind speed lowers T from an astonishing 280km/h to a comfortable 8km/h in May. That is why that is the only time that

an attempt can be made to reach the top. The Everest expedition season already starts in April, so that climbers have enough time to acclimatise to reach the 8,848m summit. The rainy season is in summer in Nepal and no climbing is done then. In winter it is too cold. However, there is some work in September and October for the Sherpas. They will go on expeditions to other high mountain tops in Nepal or Pakistan. Still, Everest remains the absolute top for most Sherpas.

the changing weather is going to do in the mountains. “We feel if a wind that is coming is going to be dangerous. We know what clouds that produce snow look like. That is why the expedition leader often has us decide if we should climb or not,” adds Chhering. Perhaps the most important job of the Sherpa is deciding the route along which the climbing will take place. The safest way has to be found again every year. While the foreign climbers rest in their tents and give their bodies time to adapt to the thin air and the cold, a number of guides of various teams go exploring the area. Armed with ropes, ladders, ice axes and picks they prepare the way up. They check the glaciers for dangerous cracks and holes and chop

A Job pays well It is not just the accidents that make their jobs so dangerous. Sherpas are also people. They lose fingers and toes because of frostbite, display symptoms of exhaustion and die suddenly and at a young age because of heart failure, oedema, cerebral infarction and strokes caused by the blood thickening effects of the great altitudes that they work at. And they have to deal with colleagues who die in front of their eyes. “There are plenty of Sherpas who want to stop halfway or who swear never to undertake another expedition. But most of them stay because it pays well,” says Chhering. That’s because it is lucrative. A Sherpa earns around R20,000 as a basic salary on an Everest expedition. He can add reward bonuses to that. For example, for every extra kilogram of baggage that he hoists up and for every camp that he reaches he can receive a bonus. And a bonus of up to R10,000 awaits him when he reaches the top. A Sherpa goes home with about R50,000 after an Everest expedition. He can support his family for an entire year and send his children to an expensive school in Kathmandu.

easier are carried by the Sherpas. Many climbers only just make it despite the extra oxygen, weakened by fatigue and the extreme altitude. The Sherpas, who mostly do this without extra oxygen, pull them through the last bit. And then they realise their dream. For an hour they look around, congratulate one another and take photographs. Then it’s time to start the descent. The climbers rest in camp 4 and enjoy their success. The Sherpas in the meantime carry the luggage to the next camp on their backs so that everything is ready for the climbers to make their descent. 7

braintainment@panorama.co.za

Favour of the goddess

uddhist Sherpas see Mount Everest as more B than just a mountain, but also as a place where an important goddess resides. They ask for official permission for the climb before an expedition begins. A lama, a Buddhist priest, conducts the religious ceremony in which the Sherpas bring offerings and pray for a safe trip for all expedition members. There is no Sherpa who will go up the mountain without this puja being performed whereby the goddess is asked for safe passage to the top. Prayer flags are hung as tokens of gratitude when the summit has been reached. These brightly coloured flags contain prayers and mantras, which the Sherpas believe the wind will blow to the gods.

Realising a dream

The money and the prospect of being on top of the holy mother is what lure most Sherpas every year to go on an expedition, according to Chhering. The foreign climbers don’t have more than a small backpack with a camera with them on the so-called ‘summit day’. The oxygen tanks that make the last bit of the climb a little

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rocks and ice clumps away to make a proper path. They explore the snow for places where it could possibly collapse. They attach ladders over cracks and against steep walls, make sure they are sturdy and secure ropes that the climbers will use to pull themselves up. “This is the most dangerous part of the work,” says Chhering. “Sherpas regularly die if they fall in a crack during the plotting of the route. Others are hit by a piece of rock or surprised by an avalanche, as was the case in April last year.” The American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention gave a number to the risk of their profession. The job group has an incredibly high death rate of 1.2% per year. A Sherpa has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. He has a 3.5 times bigger chance of dying early in life than a soldier fighting in the Iraq War.


Crime

Are many people wrongly imprisoned for ‘shaking’ their infant to death?

Shaking babies

Scores of fathers, mothers and babysitters have been imprisoned after being found guilty of shaking their babies to death. Some scientists claim they have been wrongfully accused while others say their incarceration is justified. Who is right? 7 TEXT: FRANK BEIJEN

A

merican Jennifer Del Prete had just made a bottle for 4-month-old Isabella when she saw that things were not quite right. The baby’s body was stiff, she was breathing heavily and her eyes were half shut. This was the explanation that the children’s teacher gave to the police. She tried to shake her softly to awaken her, patted her on her back and conducted a heart massage. Nothing helped. Isabella was rushed to the hospital and died within a year. It was a very unfortunate experience for Del Prete, but was Isabella’s death her fault? Blood was found in the baby’s retina and under the meninges (protective membranes that envelope the central nervous system). Doctors concluded she had died of shaken baby syndrome. And the person who had fatally shaken Isabella had to be Jennifer Del Prete. The court sentenced her to 20 years imprisonment for murder.

Growing numbers

haken baby syndrome has been in the American and British press a lot since the S ‘90s, with up to 20 cases reported per year. Punishment can be up to dozens of years in the States. 40

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A Three symptoms If a baby has brain swelling, bleeding in the retina and bleeding under the meninges, then there is a good chance that he could be a victim of shaken baby syndrome. In the United States, more than 1,000 babysitters, fathers and mothers were sentenced for injuring young children between 1990 and 2010. Critics say that more than half of the convicts are wrongly imprisoned. One of the critics is American juror Deborah Tuerkheimer. She writes in her book Flawed Convictions that there is more and more proof against shaken baby syndrome. Doctors point out that almost half of the babies examined suffered from bleeding under the meninges, but this does not necessarily mean that they have been abused. Also, ‘baby shakers’ are often victims of tunnel vision. That means that police and the justice system ignore exculpatory evidence, because the suspect is guilty anyway according to them. A handful of convicts have been released because of “changed scientific views.” However, most of them are still behind bars; some for life. A Five deaths every year Are most cases of shaken baby


syndrome the cause of judicial errors? Forensic doctor Wouter Karst doesn’t think so. He studies babies and toddlers with brain injuries at the Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI) in The Hague (NL). “We see up to 20 such cases per year. About 5 of them have died from their injuries.” Karst searches for the cause of the injuries and compares the physical evidence with the testimony of the suspects. He regularly finds the known symptoms in infants who have been abused. But other causes are possible, such as an automobile accident, a fall or a metabolic disease. Other clues can usually also be found. “Of course we also explore those possibilities. And the American doctors also do that,” explains Karst. “A ‘baby shaker’ might have been convicted purely on the basis of the 3 symptoms identified by US doctors. Also, the explanation that doctors and judicial systems suffer from tunnel vision as a standard is really not true. Other proof as well as medical history plays a role in the court cases.”

A Opposing views Karst is hardly impressed by scientists who believe that the syndrome does not exist. “There is a group who believes that shaken baby syndrome does not exist but this is not true,” he says. “They hardly do any research and point mainly to one another in articles written in medical journals. On the other hand there are hundreds of researchers who do support the diagnosis.” The World Health Organisation and a whole host of British, American and Canadian medical specialists follow this majority. “The strange thing is that people like Tuerkheimer have discarded evident medical proof,” claims Karst. They refer to an article by Doctor Patrick Barnes about a 4-month-old baby. In his article he failed to mention broken ribs in the back of the child. “This strongly points to a history of abuse,” adds Karst. Barnes testified at Del Prete’s trial that she was innocent. Other American ‘syndrome sceptics’ are also pleading in favour of those found guilty of shaken baby syndrome.

Crying can lead to abuse

rying is for some parents a reason to assault their baby. This became C apparent from research by Menno van

Reijneveld (University of Groningen, NL). 5.6% of parents of children of about 6 months old admitted in an anonymous questionnaire that they have hit, smothered or shaken a crying baby. The parents who admitted this were remarkably often unemployed. And they also more often hailed from nonWestern countries than parents who claimed not to hurt a hair on the head of their child. “Every parent can get frustrated when a baby keeps on crying,” says researcher Bregje van Sleuwen of TNO (NL). This institute researches how effective prevention campaigns against baby shaking are. “We want parents to recognise when they feel desperation or despair. Then it’s better to put the baby down. And also that shaking can be very harmful.” A Shaking is dangerous So, what about the spontaneous bleeding that occurs in nearly half of the babies born? “It mainly arises at birth, when the skull parts slide over each other,” explains Karst. “It disappears after a few weeks. Birth is thus not the cause of the bleeding in older babies.” Another explanation for such bleeding is a lack of oxygen, which could cause blood vessels to erupt. However, after a study with children suffering from a lack of oxygen from drowning or heart defects, it became apparent that such bleedings don’t occur. So that theory can be dismissed. Whoever you believe, shaking a baby is very dangerous. “Children displaying the 3 symptoms have not been picked up playfully by their parents like a little toy plane,” adds Karst. “We are talking about a movement similar to shaking your fists vigorously. That is assault. Anyone who sees this would recognise it,” he concludes. 7 braintainment@panorama.co.za EXTRA INFO Flawed Convictions: Shaken Baby Syndrome and the Inertia of Injustice by Deborah Tuerkheimer. 21/2015

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Health

Some beauty treatments were pretty scary

Extreme makeovers Rosy skin, smooth legs and luscious curls: this is what the modern woman of the ‘30s and ‘40s wanted. A lot of beauty gadgets were available on the market in those days. But they were better suited to a horror film than a beauty salon.

