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Monday, June 4, 2018

The Writer's Life 6/4 - Weird Science

Here's more fodder for writers of sci-fi. Did you know that a person can have two sets of DNA? Neither did I. The info is part of a new book by Carl Zimmer: She Has Her Mother's Laugh, which was covered in an article by Susannah Cahalan in Sunday's NY Post. The oddity typically occurs when one fraternal twin dies in the womb and is absorbed by the other. This led to legal problems for one woman, who nearly lost custody of her kids when an initial test showed nothing in common with them. Further testing found the set that matched her children's. Another woman who had given birth had chromosomes that seemed male. They were those of her deceased twin.


Here are other weird science facts plucked from a list of 40 at allthat'sinteresting.com, edited slightly by yours truly. My comments in parentheses:
The body contains enough fat to make seven bars of soap.
Between birth and death, the body goes from having 300 bones to just 206.
The small intestine is roughly 23 feet long.
You are taller in the morning than at night.
Your ears and your nose never stop growing. (Terrible news for those of us with big honkers. Why couldn't it have been the penis?)
Women’s brains actually shrink during pregnancy. (LOL)
At some point, you may have fought cancer.
Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour.
The average person produces enough saliva in a lifetime to fill two swimming pools.
In camera terms, the human eye is about 576 megapixels.
You carry, on average, about four pounds of bacteria in your body.
Men’s testicles hang below their bodies because sperm dies at body temperature. (Gotta be a punchline somewhere.)
Sex burns only about 3.6 calories a minute. (Plenty of incentive to draw the act out to at least a half hour.)
Stomach acid can dissolve metal. If it touched your skin, it would burn right through it. (And you thought Coca Cola was corrosive.)
There are more than 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your body.

A blurb in today's NY Post reveals the population of the city's most prestigious high schools. I was surprised to see that Brooklyn Tech has 5838 students, numbers reminiscent of the baby boomer era. Back then, it's 5000+ students were all male and it always fielded a strong football team. I don't remember the year it became coed. Members of our team at Lafayette H.S., which was highly rated
academically in the mid sixties, joked that Tech's offensive linemen used slide rulers to determine spacing. Our population was at least 5200. I believe our graduating class in '67 was 1400. Juniors and seniors began the day at eight AM, sophomores and freshman at ten AM. The halls were unbelievably crowded then to noon, when many upper classroom were done for the day. I wonder how crowded Tech's hallways are these days.

Hard to believe, but this morning, June 4th, the heat came up in our building.

Hot off the presses:


My thanks to the gentleman who purchased a Lawrence Block thriller and Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion by Anne Somerset; and to the woman who bought Natural Health, Natural Medicine: The Complete Guide to Wellness and Self-Care for Optimum Health by Andrew Weil; and to the sweet old lady who donated two more books in Russian.
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