Sluggish and drunk
Q During the last New Year鈥檚 Eve celebrations [1995], fairly early into the
evening, myself and five friends opened a bottle of 1991 claret. The wine tasted
fine, but after we had finished the bottle we could see a small item, about 1
centimetre long, stuck onto the inside of the glass, close to the bottom. This
turned out to be a small slug-like creature, which began to wander slowly around
the inside of the bottle, climbing halfway up the side in about two hours. The
organism had the appearance of a small sea cockle and lived for a further two
days before it died, perhaps from acute sobriety.
Six people observed its movements and its appearance could not have been
attributed to overzealous celebrations, because the evening had only just begun.
Is this a common observation and how could such a macroscopic organism survive
for several years while bottled in red wine?
It is the nature of science that it can鈥檛 easily explain single, unique
observations, especially when all known observers are likely to have been drunk.
If only slugs turned up frequently in wine bottles, we could apply for a grant
and start a serious research programme. But as they do not, we must turn to the
probabilistic approach given below鈥擡d
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A Lacking any knowledge in wine biology, to answer the question I looked at
probabilities. Was the slug a native to the wine bottle and could it live for
more than three years in a sealed bottle?
Assuming that a 1-cubic centimetre creature uses proportionally the same
amount of air as humans do, then is there enough air in a bottle for it to
survive three years? The volume of a human being is about 2 脳 0.5 脳 0.5 = 0.5
cubic metres, we breathe say about 1 litre every three seconds or about 30 000
cubic metres in three years. Let鈥檚 say that we can breathe the same air a
maximum of 10 times and we end up with a consumption that is 6000 times our
volume. The slug would have needed 6000 cubic centimetres or eight
750-millilitre air bottles to survive, let alone the fact it would have had to
stick onto the bottle鈥檚 interior ceiling that long.
Having excluded the possibility that the creature was a wine native, I
suggest two possibilities for its presence in the bottle in the night of 31
December 1994.
First, while you were drinking and having fun, a solitary slug fell into the
bottle from the ceiling. This is, however, highly improbable considering the
very small cross section of the bottle and the small population of slugs walking
on ceilings.
Secondly, a slug climbed on top of the bottle and later fell in. This is also
very improbable because everybody knows slugs stick and probably would not fall.
Also, its 4-hour per bottle-height pace of climbing is much too slow. How long
does it take to finish a bottle of wine?
In the light of these arguments, I can only suggest that one of you
deliberately dropped a poor little slug in the bottle while the others were
still finishing their drinks.
Loic Albert
Verdun, Canada
We add only the caveat that it is not reasonable to extrapolate respiration
rates from mammals to invertebrates. We thus turned to an expert鈥擡d
A An ectothermic animal (for example a slug or a grub) at 20 掳C is
expected to metabolise at 0.14 (body mass in kilograms) watts. A slender animal
1 centimetre long might have a mass of 0.1 grams (0.001 kg) and metabolise at
0.00014 watts, or 0.5 joules per hour. This would require oxygen at a rate of
0.025 cubic centimetres per hour or 0.6 cubic centimetres per day. A volume of
0.75 litres of air-saturated water would contain 6 cubic centimetres dissolved
oxygen, and I would guess that wine would contain less.
Even if the gas in the space at the top were fresh air, it would add only a
little to this oxygen store. So the oxygen would last for a couple of weeks only
if the animal remained active. There are some invertebrates whose metabolic
rates fall to much lower values in the absence of oxygen (for example, mussels
which clam up when exposed to the air at low tide) but the prospects for a slug
or grub in a wine bottle do not seem good to me.
R. McNeill Alexander
School of Biology
University of Leeds
Round and about
Q On a sunny afternoon , I saw a circular rainbow. It had a relatively small
diameter, and the sky surrounding it had a lighter colour than the sky enclosed
by it. I have never seen this before. How was it formed?
A All rainbows are circular and form as a coloured ring of light opposite the
Sun. Normally, the bottom part of this ring is blocked by the horizon, hence we
see the rainbow only as an arc in the sky. If, like a pilot, you are at a high
altitude or if the Sun is in the right position, it is possible for you to view
the rainbow as a whole circle.
