The Book Of General Ignorance Part 7

Ozone was discovered in 1840 by the German chemist Christian Schonbein. Investigating the peculiar odour that lingers around electrical equipment he traced it to a gas, O3, which he named after the Greek for 'to smell' (ozein).

Ozone or 'heavy air' found favour with medical scientists still in the grip of the 'miasma' theory of disease, where ill health was thought to spring from bad smells. Ozone, they thought, was just the thing to clear the lungs of harmful 'effluvia' and the seaside was just the place to get it.

A whole industry grew up around 'ozone cures' and 'ozone hotels' (there are still some carrying the name in Australasia). As late as 1939, Blackpool was still boasting 'the healthiest ozone in Britain'.

Nowadays, we know that the seaside doesn't smell of ozone it smells of rotting seaweed. There's no evidence this smell does you good or harm (it's mostly compounds of sulphur). It may simply trigger positive a.s.sociations in your brain, linking back to happy childhood holidays.

As for ozone, the fumes from your car's exhaust (when combined with sunlight) create far more ozone than anything on the beach. If you really want a lungful, the best thing would be to clamp your mouth round an exhaust pipe. This is emphatically not recommended. Apart from doing irreparable damage to your lungs, you could burn your lips.

Ozone is used to make bleach and to kill bacteria in drinking water as a less noxious alternative to chlorine. It is also generated by high-voltage electrical equipment such as televisions and photocopiers.

Some trees, such as oaks and willows, release ozone which can poison nearby vegetation.

The shrinking ozone layer, which protects the planet from dangerous ultra-violet radiation, would be fatal if inhaled. It is 24 km (15 miles) above the Earth's surface and smells faintly of geraniums.

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What colour is nicotine?

If you said 'yellow' or 'brown' go to the bottom of the cla.s.s. Nicotine is colourless.

Nicotine is found in all plants of the Solanaceae Solanaceae, or nightshade family, which includes tobacco, deadly nightshade, tomatoes, potatoes, aubergines and chilli peppers. In theory, cigarettes can be made out of potato or tomato leaves and some programmes designed to help people stop smoking also advise giving up potatoes and tomatoes in order to eliminate low-level nicotine intake completely.

Cauliflower and coca leaves, from which cocaine is made, also contain nicotine.

In small doses, the nicotine compound solanine that is present in all these plants produces feelings of pleasure by increasing levels of the hormone dopamine in the brain. It's why tobacco is more addictive than either cocaine or heroin, but it's also why we sometimes find ourselves craving chips or pizza. Solanine generates adrenaline, leading to higher blood pressure, a faster heart rate, and enhanced sugar levels in the blood, producing a combination of euphoria and alertness.

In large doses, however, solanine and nicotine are as deadly as the nightshade whose relative they are. Tomato leaves can be made into a potent insecticide. The nicotine in a single cigarette, if taken direct into the bloodstream, would be fatal. Eating one cigarette could make you severely ill and swallowing a packet of ten would definitely kill you. In 1976, the Department of Health urged pregnant mothers to wear rubber gloves when peeling potatoes and more than a kilogram (2.2 lb) of potatoes eaten at a single sitting would be certain death.

Fortunately for smokers, most of the nicotine in a cigarette is burned before it ever gets to the lungs. The other good news is, it doesn't stain your fingers or your teeth or the ceiling of the pub. It's not only colourless but soluble in water, so it comes off when you wash your hands. The stain on a smoker's fingers is caused by tar.

The scientific name for tobacco is Nicotiana tabac.u.m Nicotiana tabac.u.m. The name of the plant and the word nicotine derive from Jean Nicot (15301604), French amba.s.sador to Lisbon, and the man who first introduced tobacco to France in 1560. He originally promoted it as a medicine, believing it healed wounds and cured cancers, and sent some, in the form of snuff, to Catherine de Medici, Queen of France. She was so impressed when it stopped her migraine that she decreed it should be called herba regina herba regina, the 'queen's herb'.

Pure nicotine is one the most powerful poisons known: one and a half times as toxic as strychnine and three times as toxic as a.r.s.enic. a.r.s.enic is also present in tobacco, along with 4,000 other chemicals, 200 of which are carcinogenic, including formaldehyde (used to preserve dead bodies), acetone (the main ingredient of nail-polish remover), cadmium (used in batteries) and hydrogen cyanide (the gas in n.a.z.i death camps).

