Health Myths Busted!

Those old wives’ tales told by our grandparents: Don’t do such and such otherwise something horrible will happen to you! Well, even as a kid, I take pride in the fact that I used to ask, what is the science behind it? And without solid reasoning, I would ignore the advice. Not saying that’s a completely good thing, but I’m proud of the fact that I was a precocious? Or at the very least, a curious and logical child!

Here we go…

1. Sitting Too Close to the Screen Will Ruin Your Eyes.

When TVs first became popular in the 1950s, they emitted 100,000 times more radiation than they do today, so parents may have been smart to keep their kids away from the tube back then. But sitting too close to a modern set or computer screen won't do any permanent damage to your eyes. The fuzzy vision and headaches that follow a long day at the office (or a Lost marathon J) are symptoms of eyestrain-a temporary condition no different from the soreness you feel after a workout. Your eye muscles are simply tired from their workout of focusing all day!

2. Vitamin C Prevents Colds

It's true that if you don't have enough C, you'll get sick. But with scurvy, not a runny nose! Carroll and Vreeman hypothesize that this bug-fighting theory began when we discovered the vitamin's link to that infamous sailors' affliction, in 1932; if C could prevent one illness, the logic likely went, perhaps it could prevent others, too. But dozens of studies have found no difference in the number or duration of colds suffered by people who take C and those who don't. The best way to prevent the common cold is washing your hands.

3. Jet Hand Dryers are More Sanitary Than Paper Towels

Dryer or paper towel? Right old Sophie’s Choice! Molecular biologist Keith Redway, of the University of Westminster, has done a series of experiments to put an end to the debate. He found that jet dryers actually increase the amount of bacteria on users' hands because the air inside the machines is...let me put it this way, far from sterile! The driers make the restroom dirtier, too, spewing germs more than six feet. Paper towels are the clear winner. 

4. A Glass of Warm Milk will Help You Snooze

Even thousands of years ago, the Talmud associated drinking milk with sleep. Today there's no scientific evidence that it has the slightest impact on drowsiness. Milk does contain the nap-inducing amino acid tryptophan, but only in trace amounts. Eggs and cheese have more, but even an egg and cheese sandwich won't knock you out. (You'd probably have to eat seven of them, the authors speculate.) However, if a hot-milk nightcap seems to help you catch z's, drink up. A little placebo effect never hurt anyone.  


5. If Your Mucus Turns Green, Your Infection is Bacterial-and You Need Antibiotics


Congratulations, nose-blowing sleuths! This adage is partially true: When you have an infection, your body sends white blood cells called neutrophils to fight the germs, and when an enzyme in the neutrophils mixes with the healthy cells in your nose, your mucus changes color. The falsehood is that you need antibiotics. The infection in your body is not necessarily bacterial; it could be viral-in which case, no amount of antibiotics will help. 

6. Spicy Food and Ulcers

If a person suffers from an ulcer, spicy food can often aggravate it; however, ulcers are not caused by spicy food at all – if they were, ulcers would be pandemic in many eastern nations. An ulcer is usually caused by overuse of medications like aspirin and anti-inflammatories.

7. How to Catch a Cold

There are a huge number of myths about how to catch a cold, but in fact there is only one way to catch a cold virus – by direct contact with the virus itself. You can stand outside on a cold night with wet hair and your chances of getting a cold do not increase at all. The reason that colds seem to spread more in Winter is not from the cold itself, but the fact that people tend to live more often indoors and this increases your chances of coming in to contact with a sufferer. It is also worth mentioning that if you get a cold in your nose, you can not stop it from spreading to your chest if the virus is programmed to attack you there. Most cold medicines are completely pointless and do nothing to help except alleviate the pain through the inclusion of painkillers.

8. Eat carrots to improve your vision

It is possible that this tale came about due to allied propaganda during the second world war when rumors were spread that the British airmen had excellent night vision due to eating carrots. The myth was spread to stop the Germans from discovering that the British were using Radar. While carrots contain vitamin A which is good for healthy eyes, eating lots of them will do nothing to improve your vision.