7 TEXT: MELANIE METZ

This machine didn’t only attack fat thighs but also fat calves. You could slim from top to toe without leaving your chair.

THUNDER THIGHS

Fortunately there was a little window in the hood. One could at least read a book during the treatment. 42

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PROBLEM: Fat thighs SOLUTION: An electric chair in an American ‘slenderising salon’ (slimming salon). At the beginning of the 1940s women could go there to become slim without too much trouble or sweat. The clever electric machines massaged and vibrated. The devices with their hoses and weights resembled fitness apparatuses from today. HOW DID IT WORK? You took your knitting and sat in the electric chair. The iron springs turned around along your thighs. The fat was massaged away. WAS IT PAINFUL? As long as your skin didn’t get caught in between the iron springs it was a relaxing way of slimming down. And you could still finish that jersey.

PROBLEM: Lifeless, straight hair SOLUTION: The Icall machine, an electric hair-curling device. It was invented in 1923 by British technician Isidoro Calvete. Many hairdressers had such a device in the 1930s. HOW DID IT WORK? The women sat under the ‘chandelier’ of the Icall. Thick electric cables hung suspended with 22 iron curling tongs with heat elements. The hair was made wet and wound around the curling tongs. Then the device was switched on and the curlers were heated to some 100°C. The hair would remain curled because of the heat. From the 1930s hairdressers also massaged some chemicals into the hair, mostly a mixture of ammonia and bromine. This kept the curls in place for up to 3 months: that was the beginning of the perm. WAS IT PAINFUL? The combination of wet hair and electrical cables was not always a good one. The ladies often received a shock. Or a short appeared in the device. The iron curling tongs also became quite heavy after a few hours. Stronger chemical solutions were invented towards the end of the 1930s and the dangerous curling devices became obsolete. GETTY IMAGES

BLOG.MODERNMECHANIX.COM

PROBLEM: Looking pale SOLUTION: The Glamour Bonnet was an invention by a Mrs Ackerman from Hollywood, according to an article in Popular Science from March 1941. She clearly didn’t want her first name in the magazine. HOW DID IT WORK? The pale patient had to sit under a plastic hood. The hood was connected via a hose with a compressor. This sucked up the air from under the hood. The lowered pressure would increase the blood circulation. Like walking high up in the mountains. WAS IT PAINFUL? It was probably a breathtaking experience. The pressure difference under the hood gave you the feeling of being in a rising aeroplane. It is unsure whether it gave you rosy cheeks. It probably also blocked your ears.

CURLING TONGS

ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/GETTY IMAGES

LOW-PRESSURE HAT

These days it is a lot easier to get curly hair.


PROBLEM: Subtle beauty errors that you only see close up SOLUTION: The ‘beauty micrometer’, which was invented around 1930 by Hollywood makeup artist Max Factor. He applied makeup to movie stars and had noticed that some actresses, while in close-up, had some subtle beauty flaws, like a crooked nose or asymmetric jawbones. He thought that looked terrible on the movie screen. With his micrometer he could find these beauty mishaps and apply more makeup timeously. But it could also be applied to non-movie stars who wanted to look good up close. HOW DID IT WORK? The beauty micrometer would not look out of place in a medieval torture chamber. It was a sort of bird cage that the lady would stick her head into. Iron pins protruded on the inside. These were turned by the makeup artist until they touched the skin of the patient. There were micrometers on these pins. The artist could then see until a thousandth of a millimetre how crooked the nose or jawbones were. And then he could cover up the problem with makeup. WAS IT PAINFUL? Well, it was no laughing matter. The ladies in the ad photos don’t look very happy in any case.

The method worked fine. The means to protect the eyes, nose and mouth, however, were a little over the top.

PROBLEM: Freckles SOLUTION: The dry ice method. The ad said that this treatment was invented by Italian physicist M. Matarasso in 1933. It failed to mention with which institute the scientist worked. HOW DID IT WORK? The beauty therapist pushed a piece of dry ice, which she held with lead pliers, against each freckle. Dry ice (carbon dioxide snow) is -78°C. The brown piece of skin would freeze. After that, if all went well, spotless new skin would grow back. The patient was protected properly as some ice cold gas could fall off the dry ice. The beauty therapist was scared that it would land in the patient’s eyes, nose or mouth. The patient was given eyelid covers that were tightened with iron bars. The nostrils were stuffed. Breathing was done through a little pipe with a filter. WAS IT PAINFUL? The freckle treatment was rather painful. Freezing feels like burning, so it was not fun. The protection was also uncomfortable. The newspaper articles warned against dry lips and eyes because of the very tight glasses and the pipe in your mouth. But the treatment worked fine. Dermatologists still use the freeze method (cryotherapy) to remove spots or warts. They usually use even colder stuff, nitrogen (at -195°C). The protection is not so hectic anymore. But you might have to wear protective glasses. And it still hurts.

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

SNOW WHITE

BETTMANN/CORBIS

TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

ULTIMATE BEAUTY

Dimples were supposedly one of the 7 beauty measures of a woman. And so, if you didn’t have them from birth, you had them put in with this ‘clever technique’.

DIMPLE CLAMP PROBLEM: No dimples in your cheeks SOLUTION: The Dimple Machine. The invention of a New York evangelist named Isabella Gilbert. She applied for a patent for her invention in 1921. She hit the newspapers in the 1930s. HOW DID IT WORK? The Dimple Machine was actually not a machine at all, but a half round iron brace with springs in it. There were little balls at the ends. The brace was clamped around your face, with the little balls against your cheeks. They pushed the charming little dimples in. WAS IT PAINFUL? Of course. And the dimples probably didn’t even stay. If women wanted dimples in their cheeks it had to be done by a plastic surgeon. They were already around then. Facelifts have been carried out since 1900. braintainment@panorama.co.za

Max Factor (left) working with his precision instrument.

EXTRA INFO http://tinyurl.com/glamourbonnet: Popular Science from 1941 with the Glamour Bonnet and more very modern gadgets from the 1940s. 21/2015

43


Quickies 7ENVIRONMENT

Internet cable thanks to melting ice

1

2

3

4

5

6

D

oes global warming only have disadvantages? No. It has become possible to lay an enormous internet cable across the ocean floor because there is less and less pack ice along the north coast of Canada. Canadian company Arctic Fibre plans to run a fibre-optic cable between Japan and England. Large, intercontinental connections are important for fast and reliable internet. But Asia is very dependent on lines from politically unstable regions like the Middle East and the Caucasus. Many inhabitants of North Canada are happy with the cable. For them this is the end of expensive internet via satellite. But first Arctic Fibre wants to map the ocean floor. This is necessary to withstand strong currents and rolling rocks. The cable is going to cost some $620 million.

PETER DASILVA

7TECHNOLOGY

Room service robot

Y

ou open the door of your hotel room and there he is: Botlr. He is a robot that can roll into your room by himself. He even knows how to use the elevator. He will bring you anything you need: your breakfast, your newspaper, your dry cleaning. Everything that a human can also bring you. But Botlr is of course cheaper in the long run. And as a modern hotel

Great service and no need for a tip. 44

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owner you could show him off. Botlr is on duty at the Californian Cupertino Hotel (USA). Botlr cannot knock on your door and call ‘room service!’ However, he can call your phone when he is in front of your door. He doesn’t need a tip, but you can indicate your approval of his service on a little screen. Botlr will perform a little dance on the spot. And before you know it you will be smiling at a robot.


MARIJN VAN DER MEER/QUEST

7NATURE

Thief helps victim

H

e is the thug of the singing birds: the drongo. This black bird lives in tropical areas like

8

He may look innocent, but the drongo is a bit of a charlatan.

The submerged cable will consist of the following layers, from inside to outside:

clear’. Also, not every alarm made by a drongo is false. And the weavers make good use of that. When they hear the safe sound from the drongo they quickly gather as much food as possible before the alarm sounds again.