What speed does light travel at?

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That depends.

It's often said that the speed of light is constant, but it isn't. Only in a vacuum does light reach its maximum speed of nearly 300,000 km per second (186,282 miles per second).

In any other medium, the speed of light varies considerably, always being slower than the figure everyone knows. Through diamonds, for example, it goes less than half as fast: about 130,000 km per second, or 80,000 miles per second.

Until recently, the slowest recorded speed of light (through sodium at 272 C) was just over 60 kph (38 mph): slower than a bicycle.

In 2000, the same team (at Harvard University) managed to bring light to a complete standstill by shining it into a bec (Bose-Einstein condensate) of the element rubidium.

Rubidium was discovered by Robert Bunsen (181199) who didn't invent the Bunsen burner which is named after him.

Astoundingly, light is invisible.

You can't see the light itself, you can only see what it b.u.mps into. A beam of light in a vacuum, shining at right angles to the observer, cannot be seen.

Although this is very odd, it's quite logical. If light itself was visible, it would form a kind of fog between your eyes and everything in front of you.

Darkness is equally strange. It's not there but you can't see through it.

How do moths feel about flames?

They're not attracted to them. They are disorientated by them.

Apart from the odd forest fire, artificial light sources have been in existence for an extremely short time in comparison with the age of the relationship between moths and the Sun and Moon. Many insects use these light sources to navigate by day and night.

Because the Moon and Sun are a long way away, the insects have evolved to expect the light from them to strike their eyes in the same place at different times of day or night, enabling them to calculate how to fly in a straight line.

When people come along with their portable miniature suns and moons and a moth flies past, the light confuses it. It a.s.sumes it must somehow be moving in a curved path, because its position in relation to the stationary 'sun' or 'moon', has unexpectedly changed.

The moth then adjusts its course until it sees the light as stationary again. With a light source so close, the only way this is possible for an object which is so close is to fly round and round it in circles.

Moths do not eat clothes. (It's their caterpillars that do it.) STEPHEN If I've got a mothball in this hand, and a mothball in that hand, what've I got? If I've got a mothball in this hand, and a mothball in that hand, what've I got?

ALAN Two mothb.a.l.l.s. Two mothb.a.l.l.s.

STEPHEN A rather excited moth. A rather excited moth.

How many legs does a centipede have?

Not a hundred.

The word centipede is from the Latin for 'a hundred feet', and though centipedes have been extensively studied for over a hundred years, not one has ever been found that has exactly a hundred legs.

Some have more, some less. The one with the number of legs closest to one hundred was discovered in 1999. It has ninety-six legs, and is unique among centipedes in that it is the only known species with a even number of pairs of legs: forty-eight.

All other centipedes have odd numbered pairs of legs ranging from fifteen to 191 pairs.

How many toes has a two-toed sloth?

It's either six or eight.

For reasons known only to taxonomists the sloths in question are called 'two-toed' rather than 'two-fingered'. Both two-toed and three-toed sloths have three 'toes' on each foot. Two-'toed' sloths are distinguished from three-'toed' sloths by the fact that they have two 'fingers' on each 'hand', whereas three-toed sloths have three.

Despite their obvious similarities, three-toed sloths and two-toed sloths are not related to one another. Two-toed sloths are slightly faster. Three-toed sloths have nine bones in their necks; two-toed have six.

Three-toed sloths make good pets, but two-toed sloths are vicious. Three-toed sloths produce shrill whistles through their nostrils. Two-toed sloths will hiss if disturbed.

Sloths, generally, are the world's slowest mammals. Their top speed is slightly over 1.6 km (1 mile) an hour but they mostly inch along at less than 2 metres (about 6 feet) a minute.

They sleep for fourteen to nineteen hours a day and spend their entire lives hanging upside down in trees. They eat, sleep, mate, give birth and die upside-down. Some move so little that two species of algae take root on them, giving them a greenish tinge, which also acts as useful camouflage. Several species of moth and beetle also make their home in sloth fur.