Bonus *Warning: It's a long one!*

Cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis.  

Cracking your knuckles (or any of your joints) can have therapeutic benefits. When you crack one of your joints you are pulling the bones that are connected at the joint apart from each other. This process stimulates your tendons, relaxes your muscles, and loosens your joints. Chiropractors do this for spinal joints when your back is sore and stiff, but you can do this on your own for your knuckles, toes, knees, neck, etc.

Unfortunately, there can be too much of a good thing since scientists have discovered that it can cause tissue damage in the affected joints. Knuckle-cracking pulls your finger bones apart which stretches your ligaments. Too much stretching of your ligaments will cause damage to your fingers akin to the arm injuries sustained by a baseball pitcher who throws too many pitches. In addition to making your hand really sore, this ligament damage can also result in reduced grip strength.

Science: Your joints, the places in your body where you can bend, are where your bones intersect and are held together by ligaments. These joints are surrounded by a liquid called synovial fluid. When you stretch your ligaments by pulling the bones apart to crack your knuckles a gas in the synovial fluid escapes and turns into a bubble. This process is called cavitation. Cavitation ends when the bubble eventually bursts, producing that popping sound we know and love. After that, your joints won't be able to crack for another 25-30 minutes while the gas gets reabsorbed into the synovial fluid. 

Bonus for the bonus: FACT!

Scary Science...Things that frightened us silly as kids!

So I’ve been reminiscing lately…on the good ol’ days when I was a kid, when I got together with my friends, ate junkfood – no holds barred (if you see my pictures from school, you’ll see) – prank calling the cute boys we were crushing on and the losers but definitely, some of my fondest memories are when we were trying to scare the shit out of each other at a rite of passage, the slumber party. We would huddle together in the dark with a flashlight telling ghost stories and daring one another to do stupid things.

Yup, that's what we looked like. HAHA. You wish.

That's more like it :)

Scariest of all were the games that everyone seemed to know (even without Google or Youtube, it’s shocking to any New Millenium baby), the tricks that seemed to unlock paranormal powers or spiteful spirits. According to my research, the reason these things have been going on for generations is because, on a certain level, they work. No, not the demonology part, but who would’ve thunk it, it’s science.

Scary Things Explained by Science

Bloody Mary

I have to admit I did this and scared myself so much so that I will probably never try it again to this day (even after knowing what I’m going divulge now). The game is relatively simple, you stand in front of a mirror in the dark and say ‘Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary’ (sometimes while spinning in a circle or some other variation). And then a woman is supposed to appear and she’s going to scratch off your face and lead you to a very bloody death.

See...I actually scared myself searching for this picture. I'm a scaredy-cat. 

But as far as we know, no one has summoned any psychotic serial killer but still, at this very moment, somewhere, a pre-teen is standing in the mirror whispering ‘Bloody Mary’ loud enough for his/her friends to hear.

And she IS going to see something in the mirror.

Science

Giovanni Caputa, a psychologist did an experiment where he asked 50 people to look at a dimly lit mirror for 10 minutes. The participants were then asked to write down what they saw. Bear in mind that this was not a sleepover and no one was told they’d see anything scary.

Results were that 66% of participants reported massive deformations of their own face. 18% saw one of their parents with a few traits altered (among which 10% parents were dead). 28% saw a stranger’s face, like a child or an old woman. Most strikingly, almost half of the participants saw ‘fantastical and monstrous creatures’.

The reason is that if you stare at something long enough and I mean, really stare, not being looking while doing something else, like shaving – your vision starts to distort it due to something called the Troxler effect.

Stare at this for about 20 seconds

If you did it right, the dots would start to disappear after awhile. Apparently, to maintain our sanity, our brain is wired to prevent it from taking in the same thing over and over again. (in terms of sensory perception). Imagine the alternative of being aware of every limb, every breath and every blink! Life would suck because at our current brain activity levels, that would take up all our day’s activity. So a cool little trick is Selective Peripheral Fading where the neurons cancel out constant information.