Ahead of Shorts the curve Drongos eat insects, lizards and small birds. A Drongos manage to steal a quarter of their food with their false alarms. A The name ‘drongo’ comes from Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. A

GERARD SOURY/GETTY

1 Optical fibre 2 Vaseline 3 Copper or aluminium 4 Polycarbonate (a hard and sturdy material) 5 Aluminium 6 Braided steel thread 7 Mylar (a thermoplastic polyester) 8 Polyethylene (an often-used plastic)

7ARCHAEOLOGY

Ahead of Shorts the curve The Nazca lines depict various animals, birds, insects, plants and fantasy creatures. The most famous are the pelican, the lizard, the spider and the monkey. A The purpose of the lines is a mystery. Maybe they indicated water streams or were used as an astronomical calendar. A The drawings were made by scraping away the red dust that covers the desert soil, thereby exposing the light yellow rock underneath. A

PETER DASILVA

7

southern Africa and is capable of copying warning signals from all sorts of animals. He uses this to scare away other animals that have just found food. The drongo will eat their fresh meal while they flee. Still, there is another bird, the weaver, that likes to hang around the drongo. Why? Researchers from the University of Cape Town discovered that the drongo also produces a sound that says ‘coast is

New Nazca lines

A

sandstorm last summer exposed new Nazca lines. These mysterious geometric and animal patterns in the Peruvian desert are so big that they can only be recognised from the sky above. They were probably made between 500BC and 500AD by Nazca Indians. The Peruvian pilot and researcher Eduardo Herran Gomez discovered the new exposed lines while he flew over the desert in a plane. He recognised a snake, a bird and something that resembles a llama and a zigzag line. 21/2015

45


Health

SHUTTERSTOC

Hair, human skin, fibres and fluff. Read all about the world that resides inside your vacuum cleaner

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Fascinating

No matter how often you vacuum your house, new dust will always fall onto the floor again. What do you see when you enlarge this 1,000 times? Not only are there all sorts of traces of your daily life, but also harmful chemicals. These show at once why it’s better to vacuum often. Frank Beijen explains. 7 TEXT: FRANK BEIJEN 21/2015

47


Health

There is no bigger dust reservoir than the carpet in your living room

Cotton fibre A

O

ne click and the vacuum cleaner lid opens. The yield of the job I perform diligently twice a week hangs on a little plastic holder. Through the hole in the beige paper bag I can already see the dust. I understand where the white cat hairs and the lost rice grains come from. Our cats leave little tufts of fur throughout the house. And we must have messed when we cooked risotto. But that grey, cloudy stuff seems to have fallen from the sky. What is it? How unhealthy is it? And how often should we actually clean the floors and surfaces? “House dust says a lot about the quality of the interior environment,” says researcher Marc Houtzager from TNO Delft (NL). “When we measure the air quality in a building we collect both air samples and house dust. That’s because everything that hangs in the air will eventually come down as dust.”

A Everything becomes dust “House dust mainly comprises human skin, hair and textile fibres. We leave those behind ourselves,” says Houtzager. “But that’s not all. You can find just about anything in house dust.” Sand is also an important ingredient. So is pollen, fungi spores, bacteria and remains of dead insects. Then there’s also small polluted particles dropped by humans. How often each ingredient appears depends on the place where your house is and what you do in there. Houtzager adds: “If you live close to a busy highway, for example, you will find more soot particles.” Such particles float in through the window or you bring them in under the soles of your shoes. Also, every room is full of material that all slowly

Hair

A

C

Maarschalkerweerd from TNO photographed kitty litter grain, some hair and some dust fluff with an electron microscope. The dust fluff does not reveal any information about its origin. But if you zoom in a little further, you see little textile 48

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A

C

A Human skin B Clay particles C Plant-like particles D Salt

A

Is this the vacuum cleaner bag of writer Frank Beijen?

deteriorates. This includes the paint on the wall, building materials and disposable objects such as furniture and computers. In fact, when you read this article on paper there will be tiny pieces of Braintainment floating through the air. “You can only see them with the naked eye when a light beam shines on them,” adds Houtzager. “But dust particles float around everywhere.”

A Laptops spread mess Houtzager is most interested in the wear

Vacuum cleaner bag dissected hat is in Frank Beijen’s vacuum cleaner bag? W Researcher Therese

A

fibres and human skin. Maarschalkerweerd shows a graph with the composition of the kitty litter grains per chemical element. Mostly silica, aluminium and oxygen jump out. “Right, that is what the kitty litter is made of,” she says. Apart from more sodium, aluminium and carbon there are also small amounts of nitrogen

and gold. “The nitrogen could be from the urine of the cats,” she says. But how does the gold get into the cleaning bag? “Unfortunately, the gold served as a conductor. This is necessary in order to study the dust under the electron microscope. You can find a lot in your house dust, but gold is just not there.”

and tear of electronic devices. “Households have more and more smartphones, laptops and other devices. They heat up when they are switched on and this accelerates their deterioration.” The plastic that electronic devices are made from sometimes contains material that you have to be careful with, like plasticisers. These are meant to keep plastic sturdy and pliable. “It is harmful to digest those substances, especially for small children,” cautions Houtzager. “You always find these plasticisers in house dust.” A certain type of plasticiser, called phthalates, showed up during a study that TNO conducted last year in 5 Dutch houses. The most common phthalate was DEHP at concentration levels of between 150 and 600mg per kilogram. “DEHP is not nice stuff,” states Houtzager. “This material is no longer allowed to be used in children’s toys. Phthalates can mess up your hormones. It is known that crocodiles in Florida (USA) have undergone gender changes under the influence of phthalates.” If exposure to this material on such a large


Kitty litter grains

scale can have such effects, then you don’t want too much of that floating around in your house.

GERARD TIL/HOLLANDSE HOOGTE

A We all eat dust Dust, including its harmful ingredients, also enters your body. This happens in 3 ways: through your mouth, your skin and

through your nose to your lungs. The concentration of dust rises as you enter a room, because your movement makes the dust flare up. You will breathe it in and get it on your body. Your mouth might not seem like an obvious way to ingest dust, but it does happen, especially in the case of small children. Toddlers between 2 and 5 years eat between 15 and 20mg every day. This is because they put their hands in their mouths 10 times per hour on average. Very small particles even slip in through your skin. Certain substances in the faeces of dust mites are capable of doing that.

A Man can handle more Vacuum cleaning can prevent house dust from taking over your home. However, with an average round of vacuuming you don’t get rid of more than 20% of all the dust in your carpet. If you want to get stubborn dirt out, you will have to work hard to do so. American environmental engineer John Roberts noted that you will then have to vacuum a carpet around the front door at least 25 times per week. Common walking areas will have to be cleaned 16 times per week while less used areas need to be cleaned 8 times per week. If you follow this gruelling regime for a month, you can halve the number of times you vacuum and still keep the dust levels nice and low. It is probably smarter to rip out your wall-to-wall carpets, because there is no bigger dust reservoir in the house. If you have to have something soft under your feet, rather place a loose rug on the floor. A house with only a few rugs and otherwise bare floors contains only one tenth of the dust that you will find in a house with wall-towall carpeting, according to Roberts. Also, loose rugs can be taken outside to beat the dust out or can be washed regularly. This works better than vacuuming. What also helps is taking off your shoes at the front door. This prevents dirt from the street that is trapped under your

The EU logo in 2004. Suction power was different then.

Dust breaks computers

omputers are also allergic to dust. It enters via the little ventilation holes and it does not C leave by itself. When the dust piles up, the

ventilator will endure problems with turning and it will become noisier. The PC can’t get rid of its heat and might suddenly stop. Very few people will do it, but specialists advise that you clean the inside of your computer every 3 months. How do you do that? Disconnect the electrical cord of the computer before you open it up. Also, have the machine cool down. More dust sticks to the parts when it is still warm. Remove the dirt with a handheld vacuum cleaner, a brush or a spray can with air. Laptops are also affected by dust, but are more difficult to open up. It is not difficult to make a PC dust-free. However, if you are not careful you could break it. Only cleaning the outside is not enough.

GETTY IMAGES

A

THÉRÈSE MAARSCHALKERWEERD/TNO

A Human skin B Clay particles C Possible pieces of aluminium D Plant-like particles E Salt

soles from entering your home. This makes a difference to the amount of lead, pesticides and other chemicals in your house dust. Vacuum cleaning 25 times per week for people with only a mild case of hosophobia (fear of dirt) is going to be a problem. So what is a sensible vacuum cleaning routine? This question is too complicated for a simple answer. It depends on how much dust enters your

Energy-sapping vacuum cleaner is forbidden

I

n Europe, consumer watch councils are coming down hard on vacuum cleaner manufacturers. There were only a few places left that manufactured vacuum cleaners with a capacity of over 1,600 watts in the European Union. But no vacuum cleaners with a high capacity have been allowed to be made or sold in the European Union since 1 September 2014. The maximum capacity will even drop to

900 watts from September 2017. This sounds like a problem for the housewives in those countries because more prefer vacuum cleaners that put out 2,000 watts or higher. However, authorities claim that the suction power will not suffer. They say it’s a myth that vacuum cleaners with a higher capacity suck up dirt better and have conducted numerous tests which prove their theory.

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Health

Allergic to dust mites? It will not get any better by vacuuming a lot

Where are these mites?