Naomi Osman
West Linfield, New South Wales
A Your correspondent undoubtedly saw a 22掳 halo about the Sun caused by
refraction of the Sun鈥檚 light through properly orientated ice crystals high in
the atmosphere. The ice clouds that cause this, called cirrus and cirrostratus,
may be so tenuous as to be almost invisible.
This type of halo is commonly seen as an arc, but it is less usual to have an
even enough distribution of cirrostratus clouds to see the whole ring. The most
conspicuously bright parts are usually either side of the Sun and at the same
elevation and are known as 鈥渕ock suns鈥� if bright enough.
An extensive, uniform sheet of cirrostratus can give rise to great displays
of rings and arcs caused by multiple reflections and refractions through ice
crystals in the form of platelets and columns.
This ring round the Sun, or indeed the Moon, is a good predictor of bad
weather because the first indication of an approaching front is often sheets of
ice-crystal cloud.
Rodney Blackall
retired meteorologist, London
A You may never see one again because it is a rare effect. Occasionally, a
faint thin cloud of high-altitude ice crystals or water droplets of just the
right uniform size and shape lie between yourself and the Sun. They refract the
light to give a circular rainbow effect, a sunbow as it is sometimes called.
More often, you get just a few fragments of a circle, called sundogs. There are
also moonbows and moondogs, but these are much dimmer and the human eye is not
good at discriminating dim colours, so moonbows are better seen in photographs.
For that matter, so are sunbows, because looking in the direction of the Sun can
damage your eyes.
The brighter area around the bow is caused by light scattered by the faint
cloud outside the circle forming the rainbow. Light scattered from inside the
circle would also disperse, but most of it would not reach the eye, so you would
not see it and the area would look darker.
Jon Richfield
Dennesig, South Africa
A The circular rainbow is known as a glory. It consists of reddish and bluish
rings that surround the area directly beneath the Sun. A glory is the result of
sunlight being diffracted and scattered back at the Sun by water droplets from
clouds. Because the Sun is seen above the horizon, a glory is observed beneath
the horizon. Therefore, almost all glories are seen from aircraft or mountains.
Glories can be seen any time of year when there are water droplets present.
Diana Martin
Dilliner, Pennsylvania
There is more than one right answer to this question because there is more
than one type of circular rainbow.
If you see a circular rainbow when you are looking away from the Sun (as is
the case when you see a normal rainbow), then it鈥檚 very likely that you are
somewhere very high up鈥攊n an aeroplane, or on the edge of a mountain
precipice. Essentially you are viewing the whole of a rainbow which would be
normally be cut off by the horizon and the explanation provided by Naomi Osman
applies.
If you are looking towards the Sun, then you are likely to be seeing a sunbow
as described by Rodney Blackall and Jon Richfield.
And if you are looking down on cloud then you may be witnessing a glory as
described by Diana Martin. Mountaineers quite often see them when walking on a
high ridge with clouds below鈥擡d, with thanks to Malcolm Brooks of the
Meteorological Office, Bracknell, Berkshire
Brain drain
Q I have often heard it said, even in the years before such machines as PET
scanners became commonplace, that humans only use 10 or 20 per cent of their
brains. Can anyone tell me on what possible basis such a statement can be
justified?
A In the 1960s and 1970s new techniques, such as staining and microelectrode
stimulation, allowed the function of particular brain areas to be understood far
better. This meant that, for example, the area of the brain used for vision
could be delineated with some accuracy. However, some areas of the brain
stubbornly refused to display such specialisation and appeared to serve no
specific function. So the myth grew that a large proportion of our brains
remains unused. The argument roughly translates as, 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know what this bit
of the brain does, therefore this bit of the brain does nothing.鈥�
Needless to say, the brain (in its entirety) continued to work away oblivious
to some of the more far-fetched conclusions of its owner.