I hope to God that's a doll with parts of its face missing. On the plus side, Halloween costume idea for next year!

So how does this apply to Bloody Mary? Since our faces don’t have a central point (I always considered the the tip of the nose to be one but I guess it’s hard to just focus on that?) , like that target above, the whole face starts to become distorted as the brain cancels parts of it out. The result is some kind of horrific monster face. And of course, ‘Bloody Mary’ can’t attack her victim because they are usually terrified and run out of the bathroom screaming. Add that to a child’s overactive imagination and voila – I summoned a scary bloody psychotic woman in my mirror!

Ouija Board

Oldest trick in the book. You know the funny thing is, I still know adults who believe in this and they have told me not to do this (Just IN CASE)! So your friends get together in a dark room and contact spirits with the board; everyone places their hand on a planchette, that moves around a board and points to letters to spell our words or phrases in response to your question.

Science

So the thing is, the real reason the Ouija board works is almost as freaky as communicating with floating spirits in the Earth world, we are actually communicating with the subconscious part of our brain.

This involuntary movement in your hand muscles are called the ideomotor effect. Your body can and does move your muscles without your express permission because your body operates on autopilot most of the time anyway. Think about it, the next time the light stops working in a room, you will unconsciously keep flipping the switch everytime you walk in anyway.

So similarly with the Ouija board, your brain thinks of a response to the question and subtly moves the planchette where it wants it (but subconsciously). This does not work if you were creepy enough to try the board alone but with a few people together and all subconsciously pulling, it creates a distinct sensation that the planchette is moving on its own accord.

Get some milk from the market.... -- My subconscious is really boring.

For further proof, check out the video below, where magicians Penn & Teller blindfolded some random people, flipped the Ouija board 180 degrees and had them try to contact the spirit of the guy who played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy. The results are less than startling. 

In theory, ghosts should be able to direct their hands no matter the orientation of the board, right? Turns out, without being able to see the board, they just kinda move their hands to where they think the letters are.

The Orange Kangaroo Game

If you didn't do this at parties, or weren't invited to any parties, then you've probably seen this one in an email (with huge gaps in between steps to allow you to do the math or consult your handy-dandy notebook!)

I really need a better spam filter.

Pick a number between one and 10. Multiply it by nine. Add the two digits of the resulting number together. Now subtract five from that. Take your number and match it up with a letter of the alphabet (so 1 would be A, 2 would be B, etc.). Pick a country that begins with that letter. Pick an animal whose name begins with the last letter of the country name. Pick a fruit that begins with the last letter of the animal's name.

You got Denmark, kangaroo and orange, right?

MAGIC!

How did I guess?

Science

No matter what number you pick, they will always be four. So FOUR gives you D.

Apparently, with only four countries in the world that start with D (Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic)

Most people go with Denmark. Last letter is K and there are also very few animals that start with K and most tend to choose kangaroo - For a full list ofanimals that start with K

With an O, most people tend to go with orange - Another list from Wikianswers

So essentially, you’re pretty much forced into those answers. Sorry, no magic, we are all still just muggles. Unfortunately. Really really unfortunately.

On a side note, how sad were you when you didn’t get your letter from Prof Dumbledore on your 11^th birthday?  (In fact, I gave my sister a letter for her 17^th birthday, just because…I’m cool like that.)

So...those are some myths busted. I want to be a mythbuster cuz how cool would that job be? Blow stuff up on television...I'm up for that. Where do I interview?

Ok, random introspective notes but no real conclusion...oh well. Who really wants to read that?

Strange forms of Renewable Energy that COULD work!

So energy is a huge relevant issue in today’s modern world. I remember writing a ginormous essay (in 1 night the day before it was due. It turned out great! But sorry I digress,) about renewable energy and its effects on economic, political and social aspects in the world. My father works in Oil and Gas, a chemical engineer by degree and project manager by profession so I’ve heard about the main ways that we obtain oil and natural gases for energy purposes. Obviously, if you have access to the internet (which you must, since you’re reading this), you should know how those main sources (oil, gas, coal) are getting depleted and so, we (the planet) needs to find alternate, more sustainable form of energy that both meets our needs as a human race and also prevents more damage to our planet.