D

ust mites’ favourite food is human skin. We leave lots of that behind in our beds. That is why tiny, spider-like mites, hardly detectable with the naked eye, are often found in our bedrooms. There are fewer of them in the living room and other areas of the house. The numbers below are estimates of the total number of dust mites on certain surfaces in our houses. Researchers at the University Hospital in Copenhagen (Denmark) physically counted mites in 8 houses in 2002.

A Dirt is good? Sometimes you hear that too much vacuuming and mopping is also not a good thing. It could cause allergies in your children. The idea is known in science as the ‘hygiene hypothesis’. Epidemiologist David Strachan found this out in 1989 while studying a large database of British patients which showed that hay fever occurs more often in families with children. The idea was that the enormous increase of all sorts of allergies, among them dust, was caused by increased hygiene in houses with children. However, this statement has since been withdrawn after 25 years of research. “A one-dimensional connection between hygienic surroundings in early childhood years and the onset of allergies cannot be found,” says allergy specialist Maurits van Maaren of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam (NL). In one experiment, scientist studied various groups of parents. The one group had to take all sorts of hygiene measures to prevent their newborn baby from coming into contact with dust mites. The other group didn’t take those measures. It made little difference: the chance of asthma in both groups of children was the same. Whether a child becomes allergic has little or nothing to do with vacuum cleaning your home.

DENNIS KUNKEL MICROSCOPY/HH

house, how dirty the dust is and how sensitive you are to dust. “Strong, healthy adults are better equipped against certain concentrations of dust,” adds Houtzager, “while a baby or an elderly person with a lung disease might be troubled.”

Bedroom carpet Mattress Smooth bedroom floor Lounge carpet Couch Bedroom wall Curtain Book case

A Mites escape your vacuum cleaner Remarkably, vacuum cleaning is not the most effective way to stop sneezing or red eyes if you are allergic to dust mites. “This has very little effect on the complaints of a patient,” says Van Maaren. “And probably also little effect on the total number of dust mites in the bedroom. Most mites are found in the mattress.” They live off our skin. The mattress is a nice warm and moist habitat for them. Getting rid of mites can be done by washing the bedding in water of at least 60°C or by placing it in the freezer. It also helps to ventilate the room well and to cover the mattress with an anti-allergy fitted sheet. This will let

1,158 207 64 64 15 10 9 1

moisture through but not dust mites or their faeces. Back to my own house. My girlfriend and I are not allergic to dust mites, have no carpets and also don’t suffer from hosophobia, but we do have 2 cats. As such, vacuuming twice a week seems adequate to me. 7

braintainment@panorama.co.za EXTRA INFO The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes. All about dust from the cosmos to the kitchen counter.

Hair causes navel fluff our navel is like the dusty spot under the couch: it is Y difficult to reach. That is why

GETTY IMAGES

you sometimes find a bit of fluff in your navel. Men have navel fluff more often than women. And people with dark skin have darker fluff. We can thank Australian researcher Karl Kruszelnicki for this information. In 2002 he won an Ig Nobel Prize (for scientific

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research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think) with a navel fluff questionnaire that was answered 4,799 times. Navel fluff, just like house dust, consists largely of human skin and small remains of hair. This explains the colour difference in fluff between light and darker skinned people. Women also have less hair around their

abdomen to produce fluff. So do you have the most fluff if you have a very hairy abdomen? No. Kruszelnicki found out that too much hair slows down the production of navel fluff. Get yourself a navel piercing if you have had enough of fishing out fluff from your navel. Such a metal knob or ring reduces fluff production.


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Technology

How many Lego blocks would one need to build …

A Lego bridge across the ocean? American author Randall Munroe is known for his web comic strips. His book What if? was released in October, in which he answers absurd hypothetical questions. Here is one such question extracted from Munroe’s book. 7 TEXT: RANDALL MUNROE

QUESTION:

How many Lego blocks do you need to build a bridge that can carry the traffic from London to New York? Have enough Lego blocks been made? Jerry Petersen

ANSWER: We need to start with a slightly less ambitious target.

The connection

There are certainly enough Lego blocks available to connect New York and London. The 2 cities are

STUDS apart in Lego units. This means if you configure your blocks in the following way:

700 MILLION

350 MILLION More than 400 BILLION Lego pieces have been produced over the years. But how many of those can be used for the construction of a bridge, and how many have a little helmet with a visor that gets lost

… you will need to connect the 2 cities. The bridge cannot support itself and can also not carry anything heavier than a little Lego man, but it’s a start.

in the carpet? I have made a rough estimation: of every 50 to 100 pieces there is 1 rectangular block of 2x4 studs. From this

5 TO 10 BILLION

we can deduce that there are about 2x4 bricks. That is more than enough to build our bridge of 1 brick-width. We assume here that we are going to build our bridge with the most used Lego piece, the 2x4 brick.

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Suitable for cars

If we are going to make the bridge suitable for real traffic, we will obviously have to make it wider. A floating bridge would then be best. The Atlantic Ocean is deep and we would rather not build from Lego if we don’t have to.

5 KM-HIGH PILLARS

Sorry, I dropped a brick.

Lego blocks are not watertight when you connect them to one another. Furthermore, the plastic that they are made from has a higher specific gravity than water. But we can easily find a solution for that: if we apply a layer of foil on the outside the result will be that the block will have a lower specific gravity than water.

Foil

For every cubic metre that the bridge moves water, it can carry 400kg. An average car weighs a little less than 2,000kg, so our

10 CUBIC METRES OF LEGO

bridge needs a minimum of to carry every car. If we made the bridge 1m high and 5m wide, then it should be able to float, even if it would lie low in the water, and it should also be strong enough to drive over. Lego blocks are very strong. According to research from the BBC you can put

250,000 2X2 BLOCKS

on top of each other before the bottom one collapses. The first problem with this idea is that there are not enough Lego blocks to build such a bridge. Our second problem is the ocean.

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Technology

The bridge will increase in length with 3 studs every year due to the shifting ocean floor Overlapping plates

The North Atlantic Ocean is a stormy place. Even though we can avoid the fastest parts of the Gulf Stream, the bridge is still vulnerable because of strong winds and heavy waves. How strong can we make our bridge? Thanks to Tristan Lostroh, a researcher at the University of Southern Queensland (Australia), we have some information about the elastic strength of certain Lego connection pieces. His conclusion is, just like with the BBC, that Lego blocks are

SURPRISINGLY STRONG

. The optimal design consists of long, thin plates that overlap one another.

New York

Tension

London

This design would be fairly strong. Its elastic strength is comparable to that of concrete, but not as strong. The wind, the waves and the current push the middle of the bridge away which puts enormous tension on the structure.

Current TRADITIONAL APPROACH in such a situation is to fix the bridge to the bottom so that it can’t shift The

sideways too much. We can allow ourselves to use cable as an addition to the Lego blocks. Then we could fix this large installation to the floor of the ocean.

However, this doesn’t solve our problem. A 5m bridge could possibly support a car on a quiet pond, but our bridge has to be large enough to stay afloat even when it is hit by waves. The waves in the open sea could very well be a few metres high and so our bridge

4 METRES ABOVE WATER

surface must float at least . We should rather keep our structure afloat by adding airbags and hollow space, but we also have to make our bridge wider or it will capsize. This means that we have to add more anchors, with buoys to prevent it from sinking. The buoys create more resistance whereby more pressure is put on the cables and our construction is pulled down, whereby we need more buoys …

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Wait, this is the idea with the pillars again.

Ocean floor

There are also a few problems if we want to anchor our bridge to the ocean floor. We can’t keep the airbags in the bridge open under the water pressure, thus the construction will have to carry its own weight. And to withstand the pressure of the ocean current we have to make the whole thing wider. Eventually we are building a dam. An added effect is that we block circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean. This is ‘probably a bad thing’ according to climate scientists. The bridge also crosses the mid ocean riff, a geologically active mountain on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that grows and moves

112 DAYS

on both sides with a speed of, in Lego units, 1 stud per . So we also have to build insert pieces, or every so often drive to the middle and add a few blocks.

Cost

Lego blocks are made of ABS-plastic, which currently costs about R10 per kilogram. Even our simplest bridge design, the one with

5 BILLION RAND

. That’s double the total value of the the kilometres-long steel cables, costs more than property market in London which is around 22 billion rand. The transatlantic ships’ tariffs are about 300 rand per ton. This means that we could buy all the buildings in London and ship them to New York one by one for less than the cost of our bridge. Then we could put them all together again on a new island in the harbour of New York and connect the 2 cities with a much simpler Lego bridge:

New York

London

What if? Randall Munroe is the brains behind the website www.xkcd.com. He gives answers to absurd questions. How fast can you drive over speed humps without killing yourself? How long can mankind survive on cannibalism? These and many more strange questions can be found in his book.