Marcus Munafo鈥�
Psychology Department
University of Southampton
A I鈥檝e heard that this story began after an experiment during which mice were
taught a simple motor task (possibly how to get through a maze), and were then
made to repeat the task with a certain amount of their brains removed each time.
The mice failed to repeat the task when just less than 10 per cent of their
brains was left; hence the basis for this particular urban myth.
Seamus Sweeney
Dublin
The writer is probably referring to the classic experiments carried out by
Karl Lashley beginning in the 1920s. In an attempt to find exactly where
memories (or the 鈥渆ngram鈥�) were stored in the brain, Lashley trained rats to
find their way through mazes in order to observe how their memory of the correct
route was affected when he removed parts of the brain鈥檚 cortex. The results
indicated that memories were stored throughout the cortex and not in one
particular place: the more of the cortex was removed the worse the rats鈥�
performance became. Rats may still be able to remember a very simple task after
large area of the cortex is removed but in general, Lashley鈥檚 results show that
any loss of brain tissue causes a loss of performance鈥攖he opposite of the
鈥�10 per cent鈥� view. And Lashley never removed as much as 90 per cent of the
cortex, anyway鈥擡d
A The earliest source I know of for the argument that we really only use
between 10 and 20 per cent of the brain is Dale Carnegie鈥檚 How to Win Friends
and Influence People, published in 1936. In his treatise on manners and
thoughtfulness, to back up the point that only a small increase in cerebral
exertion would confer a large social advantage, Carnegie asserted that most
people use only 15 per cent of their brains. Carnegie was not a neurologist and
it is now thought that he pulled this 鈥渇act鈥� from thin air.
It is true, of course, that healthy people do not use all of their neurons at
any given time, because that would constitute a grand mal epileptic seizure, but
it seems safe to say that when it is required or when we are so inclined, all of
our cognitive potential is at our disposal. From an evolutionary perspective, it
is hard to imagine what it could all possibly be there for if this were not the
case.
Scott Turner
Vancouver, Canada
A I cannot supply the source of the urban myth, but it is not a recent
misapprehension. It was being touted as a 鈥渟cientists tell us鈥� fact in
advertisements for self-improvement courses in the 1920s and was uncritically
cited by Albert Einstein.
Richard Oertel
Whyalla, South Australia
We have not been able to trace the exact quote but we understand that
Einstein used it as a wry answer when asked by a journalist to explain why he
was smarter than other people鈥擡d
A There are numerous documented cases of people born with brains which were
much smaller than normal; people whose brains were damaged over a large area;
and those whose brains got crushed, compressed, or otherwise altered, who were
yet able to function as completely normal people with the usual intelligence.
Sometimes the malformed brains were discovered only after death. The quick, but
invalid, conclusion from this is that we don鈥檛 need most of our brains, and so
we don鈥檛 use them. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification. Similar cases
abound where brain damage or loss led to loss of intelligence. This only proves
that in some cases the brain has incredible abilities to recover from damage,
and not that it wasn鈥檛 being used in the first place.
Frank Perricone
Berlin, Vermont
Many readers wrote in with similar answers that referred to a half-remembered
television documentary from the 1980s. Had they been able to use more of their
brains, they would have remembered that the documentary, shown on both BBC and
public television (PBS) in the US, was called Is the Brain Really Necessary? It
described the work of the late British neurologist John Lorber who had studied
some very unusual young patients. All were of normal, or greater than normal,
intelligence and had been sent to him because of minor neurological problems.
Otherwise they did not stand out in any way, either socially or educationally.
Astonishingly, CAT scans revealed that their brains had been compressed into a
thin slab by the slow build-up of fluid inside the cerebral ventricles, a
condition known as hydrocephalus. One individual in particular had gained a
first-class degree in mathematics although the average thickness of his grey
matter was claimed to be only 1 millimetre, rather than the usual 45
millimetres.
These findings may well have reinforced the myth that we only use 10 per cent
of our brains. But what they really show is that the developing brain is very
adaptable and that when a neurological problem develops slowly in a young
person, one part of the brain may compensate for losses elsewhere.