Offshore structures to obtain oil and gas from undersea ventures

But I don’t usually write about something unless it’s going to be both illuminating and humourous! So this isn’t just a boring old blogpost about alternative energy, this is about energy solutions designed by supervillains to take over the world (but they’ll probably fix the problem temporarily but lead us into quite a few more). Evil villains definitely think outside the box and their potential power sources would possibly be considered ridiculous but worse than coal? I think not.

(All links are the research I did. There's more but I didn't want to link every word lol. Don't bother clicking unless you're really curious where I got my info.)

5 Energy Crisis Solutions

1. A battery that runs off of human blood (Not kidding, it exists.)

Mad scientists have searched for years to get power from stolen souls but since that didn’t quite work out for them, they settled on getting electricity from human blood! At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, scientists have invented a strong and flexible battery, powered by blood, which looks like a curled up scab!

This is part of a larger series of batteries called bio-batteries which can run off of a a few bodily fluids (sweat, urine or…tears) All of these can be produced during a human response to fear…wow, Monsters Inc. the Sequel. Also I can't believe all that information is on HowStuffWorks, a predominantly children's science site!

It has the texture of paper and is implanted under the skin but draws electrolytes from your fluids and channels them through nanotexh carbon tubes to create energy (Wouldn’t that dehydrate you? Would you have to be on the drips? Or continuously be drinking H₂O or Mountain Dew or something?)

Apparently, the goal is not to make a huge one and power it with a lake consisting of human victims’ blood but rather to help power medical implants such as pacemakers.

BTW, as creepy as this may sound, the older method (not in current use) was to power those devices using nuclear power but having a little hunk of plutonium inside the batter. As the plutonius decayed, the heat released would power the device. When the patient eventually died, they’d have to ship the pacemaker to Los Alamos to safely dispose the radioactive material.

2. Harvesting human body heat (Not by trapping in pods. I promise.)

The Matrix has taught me a many wonderful things about life (definitely going to be a blogpost in the near future!) but using human heat was not one of them. In Sweden, however,  some engineers watched it and said, “Hey, you know that’s so true! We SHOULD harvest human body heat for our planet’s energy needs! Great idea!”

They don’t, however, round up crowds and shove them into power plants with IVs to sustain them and suck out their heat energy (I don’t know why but evil laugh sounds appropriate) – MuaHaHaHa – these people volunteer themselves. Let me explain, he Stockholm Central Station is a huge train station that acts as a central hub for all Swedish travel and some 250,000 people pass through everyday. According to The Matrix, the human body generate 400BTUs of heat/hour. Multiply that by a quarter million and voila! – A building that stays too hot even in freezing Stockholm.

So instead of opening a window and wasting all that extra heat energy, they installed heat converters in the vents that suck all the extra body heat, heats water and then they send it across the street to heat an office building. Apparently, the air can’t be directly pumped over there because it would smell like sweaty train travellers and Swedish hobos.

Besides completely deducting the station’s heating bill, the office building knocked off 25% of their their bill! This sounds like a really easy method to be used in any Metropolitan city in the world, where there are plenty of packed buildings! Especially now that we’ve reached 7million (although I’m pretty sure that’s not contributing to the Metros too much)

You know what would really work? Pay an unemployed or homeless person to just sit in a container (or pod) and just provide energy. Of course, that might increase the amount of money invested as you would have to entertain them, pay them, benefits and all…Or you could get robots to guard them and make sure they don’t leave. Ever.

3. Volcano Power!

This makes me laugh because every famous supervillain has his evil lair within a volcano where he hides from the law harnessing energy to fuel his death ray while the superhero comes to his rescue right before the eruption, only to throw the guy in jail J The ultimate supervillain symbol from Sauron to Syndrome (The Incredibles).

