Random Facts & Wierd Science

[TheEarl]

Dextro and laevo organic chemicals (what DrM was talkign about) are actually responsible for most tetarogens (literally 'monster formers'). Thalidomide has dextro and laevo forms - the laevo is very useful for combatting mornign sickness and so the drug ws prescribed. Unfortunately no-one thought of screenign the dextro form, which turned out to be a tetarogen and that is what the drug is now known for.

Louis Pasteur, as well as inventing pasteurisation, invented the smallpox vaccine by the art of noticing that milkmaids rarely contracted the disease. Pasteur theorised that they'd caught cowpox, a bovine affliction with little effect on humans, and this somehow made them immune from smallpox. To test his theory he got a small boy and gave him cowpox. Then, after allowing the cowpox to take its course, he took the same boy to a smallpox sufferer. He scratched one of the boils of the smallpox sufferer and then scratched the boy's arm. The boy survived.

Interesting scientific methodology.

If every person in France joined hand in hand to encircle the Earth, 2/3s of them would drown. Think we should experiment?

The Earl

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

Every single species of spider in the UK is poisonous...

So THAT's why TheEarl was so panicked?

 

[cantdog]

I thought you were supposed to guess.

Anyhow, it's the duck billed platypus. The male actually. Quelle surprise, eh?

I thought there was a shrew or some damn thing that could chew poison into things?

 

[oggbashan]

Every single species of spider in the UK is poisonous. And Aussies thought they had it bad.

Gauche

Maybe. But Aussie spiders can kill humans. UK spiders can't unless you try to eat a few thousand of them.

Australia has most of the world's most deadly creatures. Don't mess with their jellyfish. They are worse than the sharks.

Og

 

[Somme]

Everybody knows that butterflies taste with tiny American flags.

God, I hope it's not #2 because to prove it, you'd have had to do something awful to your cat.

Too late.

 

[Guest]

All science is weird

Once a second or so, somewhere in the universe, a star blows itself to smithereens, blossoming momentarily to a brilliance greater than a billion suns. Nobody understands how these events, among the most violent in nature, actually happen. But, until recently, that didn't much matter unless you were a practitioner of the arcane and messy branch of science known as nuclear astrophysics.

Lately, however, supernovas have become signal events in the life of the cosmos, as told by modern science. Using a particular species of supernova, Type 1a, as cosmic distance markers, astronomers have concluded that a mysterious "dark energy" is wrenching space apart, a discovery that has thrown physics and cosmology into an uproar.

As a result, the fate of the universe - or at least our knowledge of it - is at stake, and understanding supernovas has become essential.

for full story