Recent neurobiological research reinforces the view that particular functions
are not rigidly restricted to particular areas. If you learn to play the violin,
for example, the area of brain tissue devoted to controlling the hand will
expand. And even adults suffering from damage to the brain as a result of a
stroke may partially recover as new parts of the brain take over. That the brain
can compensate for injury does not, however, imply that large parts of the brain
are normally 鈥渟pare鈥� or unused.
On the other hand, even though we may all be using all of our neural tissue,
that doesn鈥檛 mean that we aren鈥檛 all capable of doing more things. It鈥檚 always
astounding that among groups of physicists at an international centre such as
CERN, for example, some are capable of speaking only one language (the
Americans) while others may have found room in their brains for four languages
(the Swiss), but all are equally good at physics鈥攗nless CERN has evidence
to the contrary鈥擡d
It鈥檚 the pits
Q How does the service fault machine at Wimbledon and other major tennis
tournaments work? It detects when a ball is out of play but doesn鈥檛 seem to
react to players鈥� feet.
A During the many years I have been attending the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis
Championships as an honorary steward I have seen the gradual incorporation of
this gadget, from the time when the inventor himself came onto the sacred grass
of the Centre Court to set it up, to its everyday use.
It is just an infrared beam sent from a generator on one side of the court to
a receiver on the other. If the beam is cut by a ball then it emits the familiar
beep. The setting is crucial, because the ball is deemed in the court if it
touches the line, so this must be taken into account when the beam is
positioned, which consequently must be past the service line.
Yes, your choice of title was very apposite. Former champion John McEnroe
frequently complained about it and, as is permitted, many times asked for it to
be turned off.
The latest bit of technology is the electronic net cord judge, which issues a
beep when the ball touches the net. I have never heard this questioned, and the
familiar figure of the human net cord judge with his ear pressed to the net
support is disappearing quickly.
Laurie North
London
Fruit ID
Q Why do items of fruit in supermarkets bear individual labels with numbers
on them?
Do the numbers denote variety so that, for example, every Cox apple is a
4104? if so, who allocates the numbers and where are they listed?
A The numbers found on fruits and other produce in supermarkets are PLU or
price look up numbers. In the US, these numbers are applied to and allocated (to
the produce) by the PLU Review Committee of the Produce Electronic
Identification Board.
Tui Minderhout
Ann Arbor, Michigan
A In the US, the more common fruits and vegetables have numbers that are the
same among different chains of supermarkets. If someone buys, for example, two
kilograms of Golden Delicious apples (which bear the key code 4262), the cashier
can place the bag of apples on the electronic scale and enter the key code 4262.
In a perfect world, the supermarket鈥檚 central computer will know this week鈥檚
price for 4262 and calculate the cost to the shopper, so saving a mathematically
challenged cashier from having to calculate it.
Joan Muratore
Yonkers, New York
In the US, the Produce Electronic Identification Board (a committee of the
Produce Marketing Association) is establishing a nationwide system where all
retailers use a standard set of PLUs so that growers can label their produce
with confidence, wherever they may be shipped. Currently 75 per cent of US
produce is labelled but code allocations of local growing organisations are
still not the same everywhere. The PEIB hopes that by 2005 a nationwide system
will be in place, although it may take longer for all growers to sign up.
Elsewhere, progress towards universal labelling systems has been slower. In
Britain there is no national regulatory body. Each supermarket has its own
produce codes, and some growers label their produce and others do not. Where a
grower鈥檚 code can be utilised by a particular supermarket, they will use it to
save time relabelling produce鈥擡d
Clove cove
Q I enjoy eating fresh garlic but I also take odourless garlic capsules so
that my work colleagues don鈥檛 have to suffer every day. I take odourless garlic
capsules because I assume that they carry the same benefits as fresh garlic.
However, after I read an article in New 杏吧原创 I found myself
wondering whether odourless garlic capsules produce any metabolic change and
hence, any degradation of the fatty acids in the bloodstream. If they don鈥檛 then
it follows that the capsules which don鈥檛 give rise to garlic breath are not
lowering your cholesterol level. So are there benefits in taking the odourless
garlic capsules or are they a waste of time? Can you clear this up for me before
I subject my work associates to my garlic breath on a daily basis?