But, most power plants operate by heating up water until it becomes steam. So if it’s heat you need, why not use the giant hold spewing molten rock from the center of the Earth?

Iceland already provides power to 95% of their population and has plans to start selling this power to other countries soon. These people are taking the very unpronouce-able volcano that screwed up everyone’s air travel earlier and making it work for them!

Even by modest projections, it’s estimated that US could power 25% of their country and for volcanic-activity-heavy countries like Indonesia where 35% of the population doesn’t have electricity, this is a Godsend! The volcanoes in the Indonesia archipelago would produce 4,000 MW of power by 2014.

Context: World’s largest solar plant: 400MW/year and Largest windplant: 800MW/year

Hold on to your horses, reader who thought of galloping off to Eyoihwifwoehoi (something or the other) to make your own power plant…there is some risk. If the volcano erupts, power supply can be interrupted and that’s kinda what volcanos tend to do. And even if it’s not exploding in your face, drilling into the ground and releasing a cloud of super-heated steam that makes your equipment explode and form a crater 100ft deep and 100ft wide is a scenario that is very possible (it has happened several times). But think about it: you’re trying to tame a freaking volcano to serve your energy needs, it’s gonna fight back dammit!

4. Harnessing eel electricity

Ok, so this is more Disney Pixar supervillain than real supervillain (If I can be permitted to call a non-animated movie bad guy that…what’s a real supervillain anyway?) If you were to look at an electric eel and say, “I’m going to put them in a tank and use them to power my lair!,” I would assume you’re a 12 year old. Or Japanese. (Sorry for the racism but you’ll get the reason in a minute.)

At the Kamakura Aquarius just south of Tokyo, they’ve set up a demonstration of a single, huge electric eel powering…a Christmas tree. Yes, they used the evil henchmen in The Little Mermaid to power a Christmas tree. They produce electricity similar to batteries and it works simply by putting them in a tank and when it moves, it generates power. Electrodes feed the current into a Christmas tree and voila! – You’ve got an erratically powered Christmas tree.

Besides getting our super-villain a prince for a husband, our ultimate goal was to light up Christmas trees.

I hope the eel tree’s inventor is joking when he is quoted as saying (perhaps the most uncreative vision of the future in the history of mankind), “If we could gather up all the electric eels from all around the world we would be able to light up an unimaginably large Christmas tree." Solve the global energy crisis? Noooo…Christmas tree!

Well, I suppose it’s better than the alternative of for example, having 10,000 square km pit of electric eels or breeding a Godzilla-sized eel. On second thought, if you were planning on something like that, you wouldn’t advertise it. You’d cover it up by saying you were doing something no one would question. Like say…Christmas. Hmm…

5. A Giant Invisible Energy (Death) Ray

Ok…wires are old technology and physically having to connect your chargerto a power station through cords, power lines and transformers is overly complicated, essentially the same as what has been happening for the last century. Shouldn’t we be able to beam the energy to where we need it? Yes, there are small scale versions of it like phone chargers without plugs but hopefully, someone out there is thinking much much bigger, like huge, right?

Now THAT is a fire hazard.

Yes, this is also true. Scientists have built a laser that can transfer power nearly mile into the sky, a project that was done as part of a NASA contest which awarded teams for innovations in beaming invisible power over distances. The winning team wirelessly beamed enough power to command a robot to climb a 4,300ft cable up to a helicopter. The article doesn’t say if the robot then climbed into the helicopter and threw out the pilot like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.

Another research team has outlined plans for a colossal solar space sail that would pick up outer space solar winds and beam them to Earth. There’s plenty of energy in space, enough to power Earth many times over! The beaming technology to transmit the mind-boggling amount of energy needs to be perfected and also a few missions in orbit to build the sail. And then, the grand revelation: it’s a Death Star.

So that's it...Renewable energy. Super villains. Hopefully, technology will be used for good. I guess that's a human's most redeemable quality. Hope. So here's hoping...