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Biography

BETTMANN/CORBIS

Buzz Aldrin sank into a black hole after his walk on the moon

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“K

The second man Buzz Aldrin was the second man to set foot on the moon in 1969. But 45 years after the event he suffers from depression, drinks excessively and is known to be unfaithful to women. What went wrong? 7 TEXT: FRANK BEIJEN

athy? Kathy, are you there?” A completely drunk Buzz Aldrin is banging on the door of an apartment in Los Angeles in the middle of the night. The man who stood on the moon 10 years before is worried about his casual girlfriend. Why doesn’t she open the door? Aldrin kicks in the door. Then he sees with his own eyes that Kathy isn’t even at home. Two police officers roughly stuff him in a police car and take him to the police department. They will only release him if someone comes to pick him up. The astronaut calls the leader of his discussion group for alcoholics, but he is not interested. A friend from the group comes to his recue. “Please go to bed, Buzz,” he says after dropping him off at home. Aldrin promises to do that, but makes a mess of his house, finds a bottle and finishes it. The former world star had descended into being a helpless drunk. Aldrin was invincible at age 39 as one of the 3 passengers on the first flight to the moon. Some 600 million TV viewers from around the world witnessed the event. On this journey in 1969 Aldrin knew what was expected of him minute by minute. But after his return to Earth, he had no idea what to do with himself.

A Aldrin feels abused NASA sent Aldrin, his colleagues Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins, and their families on a tiring promotional tour to 23 countries. Buzz felt like a walking mannequin. They dragged themselves from aeroplane to aeroplane and from autograph hunter to head of state. Aldrin struggled every time he had to make a speech. He took tranquillisers and drank. His marriage with his wife Joan started to suffer. While main man Armstrong hardly suffered under the fame (see heading ‘Armstrong quiet on the side’), Aldrin became depressed. Was he upset because he wasn’t allowed that small step, that giant leap for mankind?

BETTMANN/CORBIS

AURORA/HH

In this iconic photo (below), the footprint on the moon was made by Aldrin.

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Biography Enough of companies

NASA was interested in his feedback and Aldrin also didn’t have business plans

FRANK TRAPPER/CORBIS

Commander Armstrong was the first one down the steps, while on previous space walks the highest in rank always remained in the spacecraft. Aldrin stressed in each interview that second place didn’t bother him. Armstrong was first because, according to Aldrin, he was closer to the hatch. Aldrin even said that he would have preferred to go on a later moon expedition. He would have had more time for scientific research.

Face-lifted Buzz and botoxed Lois stayed together for 23 years.

Buzz Aldrin

Pilot, astronaut, playboy 1930: Born in Montclair, New Jersey as Edwin Eugene Aldrin Junior. 1951: Graduated at the military academy West Point. 1951-1953: Fighter pilot in the Korean War. 1954-1975: Married to Joan Archer. 1963: Started at NASA. 1966: Made his first space voyage with Gemini 12. 1969: Second man on the moon during Mission Apollo 11. 1972: Retired from the air force. 1975-1978: Married to Beverly van Ziles. Early ‘80s: Officially changed his name to Buzz. 1988-2012: Married to Lois Driggs Cannon. 2009: Met current girlfriend Michelle Sucillon. 58

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A Depression is a family trait Aldrin was admitted to hospital for a month in 1971. “In my days people didn’t get depressed,” was the ice-cold reaction from his father. “And definitely not soldiers.” But Buzz was not the first in his family to suffer from depression. His grandfather on his mother’s side put a gun in his mouth after years of being depressed. And Aldrin’s mother, who was called Marion Moon by the way, committed suicide. After Aldrin’s first space mission with Gemini 12 in 1966, she was incapable of handling the sudden attention on the family. She didn’t wait to see how Buzz would write history as one of the first men on the moon. She took too many sleeping tablets and died 14 months before the moon trip. During his hospital stay Aldrin discussed one of his big fears with his psychiatrist: he was scared of hurting himself. Aldrin didn’t keep his depression to himself, but wrote about it in his first autobiography Return to Earth (1973). This didn’t help matters at all. The openness about his moods was taken badly by insurance company Mutual of Omaha, where he was on the board of directors. The company told him that he was no longer a suitable face for them. This hit hard, as his salary with NASA was anything but astronomical. And his job at the air force had ended in failure. Friends to fall back on were also lacking. He only saw Armstrong and Collins when the space

PIXAR/DISNEY

ldrin and his 2 moon A companions could have easily earned good money with their hero

status. Ex-astronaut Frank Borman was convinced of that, and said as much during a dinner shortly after the moon landing. “A little while later I would laugh hard about the absurdity of his remark,” wrote Aldrin in 1973. The astronaut had a few jobs, but also often felt very disadvantaged. He also didn’t like it that Disney named one of the main characters in the cartoon Toy Story (1995) after him without paying him for it. Aldrin didn’t see the point of dragging Disney to court. He did sue watchmaker Omega. They used photos of him on the moon, where he happened to wear an Omega watch. He never saw a penny for that, much to his disappointment. It became apparent after Aldrin’s third divorce in 2012 that he hadn’t become a millionaire. According to the divorce papers, as quoted by entertainment site TMX, he had 475,000 dollars in his bank account. Ex-wife Lois got half. It might seem a nice amount, but Aldrin gave lectures and appeared in ads his whole life for that. organisation summoned them. And his marriage with Joan ended in 1975.

A Whiskey becomes a friend What was Aldrin to do with the second half of his life? He very much wanted to use his technical knowledge for new space missions or become a successful businessman. But NASA was not waiting for his expertise, and Buzz didn’t have concrete business plans. “But my friend Jack Daniels always cheered me up.” More and more often he locked himself up in his apartment. Sometimes for weeks on end. Telephone plug out of the wall, curtains closed, TV on and a bottle of whiskey in his hand. “I would quickly put on some clothes and fetch a few buckets of chicken at the KFC when I would get hungry. But first I would pass the liquor store to stock up on booze.” The next lifebuoy that Aldrin clamped onto was called Beverly van Ziles. He had met the interior decorator in a pub. Beverly tidied up his apartment, flushed the whiskey down the drain and sent him to rehab. But alcohol remained a problem. The marriage ended after 2 years.

Troublemaker receives fists

on’t argue with Buzz Aldrin. American D conspiracy theorist Bart

Sibrel found this out in 2002. The filmmaker, who claims that there never was a real moon landing, asked the then 72-year-old Aldrin

in front of the camera to swear on The Bible that he had walked on the moon. Aldrin refused. Sibrel insisted: “You are a coward and a liar and a thief.” The last word sounds rather high-pitched on video,

because that is precisely the moment that Aldrin’s fist landed on his face. No investigation was conducted against the astronaut, because Sibrel had provoked him and also because he didn’t get hurt.


GERHARD VAN ROON/HH

Aldrin earned a little extra by giving lectures around the world. Aldrin decided to seek help from Alcoholics Anonymous. There he met new girlfriends, like Kathy, but also a salesman from Cadillac. Buzz could start as a dealer in Beverly Hills via him. “I was a terrible salesman,” he writes. “The moment people saw me the conversation from new and second-hand cars changed to space travel. I mostly handed out autographs. Also, I was too honest. I never recommended a car if I knew the weak spots. I also didn’t sell expensive Cadillacs if I knew people couldn’t afford them. “Nice to meet you, Buzz!” they would say while walking away. He didn’t sell a single car in 6 months.

A Playboy without alcohol There was only 1 way out of the crisis: stop drinking completely. Aldrin became a teetotaller in 1978. Even without alcohol he remained a playboy. He went to countless parties in Beverly Hills, showed his medals, talked about the moon and often went home with a beautiful woman on his side. Until he met the filthy rich banker’s daughter, Lois Driggs Cannon. They married in 1988. But they lost all their money after a year because the Driggs family bank went bankrupt. Aldrin had to start a new job in order to maintain their luxury lifestyle. He started giving well-paid lectures all over the world. But he didn’t enjoy it. He climbed on top of the roof of a building in Los Angeles

and peered over the edge. He didn’t jump. Buzz adjusted to his fate and Lois organised his bookings. Lois was the “big love of his life,” wrote Aldrin in his latest autobiography Magnificent Desolation (2009).