A There have been clinical trials that affirm that commercially available
garlic capsules can lower blood pressure and cholesterol (although like every
potent biologically active chemical, they can be overdone). There are still many
drugs being researched that are from plants (and other natural sources such as
sponges) that show great promise in treating intractable diseases such as
cancer.
Specific papers that cover the beneficial effects of garlic capsules include:
鈥淭reatment of hyperlipidaemia with garlic powder tablets鈥�, Drug Research, vol
40, p 1111; 鈥淕arlic in hyperlipidaemia: a multicentre randomised, controlled
trial鈥�, Cardiology in Practice Supplement, June 1991, p 12; 鈥淟owering of blood
lipid values with standardised garlic powder drug鈥攍ong-range, multicentre
study, Cardiology in Practice Supplement, June 1991, p 18.
John Humphreys
Solihull, West Midlands
Stop talking
Q What parameters, if any, limit the number of different words available to
us in English (or any other language)? Are we near to running out of words?
A There is no sensible limit, in theory, to the number of possible words in a
language, although the constituents which make up words (the sounds and
syllables) are indeed strictly limited. The remarkable thing about language is
that it makes infinite use of these finite means.
Take British English as an example. There are only 44 contrasting sound units
(phonemes) in that dialect鈥攃onsonants and vowels such as /p/, /t/, /k/,
/e/, and /i/, which can combine in certain ways to make different words, such as
/pit/, /pet/, /kip/, /pik/ (conventionally spelled pick), and so on. A large
number of possibilities suggest themselves, therefore, but all languages have
phonotactic rules limiting the ways these units combine. For example, in English
we can have words beginning with the phoneme /h/, but there are none ending with
it, or words ending with the /ng/ sound, but none beginning with them. There are
only about 300 vowel plus consonant combinations making up the syllables of
English鈥攖he most complex consisting of three consonants at the beginning
of a syllable (in such words as string) and four at the end (in such words as
twelfth).
With these limited resources, English then makes up words of increasing
complexity鈥攐f two syllables (butter), three (discover), four
(publication), five (innumerable), and so on. And so on? There are long words in
English, all children know antidisestablishmentarianism, and the syllabic length
grows significantly when we take compound items into account, such as science
terms鈥攏eurolymphomatosis, deoxyribonucleic, and the like (if DNA was given
in its fully explicit form, it is said to be more than 200 000 letters in
length).
Therefore, there is no theoretical limit. Whatever you think is the longest
word in the language, I can always make it longer by adding another
element鈥攁n extra prefix, such as anti- or non-, or an extra element to
make a new compound. Whether these words make any real sense is another matter.
In practical terms, we just don鈥檛 need so many words and we鈥檙e also nowhere near
running out of words.
So the number of actual words in English is relatively quite small. There are
some half a million words recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, and a
similar number in Webster鈥檚 Third New International Dictionary. However, the two
books do not contain exactly the same words鈥攎any British dialect words do
not appear in the US book (Webster鈥檚) and vice versa. There is as yet no 鈥渟uper
dictionary鈥� which includes all the words in English, including all dialect,
slang, and specialised words. And when we reflect on the way in which English is
spreading around the world, in the process borrowing thousands of words from
other languages in such places as India, South Africa and Malaysia, it is
obvious that keeping up with the vocabulary of the language is an enormous task.
So nobody knows exactly how many words there are in English, although there are
at least a million.
The only real limiting factor on the growth of a language鈥檚 vocabulary is the
power of the human imagination. People invent words all the time, although not
all of them actually get into the standard language. A few years ago, on a BBC
Radio 4 programme, I ran a competition in which listeners were asked to invent
words to express concepts of importance to them. The winner was the word we need
to express the feeling we have when we are at an airport waiting for our luggage
to appear on the carousel, and everyone else鈥檚 luggage is appearing except ours:
we chose 鈥渂agonize鈥�.
David Crystal
Editor, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
Anglesey