Their metabolism is slow, too. It takes then more than a month to digest their food and they pa.s.s urine and faeces only once a week. They do this at the base of the trees they live in, these unsavoury piles being romantically known as 'trysting places'.

Like reptiles, they practise thermoregulation basking in the sun to warm up, creeping into the shade to cool down.

This slows down their complex and lethargic digestive rate. During the rainy season when they stay put under leaves to stay dry, some sloths perform the astonishing feat of starving to death on a full stomach.

STEPHEN What is the most dangerous animal in the history of the world? What is the most dangerous animal in the history of the world?

JEREMY HARDY A sloth driving a petrol tanker A sloth driving a petrol tanker.

How many eyes does a no-eyed, big-eyed wolf spider have?

a) No eyes b) No eyes, but big ones c) One big eye that doesn't work d) 144 eye-like warts It has no eyes.

The blind arachnid was first discovered in 1973 and the entire population lives in three pitch-black caves on the volcanic island of Kauai in Hawaii.

Like other cave-dwelling beasts, it evolved without needing to see but, as it's a member of the big-eyed wolf spider family, it gets to call itself big-eyed (i.e. if it did have any eyes left, they'd be big ones).

It's about the size of a fifty-pence piece when fully grown. Its rooming buddy and main source of nourishment is the Kauai cave amphipod, a small crustacean that resembles a blind, semi-transparent shrimp.

How many p.e.n.i.ses does a European earwig have?

a) Fourteen b) None at all c) Two (one for special occasions) d) Mind your own business The answer is c c. The European or Black earwig carries a spare one in case the first one snaps off, which happens quite frequently.

Both p.e.n.i.ses are very brittle and relatively long; at just over a centimetre in length, they are often longer than the earwig itself. Two gentlemen at Tokyo Metropolitan University discovered this when one of them playfully pinched a male earwig's rear end during the act of s.e.xual intercourse. Its p.e.n.i.s snapped off inside the female, but miraculously it produced a back up.

Earwigs are named for the almost universal belief that they crawl into people's ears and burrow into their brain. The word earwig is Anglo-Saxon for 'ear-creature'. Their French name is perce-oreille perce-oreille ('ear-piercer'); in German it's ('ear-piercer'); in German it's ohrwurm ohrwurm ('ear-worm'); in Turkish ('ear-worm'); in Turkish kulagakacan kulagakacan ('ear-fugitive'). ('ear-fugitive').

Earwigs don't crawl into ears any more than any other insect but Pliny the Elder recommended that if one does do so, you spit in the person's ear until the earwig comes out again. They definitely do not burrow into brains.

An alternative suggestion for the name is that the pincers on the rear of an earwig resemble the tool once used for earpiercing.

This idea seems to have more appeal to Latins. The Spanish have two words for earwig: contraplumas contraplumas (which also means 'penknife'), and (which also means 'penknife'), and tijereta tijereta (which also means a 'scissor-kick'). In Italian, an earwig is (which also means a 'scissor-kick'). In Italian, an earwig is forbicina forbicina ('little scissors'). ('little scissors').

A giant species of earwig (8.5 cm, or 3.3 inches long) lived on St Helena, the South Atlantic island where Napoleon Bonaparte spent his final years in exile. They may still be living there, but the last one was sighted in 1967.

Nicknamed the 'Dodo of the Dermaptera' (the order to which they belong, meaning 'skin wing'), the slim hope that they may still exist was enough for environmentalists to prevent a new airport being built on the island in 2005.

Two species of Malayan earwig feed exclusively on the body oozings and dead skin of naked bats.

ALAN Have you snapped off a w.i.l.l.y Have you snapped off a w.i.l.l.y?

JO I snapped off my husband's last night. Another one didn't appear, I'm afraid, but a sandwich did, so that was all right. I snapped off my husband's last night. Another one didn't appear, I'm afraid, but a sandwich did, so that was all right.

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Which animals are the best-endowed of all?

Barnacles. These una.s.sumingly modest beasts have the longest p.e.n.i.s relative to their size of any creature. They can be seven times longer than their body.