A Mistakes again For years things went well between Lois and Buzz. But during one of the signing sessions for his book, in which he praises his wife for 4 chapters, he displayed his talent of falling for the same trap. He met the 30-years-younger Michelle Sucillon, with whom he started a relationship a few years later. Enough was enough in 2012. Buzz divorced for the third time because he couldn’t stay true to the love of his life. He was then 82 years old. Aldrin still tours the world. In the last couple of months he has done lectures in Beijing, Toronto, Dortmund (Germany) and Boston. In between he advertises underwear and deodorant. He participated in Dancing with the Stars. And at the height of the ice bucket-hype he threw ice cold water over himself. The man who didn’t want to be a mannequin has never been able to release himself from the gravity of his fame. 7 braintainment@panorama.co.za

FRENT COLLECTION/CORBIS

Armstrong quiet on the side

eil Armstrong was going strong while Buzz Aldrin N slid into the throes of alcohol and depression. He was less troubled by the month-long festivities after the return to Earth than Aldrin. And delivering speeches was also no problem. Armstrong avoided autograph hunters and camera crews by leading a quiet life. He started teaching at the University of Cincinnati and bought a farm outside of town. He was on the board of directors for various industries and aircraft companies. In 1986 he joined the commission that studied the space shuttle Challenger that crashed and killed 7 people. Armstrong died in 2012 aged 82. EXTRA INFO www.quest.nl/buzz: Aldrin in Dancing with the Stars and other video highlights. Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon, Buzz Aldrin and Ken Abraham (2009): a book full of whiskey, depression and women. 21/2015

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Focus

Pulling faces

n extreme close up of a chameleon in Madagascar. The island boasts A many different kinds of chameleons, all of which are photogenic and interesting. It was shot by South African based wildlife photographer Heinrich van den Berg. The highly acclaimed photographer recently released his new book, Reflections, which features stunning wildlife photography captured by Van den Berg on his travels throughout the world.

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Psychology

Why do we see faces in lifeless objects?

It is more difficult to see a telescope in this picture than a happy face. 62

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Faces

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hoever sees ghosts, sees things that are not there in reality. But you too see things that are not there. Have a look at the photos on these pages. You’ll discover faces everywhere, but in reality you are just looking at a blob or a spot. A clear case of pareidolia. But don’t worry, it is not a mental illness. Pareidolia is nothing other than a natural tendency to recognise clear shapes on the basis of vague indications. And we all experience that now and then.

In the sky. On the grill of your car. On your burnt toast. With a bit of imagination we see faces everywhere. Your brain is fooling you. But why?

A Brain fools around Why is your brain fooling you? The evolutionary-psychological explanation used to be that it was good for your chances of survival to recognise faces quickly. It was important to know whether that glimpse of a head in the bushes in the far distance was friend or foe. It is only by a small evolutionary inheritance that we now see faces in everyday objects and household devices. But even pareidolia can be explained without evolutionary psychology. Your brain has to process a lot of visual stimulation. A stimulus only receives meaning when it is connected to a memory, something that you have seen or learned in the past. This even works when the stimulus is vague. So it can happen that you see a spot that looks like the shape of a human face (of which you have seen quite a few in your life). Your brain then connects the visual stimulus with the stored knowledge about the shape of the human face, and bingo: you no longer see a spot, but a person.

7 TEXT: BERRY OVERVELDE

CORBIS/HH

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Catacanthus incarnatus is the scientific name for the man-faced stink bug.

This Australian tip-tilted nose was not man-made. 21/2015

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Psychology

Some people can even see a face in a coffee spill A Religious people see more The process of recognising faces is very quick, discovered researchers of Harvard University (USA) in 2012. The brain area that becomes active when you see a face reacts almost as fast as in a case of pareidolia, scans showed. In the same year further study revealed that some are more susceptible than others. Researchers of the University of Helsinki (Finland) showed a great number of images to test persons. The images ranged from objects like tools to landscapes, for example a rock formation. The participants filled out questionnaires afterwards. It became apparent that religious people and people who believe in the paranormal more often recognise faces in lifeless

shapes or landscapes than non-religious and non-paranormal types. The religious are mostly eager to see the faces of Jesus and Mary – they seem to surface regularly in blood spots and coffee spills. A Expensive chicken nugget Other believers pay good money for these kinds of discoveries. American Diana Duyser sold a toasted cheese sandwich that she had already taken a bite out of for $28,000 in 2004. Why was so much money paid for a halfeaten toasted sandwich? When it was cooked, a pattern emerged that looked like a woman with a head scarf. A dedicated Catholic will of course see the Virgin Mary in that straight away. The faces of other famous people have also been spotted. A chicken nugget in the ‘shape’ of the head of George Washington, America’s first president, was sold for $8,100 on eBay in 2012. So seeing faces in lifeless objects might not be so crazy. 7 braintainment@panorama.co.za

This piece of chicken was way past its sell-by date when it sold for $8,100.

HOLLANDSE HOOGTE

It might only be a stapler, but it remains positive.

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It is no fun if there is no clothing to hold. Such beautiful hair and still angry? This mop is a real pessimist.


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WIKIPEDIA

Service with a smile.

This piece of coral is clearly happy in the aquarium. 21/2015

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Q&A

MARIJN ALDERS/ANP

Questions & Answers

Got questions you’ve been carrying around for years? Braintainment answers them! Mail your questions to braintainment@panorama.co.za

Mike Billings, Johannesburg

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here are 3 reasons for this. Firstly, there is less space on a motorcycle for a large exhaust system to muffle the sound and also less space to encapsulate the motor block, which also reduces the sound. Then there is the law: motorcycles and cars are allowed a certain amount of decibels, but with cars this is measured at a higher speed. That is why cars travelling at ‘motorcycle speed’ sound softer than bikes. The most important reason is that many bikers love the sound and will therefore fit a sports exhaust under their motorcycles, which makes extra noise.

What distance does a snail cover in a day? Antony Mbuli, Johannesburg

Is there a place where you report a mail if you suspect it to be phishing? Katrin Jannsenn, Johannesburg

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rooks use phishing mails to lure people to false (bank) websites and have them log in there. This way they can retrieve sensitive information such as login details, credit card numbers and passwords. Just about any bank now has an email address where you can send 66

suspicious mails. The bank will then place such a mail on their website to warn other customers of the danger. An email to your bank is also advisable, because they can block the address where the phishing mail comes from. No other mail can then be sent from that address.

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123RF

Why does a motorcycle make more noise than a car?


GUIDO COZZI/CORBIS

use of this and fertilise themselves.

Did Mount Vesuvius previously erupt before Pompeii was destroyed?

FLASH

Snails are one of the few molluscs that live on dry land. A Their skin is slimy to prevent them from drying out. A The slime is also used for forward movement. It forms a layer over which the snails slides.

Zubeer Khan, Durban

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es, it did. The best known eruption that covered Pompeii with hot molten lava took place in 79BC. However, from geological research we know that the volcano is about 25,000 years old. Previous to the first known eruption, the mountain had at least 4 more outpourings of fire and ashes. On one such instance, around 1800BC, we

know that it claimed lives as the burnt remains of 9 goats and 2 human skeletons were found. That is not a lot. Archaeologists did find thousands of fossilised foot and paw prints in the ashes made by people and cattle that were fleeing the city. The residents must have realised in time that the mountain was about to burst.

Q&A

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TETRA IMAGES/CORBIS

t has never been researched how far an average snail travels in a day. However, research has found that the average speed that the snail can reach is 4m/h. Snails can be active up to 24 hours without sleep. So if the snail moves the whole day it could cover 96m. This slow action could sometimes be a problem when it comes to finding a suitable partner for mating. Fortunately, some snails can also mate with themselves. Snails are hermaphrodites and have both male and female reproductive parts. Some species make good

Q&A

I

FLASH

Why do older fighter planes often have a target disc on their wings? Anthony Birkholtz, Centurion

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123RF

hat is not a target disc but a ‘roundel’, a symbol to indicate to which air force the plane belongs. The simple logo makes the plane recognisable to other airplanes and people from a great distance. This prevented soldiers from shooting down their own planes or that of their allies. The French Air Force was the first to fly with a roundel during WWI and took its inspiration from colours that appear on the French flag: blue, white and red.

This plane’s roundel indicates that it belongs to the Royal Air Force (UK). The French roundel is red on the outside and blue on the inside.

British aeroplanes first had the British flag on their wings. However, from a distance it bore a strong resemblance to the cross of the German Air Force. A The British decided to use the French’s roundel idea, but with inverted colours. A The red circle in the middle was taken out of the British roundel during WWII because it resembled the red circle that the Japanese used. A

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Q&A Questions & Answers

Got questions you’ve been carrying around for years? Braintainment answers them! Mail your questions to braintainment@panorama.co.za

Which is the smallest country in the world? Leon de Jong, Windhoek

hat honour goes to Vatican City with a surface area of only 0.44 square kilometres. The country has emerged as a compromise between the Catholic Church on the one side and Italy on the other.

When Italy was formed adding the north to the south in 1861, the Catholic Church didn’t want to fall under the Italian government and this led to a violent conflict. It was only on 11 February 1929 that a

solution to the standoff was found. The city where the Pope resided, Stato Della Citta Del Vaticano, or in other words Vatican City, officially received the status of a country in that year.

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The smallest countries (In square kilometres) 1 Vatican City 2 Monaco (Europe) 3 Nauru (Oceania) 4 Tuvalu (Oceania) 5 San Marino (Europe)

0.44 2 21 26 61

Fact: a banana peel could sweep you off your feet.

Can you really slip on a banana?

Vernon Smith, via email

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EPA/ANP

About 800 people live in Vatican City.

Q&A

Why do you always have to complete a course of antibiotics?

FLASH

ou take antibiotics to kill bacteria. The timeframe and the doses of the treatment have been decided so that all the bacteria that cause an infection are destroyed. Some bacteria will survive if you stop your treatment early and these could get used to the antibiotic. They can develop ways to break down the medicine, to remove it or to deactivate it. If you then get the same infection from the same bacteria, the 68

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antibiotics will no longer work. Resistance to antibiotics is the biggest medical problem of the 21st century, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). More and more bacteria are resistant to antibiotics. This makes illnesses that were previously treatable with antibiotics untreatable.

A modern antibiotic under the microscope.

DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES

Diederik Alma, Durban

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anana peels are pretty slippery so it is possible that you could slip on them. Popular science programme MythBusters once tested the ‘slipperiness’ of a banana peel by having one of the presenters walk through a vessel with peels. He didn’t manage to stand up straight, while he knew that it was slippery. If you are not paying attention while stepping on a banana skin, there’s a greater chance that you will slip and fall.

A The first antibiotics were discovered by microbiologist Alexander Fleming in 1929. A Fleming saw that a fungus that landed in his culture by accident slowed down the growth of bacteria. A He named the substance responsible for this ‘penicillin’, the first antibiotics.


Why is it that mainly women scream while riding a roller coaster? Gerard van Beukel, Northriding

doesn’t seem cool, it might be difficult to suppress a scream. Men do scream a lot less than women though. Also, the lowered pitch in the scream of a man does not attract the same attention as the higher pitch in the scream of a lady.

Make no mistake, men also scream in fear.

GETTY

imply put: it’s not cool for men to show their emotions in public. Men are taught from a young age to keep their fear and sorrow under control. But that doesn’t mean that men never scream on a roller coaster. Because even if it

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Why do medicines often have such impossible names? Leon Koekemoer, Durban

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enerally a medicine has 3 names: its trademarked name, its chemical name and its generic name. Take aspirin for example. ‘Aspirin’ is the trademarked name, ‘2-acetoxybenzoic acid’ is the chemical name and ‘acetylsalicylic acid’ is the generic name. This is the name under which the substance is known internationally. When you have a medicine with an unpronounceable name, you

probably have a box with a generic name on it. This means that the patent on this medicine has expired. It can now also be sold under another brand name or under the generic name. So, why is the name often so complicated? Because it often refers to chemical or medical terms. Acetylsalicylic acid is the substance that arises with the acetyl delivery of salicylic acid. 21/2015

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BRAIN CANDY Sound byte

Do it the card way

Endorsed by world-renowned DJ Armin Van Buuren, Philips A3Pro DJ headphones provide source-accurate sound for as-recorded music enjoyment. A closed-back architecture maximises bass and helps you listen to your music as loud as you want without leaking, while supra-aural cushions seal the gap between your ears and the headphones for good sound isolation. This is essential equipment for any aspiring DJ or if you simply want to keep out the drone of the nagging mother-in-law. Price: R2,499 Info: Tarsus Technologies, 011 531 1000

Phone cameras and Instagram have mercilessly slain traditional photography as we know it and it’s time to take a stand, to reject our heavily-filtered future and do things the old-fashioned way. Bring back the vintage cameras of old and inject a bit of thought and life into your photos, with the Pop Up Pinhole Camera. This hand screen-printed kit goes from flat-packed cardboard to working camera in just half an hour. Stickers and split pins are used to build the main body and you only need a tiny dab of glue to construct the film advance knobs. No craft knives required and no mess, and the resultant camera just oozes nostalgia. There’s no lens, just 1 powerful pin hole. So ditch the trigger-happy tendencies and the same old boring filters and try things the card way. Price: R1,200 Info: firebox.com

Catch all the action From filming the births of babies to rock climbing, GoPro has gained immense popularity. This smaller, fully-adjustable version of the adultsized Chest Mount Harness allows children to experience the wonders of the GoPro. Allow them to film their skateboarding, sliding and swinging. Best suited for children 8 and under and, though it is not its real purpose, you can use it on a medium-sized dog too (or so we hear). Price: R475 Info: www.omnico.co.za

May the wors be from you If you’ve always dreamed of dabbling in sausage-making then the Prima electric meat grinder/wors maker is the right tool for the job. There are endless sausage possibilities – if you own a smoker you can even make homemade cabanossi. The machine has a powerful motor and 3 cutting blades (fine, medium and coarse). It also has handy sausage filling and tomato juicing attachments as well as a vegetable slicing blade. Score! Price: R779 Info: www.braaishop.com

This is the Bread Knife. I’m going in The world probably isn’t ready to effortlessly slice through meats and cheeses with dinky red-hot lightsabers just yet. So for the time-being we’ll have to adorn our kitchens with the next best thing – the Star Wars X-Wing Knife Block. 70

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It looks just like the classic Starfighter from the Rebel Alliance, though instead of laser cannons and proton torpedoes, this nimble vessel is armed with a cook’s knife, bread knife, carving knife, utility knife and a paring knife. Made

from a polished chrome-effect plastic reminiscent of the J-Type 327 Nubian Royal Starship, you can carry out Rogue Squadron-style roll calls every time you slice ‘n dice. Price: R1,600 Info: firebox.com


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7NUTRITION

Go on, enjoy your nuts

STOCKBYTE/GETTY IMAGES

Quickies

A nut allergy is usually for life. acid immunoglobulin E) and an allergic reaction will not occur. The nuts are altered with simple sodium sulphite (salt made of sodium and sulphuric acid). This, says researcher Chris Mattison, is revolutionary because it is the first time that the food that causes the allergy has been studied as opposed to the person with the allergy. The altered cashew nuts are currently in the last test phase, with peanuts being next in line.

NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/ANP

hose allergic to nuts can soon enjoy them without fearing spots, boils or shortness of breath. Researchers at the Agricultural Research Service of the American Ministry of Agriculture have managed to change the structure of certain proteins in cashew nuts. Your body will therefore not recognise the strange nut proteins that it is allergic to. This means you will no longer produce anti-matter (amino

Ahead of Shorts the curve A It was thought for a long time that animals with eyes on the sides of their heads could not follow one another’s expressions. A Horses also use the orientation of their heads to transfer information.

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7ENVIRONMENT

At home in the oil

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hey didn’t expect to find life there. But whole communities of microorganisms feel at home in oil. Researchers at the Helmholtz Zentrum in Munich (Germany) found microbes in tiny water droplets that are caught in oil. Researchers

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think that these microorganisms help break down the oil. Previously it was thought that this breakdown by microbes only took place on the outside of, for example, an oil spill, where contact is made with moisture from the outside world. But, it seems, the microbes also tackle the oil from the inside.

Ahead of Shorts the curve A Microbes are single-cell organisms like bacteria, amoebas and yeast. A They can be found everywhere in our surroundings and on our bodies. A Microbes often live in colonies. A Most single cells reproduce by cell division.


Would these Island ponies be able to understand each other with all that hair in front of their eyes?

7NATURE

How do horses communicate? orses don’t have a vast range of facial expressions. Still, the animals are capable of transferring information with their faces, according to researchers from the University of Sussex (UK). The animals use their eyes and ears to communicate. The

researchers had a horse choose between 2 buckets (1 of the 2 contained plenty of feed), while looking at a life-size photo of a horse that focused on 1 bucket. When the test horse could see the whole photo they chose the right bucket in more than 70% of the cases. But if

7TECHNOLOGY

Wave directs ball

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cientists at the Australia National University can propel floating objects with the aid of waves. They have even managed to successfully float objects towards themselves against the wave direction. The researchers are experimenting with a ping-pong ball in a tub of water. They test different waves to make the little ball bob to the left, the right, forward and backward with

the aid of a wave generator. There is currently no mathematical description that explains how the waves control the little ball. It is clear, however, that a wave causes a current on the water’s surface that can move in the opposite direction of the wave. Maybe waves can suck little boats into a harbour in future. Or masses of floating objects could be kept together and an oil spill controlled.

the eyes and ears of the horse in the photo were covered, then the animals didn’t fare very well. According to British researchers the fact that you can communicate with movable ears has long been ignored simply because we don’t have them.

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They are now using a ping-pong ball, maybe one day it will be something useful. 21/2015

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Quickies

7ECONOMY

Hurricanes are expensive I

s a hurricane really as bad for the economy of a country as we might think? According to some theories such a natural disaster is actually good, because afterwards extra money is invested in, for example, the infrastructure. These theories can be

shelved, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). They collected meteorological and economic data from 6,712 hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons between 1950 and 2008. The storms all had a negative effect on the

economy. A real heavy tropical storm, one that only passes every 10 years, creates as much havoc as a financial crisis. And if the storm belongs to the heaviest 1% of all storms, the economy of a country will still be affected after 20 years.