Most of the 1,220 species of barnacles are hermaphrodites. When one barnacle decides to be 'mother' it lays eggs inside its own sh.e.l.l and at the same time releases some alluring pheromones. A nearby barnacle will respond by playing 'male' and fertilise the eggs by extending its ma.s.sive p.e.n.i.s, releasing sperm into the cavity of the 'female'.

Barnacles stand on their heads and eat with their feet. Using a very strong glue, they attach themselves head-first to a rock or the hull of a ship. The opening we see as the top of the barnacle is actually the bottom; through it their long, feathery legs catch small plants and animals that float past.

Other well-endowed species are the nine-banded armadillo (its p.e.n.i.s extends to two-thirds of its body length) and the blue whale, whose p.e.n.i.s, despite a relatively modest proportion in comparison to size, is still the biggest physical organ of all, averaging between 1.8 and 3 metres (6 to 10 feet) in length and around 450 mm (18 inches) in girth.

A blue whale's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e is estimated to contain about 20 litres (35 pints) based on its testes, which weigh about 70 kg (over 150 lb) each.

Whale's p.e.n.i.ses were useful. In Herman Melville's Moby-d.i.c.k Moby-d.i.c.k (1851), there is an account of how the outer skin can be transformed into a floor-length waterproof ap.r.o.n, ideal for protection when gutting the dead whale. (1851), there is an account of how the outer skin can be transformed into a floor-length waterproof ap.r.o.n, ideal for protection when gutting the dead whale.

Like most other mammals, whales have a p.e.n.i.s bone, the baculum baculum or or os p.e.n.i.s os p.e.n.i.s. These, along with the baculi baculi of walruses and polar bears, are used by Eskimo peoples as runners for their sleds or as clubs. of walruses and polar bears, are used by Eskimo peoples as runners for their sleds or as clubs.

Other uses for mammalian baculi baculi ('little rod' in Latin) are as tie-pins, coffee stirrers, or love-tokens. The bones are incredibly diverse in shape they are probably the most varied of any bone and are useful in working out the relationships between mammalian species. Humans and spider monkeys are the only primates without them. ('little rod' in Latin) are as tie-pins, coffee stirrers, or love-tokens. The bones are incredibly diverse in shape they are probably the most varied of any bone and are useful in working out the relationships between mammalian species. Humans and spider monkeys are the only primates without them.

Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for p.e.n.i.s. This has led two scholars (Gilbert and Zevit in the American Journal of Medical Genetics American Journal of Medical Genetics in 2001) to suggest that Eve was made out of Adam's p.e.n.i.s bone rather than his rib (Genesis 2: 2123). This would explain why males and females have the same number of ribs but the man has no p.e.n.i.s bone. in 2001) to suggest that Eve was made out of Adam's p.e.n.i.s bone rather than his rib (Genesis 2: 2123). This would explain why males and females have the same number of ribs but the man has no p.e.n.i.s bone.

The biblical account also states that afterwards 'the Lord G.o.d closed up the flesh', the suggestion being that this is the 'scar' (known as the raphe raphe) that runs down the underside of the p.e.n.i.s and s.c.r.o.t.u.m.

What's a rhino's horn made from?

A rhinoceros horn is not, as some people think, made out of hair.

It's made out of tightly packed strands of keratin fibres. Keratin is the protein found in human hair and fingernails as well as animal claws and hooves, birds' feathers, porcupine quills and the sh.e.l.ls of armadillos and tortoises.

Rhinos are the only animal to have a horn that is entirely made from keratin; unlike those of cattle, sheep, antelopes and giraffes they don't have any bone core. A dead rhino's skull shows no evidence that it ever had horns; in life they are anch.o.r.ed on a roughened b.u.mp on the skin, above the nasal bone.

A rhino's horn sometimes unravels if cut or damaged, but young rhinos can completely re-grow them if that happens. No one knows what their function is, though females with their horns removed fail to look after their offspring properly.

Rhinoceroses are endangered animals largely due to the demand for their horns. Africa's rhinoceros horns have long been in demand for both medicines and traditional dagger handles in the Middle East, especially Yemen. Since 1970 67,050 kg (nearly 150,000 lb) of rhinoceros horn have been imported into Yemen. Based upon an average horn weight of 3 kg (6.6 lb), this volume represents the horns of 22,350 rhinoceroses.