7PSYCHOLOGY

Young people are more often work junkies

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t is not an official disease, but there are quite a few people who suffer from ‘workaholism’. They work so hard that they display withdrawal symptoms if they don’t work, even if their health suffers under their work behaviour. Researchers from the University of Bergen (Norway) have discovered that at least 8.3% of Norwegians are addicted to their work. According to psychologists

LARRY DALE GORDON/ANP

Hurricane Katrina cost 1,833 people their lives and caused 108 billion dollars worth of damage.

this is the first work addiction research that is representative of a whole country. Young entrepreneurs are most often found to suffer, with both men and women suffering equally. The Norwegians also found no difference between highly educated and less educated people. The psychologists think it is time to start thinking about treatment methods for these unhappy workaholics.

Ahead of Shorts the curve More symptoms of workaholism: working more than you planned/ intended; working to curb feelings of fear, guilt or depression; neglecting other activities to keep on working; and continually thinking about work while you are not working. A Workaholics Anonymous is an organisation where workaholics can go for help. A


7TECHNOLOGY

Can I get a ride? obots are often the baddies in science fiction films. They instil fear in humankind and are portrayed as machines hell-bent on taking over the earth and making the human race their slaves. Still, researchers from Ryerson and McMaster Universities in Canada showed that we humans still trust robots. They built hitchBOT, and had the robot hitchhike from Halifax to Victoria, a journey over 6,000km

from east to west Canada. The hitchBOT kept its travel companions amused with good conversation in exchange for the lift. It took just under a month to complete its journey, which should take 70 hours according to Google Maps. It seems that hitchBOT did have to wait quite long for its lifts. Or could it be that the drivers enjoyed its company so much that it stayed the night?

Ahead of Shorts the curve Drivers were able to pick up hitchBOT and strap it in with a safety belt. A Its batteries could be charged via the cigarette lighter socket. A The adventures of hitchBOT can be found on www.hitchbot.me. A

7TECHNOLOGY

Hand axe reborn I PHOTOGRAPHY: MOTI FISHBAIN SCAN: DR. LEORE GROSMAN / INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY, JERUSALEM 3D PRINTING: OBJET / STRATASYS

n the beginning there was the hand axe. The first tool was nothing more than a sharp piece of stone that our ancestors used to hack and dig. Now, some 1.5 million years later, there is a wide variety of more modern versions of the axe, most of which are lighter and more effective than the first example. Still, this hasn’t stopped 2 Israeli

designers from taking hold of the old-fashioned hand axe again. Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow used computer-aided design (CAD) and a 3D-printer to make their own version of the ancient hand axe. They also developed primitive spears, knives, hammers and trowels. They did so without losing any of the advantage of our forefathers’ tools: simplicity. 21/2015

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HitchBOT hitchhiked from east to west Canada.


Quickies 7CULTURE

Economy puts paid to languages

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conomic prosperity may bode well for progressive countries but it could also spell the end of local languages. This is according to Tatsuya Amato of the University of Cambridge (UK). He discovered that the gross national product of a country negatively corresponds with the language diversity of that country. The larger the economic growth, the faster vernacular languages disappear. When economies develop, says Amato, usually 1 language will dominate in economic and political spheres. And to take part in that people have to choose to speak that language. That is why some 25% of these languages are now threatened with extinction.

7GEOLOGY

Sand smuggling

DIETER TELEMANS/HH

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outh Africa may have a serious issue with crime, but the smuggling of sand is not one of them. This problem is of serious concern to law enforcement authorities in the coastal areas of India, Indonesia and Cambodia though. Rogue companies dig up the beach and ship the sand to other countries. There it is used as a raw material for concrete. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) points

towards Singapore as one of the big culprits. This small Asian country increased in size by at least 130km² in the last 40 years. Singapore is the world’s largest sand importer, but much of this imported sand stays outside of the official books, according to the UNEP. It’s little wonder seeing that Singapore paid only $3 per legal ton of sand between 1995 and 2001. Now the price stands at $190.

7HEALTH

Chuck Norris makes you fat

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ike Chuck Norris and the pony-tailed Steven Segal? Well, they could be helping you pack on the pounds. That’s because during an action film you will eat twice as much as during a talk show without even noticing. Researchers from Cornell University (USA) had 3 groups of students watch different clips. Group 1 watched the action film The Island. Group 2 watched the same movie, except it had no sound. Group 3 watched the talk show Charlie Rose. There were healthy and unhealthy snacks on the table. In the end it appeared that group 1 had eaten 98% more than group 3 and consumed 65% more calories. Group 2 still ate 36% more than the talk show watchers, and munched up only 46% more calories. The explanation: the high speed, visual action and loud noises provide more stimulation and distract you more. So you don’t really know how much you actually stuff in your mouth when you are watching Norris roundhouse kick his opponents.

Ahead of Shorts the curve Researchers advise that you only eat healthy snacks while watching an action movie. A This way you avoid unnoticed bingeing. A Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson starred in The Island (2005). The plot revolves around an escape from a compound that is made up of clones that are used for organ harvesting. A


NASA

Double stars are certainly not a rarity.

Here another load of India’s sand travels towards Singapore.

A The removal of sand lowers the water level in the Indian Vembanad Lake by up to 15cm per year. A Twenty-four islands have disappeared through sand diggings in Indonesia. A About 28 billion tons of sand was processed into concrete worldwide in 2012. You can build a wall 27m high and 27m wide all around the equator with that.

7SPACE

Planets without nights

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e seem to have been deprived with just our single sun. It could be that it is quite normal for other planets to have 2 suns. A group of astronauts, under the guidance of Elliott Horch of the Southern Connecticut University (USA), looked at about 1,000 stars that are orbited by planets. Using new technology they could make photographs even sharper and brighter than the images that NASA’s Kepler telescope previously took of these stars. Guess what? Forty to 50% of the stars are double stars – 2 stars that stand relatively close together. Sunset might be rare or totally unknown on those planets.

7TECHNOLOGY

Sign language for your cellphone?

J

SIDESWIPE

MITCHELL KANASHKEVICH/CORB

Ahead of Shorts the curve

ust when you are in the middle of a meeting, your cellphone rings. Annoyed, everybody looks at you and you quickly fish it out your pocket and switch it off. That takes a few seconds. This has to be done faster. And soon it can be. Researchers from the University of Washington (USA) have developed a program called SideSwipe, that can recognise a few hand signals. It can even recognise the reflection of hand signals. By waving your hand in front of your cellphone, you break the signal between your cell and the provider’s mast. This makes it possible to silence your phone by making gestures in the air, while your cell still remains in your pocket. It’s lightning fast and not as annoying. After all, who gets irritated if you wave at them during a meeting? 21/2015

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Next issue

on sale 24 February 2015

7 PSYCHOLOGY

SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES Forget burning bras and fighting for the right to vote. Today’s women are more powerful than ever and are a force to be reckoned with. What makes them more rational, mature and cleverer than their male counterparts? 7 BIOLOGY

7HEALTH

Hen pecking What determines if a chick is born a hen or rooster? Can we change the outcome? Scientists believe they can.

Never say die You die when your heart stops beating, right? Wrong. Modern technology is capable of bringing you back to life in a heartbeat. Find out how it’s done. 7 SPACE

ET, PLEASE CALL ME There could very well be life forms in galaxies far, far away. But contact with them might be thousands of light years away. Read why it is probably best that ET calls us instead.

7 TECHNOLOGY

What’s app Developers of Candy Crush and WhatsApp are sitting pretty. What is the secret to their success? We show you how to develop a moneygenerating app.

ALSO IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF BRAINTAINMENT: Archaeology, meteorology, robotics, your questions answered and more ... Any questions? Mail braintainment@panorama.co.za 78

21/2015



Outlook

ALLES WAT JE MOET WETEN IN 1 PAGINA

PAGE 1 N O S T H IG L H THIS ISSUE’S HIG

Riddle me this Ever wondered how many Lego blocks it will take to connect London and New York City? We crunch the numbers. Page 52

Get smart Want to increase your intelligence by 20%? Find out how in 8 easy steps. Page 20

INDEX Archaeology ........................10,45 Anthropology ..............................7 Culture ................................36,76 Crime ....................................... 40 Brain Candy ............................. 70 Economy .................................. 74 Environment....................... 44,72 Health........... 10,14, 42,46,72,76 History ...................................... 56 Lifestyle.................................... 11 Nature ......................28,30,44,72 Paleaontology ............................ 8 Psychology.............. 6,8,20,62,74 Science ....................... 26, 72, 75 Technology .................................... 6,11,26,44,52,72,74,76 Space ........................ 6,11,12, 77

Fallen hero

Buzz Aldrin may have made a giant step for mankind, but after that his life was a shambles. Page 56

Plus

Your questions answered, would you give a robot a lift home? Why do we see faces in objects? What makes Sherpas such good climbers? And more ‌ Any questions? Mail braintainment@panorama.co.za. 80

21/2015

Dust buster What harmful substances are trapped inside your vacuum cleaner? Page 46




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