DID YOU KNOW?
- Although he’s been dead since 1926, escape artist Harry Houdini is still synonymous with the art. He was that good.
- When a police officer once alleged that he made his daring jail escapes by bribing the guards, Houdini sued the officer – and then
showed up in court with various objects he took from the judge’s safe.
- Daring escapes were what he was best known for and his public performances saw him free himself from straightjackets, jail cells,
handcuffs, chains, ropes and more – often while hanging from the ground upside down or while submerged in water.
- His biggest trick was the Chinese Water Torture Cell, where he was suspended upside down in a locked cabinet of glass and steel
filled with water. He had to hold his breath for more than three minutes for this trick – not because it took him that long to escape,
but because it was more dramatic that way.
- Later in his career, Houdini showed people how he made his daring escapes. Sometimes he’d apply force to weak spots or use
shoelaces for leverage; other times he’d regurgitate small keys and tools. For straightjackets and chains? He’d perfected the art of
dislocating his own shoulders so he could squirm out.
- The story that Houdini died from a punch in the stomach is completely true. Houdini claimed he could take a punch from any man,
and a young boxer tested him on it once before the escape artist was ready. Houdini continued to perform the next week as his
health got progressively worse and he finally collapsed after a show in Detroit with a ruptured appendix that had become infected. A
lot of fans assumed he faked his own death, and there were sightings for decades after his passing.
DID YOU KNOW?
- The human body is an incredible machine, but it also has a few spare parts we don’t really need.
- The appendix is a narrow muscular tube that’s attached to the large intestine, probably left over from the days when people ate a
lot of raw vegetation. It doesn’t do much now except occasionally burst and get infected – 300,000 Americans have their appendixes
removed every year!
- The coccyx, or tailbone, could be a remnant of some tailed human ancestor. It does nothing for us now except get bruised or
broken falling off ladders and skateboards.
- “Erector pili” are what cause goose bumps to stick up when we get cold. Problem is, they’re no longer attached to fur and do
nothing but make us looked like plucked chickens.
- The palmaris muscle is already starting to disappear from human anatomy, and some 10 percent of us no longer have them. The
small muscle runs from the elbow to the wrist, and probably once helped our ancestors to climb trees and hang off branches. It’s a
bit of bonus material for surgeons that harvest it to repair knees, elbows and other joints.
- The sublavius muscle stretches from under the first rib to the collarbone, and is really only useful for crawling babies and animals
that walk on all fours.
- About one in every 100 people has a set of small cervical ribs on their necks that can cause nerve and artery problems.
- Had your wisdom teeth out yet? Only about five percent of people have enough room in their mouths to accommodate four large
molars that grow in while we’re young adults. The rest of us have to get them yanked so they don’t crack or displace other teeth or
rot out because they're harder to brush.
- Ever met someone who can wiggle their ears? Extrinsic ear muscles are what allow dogs, cats and other animals raise and direct
their ears. They're fun at parties, but not necessarily useful.
DID YOU KNOW?
- Despite the fact that it was cancelled after only three seasons in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, Star Trek remains one of the most
influential pieces of science fiction ever produced.
- There have been a total of five spin-off television series so far - Star Trek: The Animated Series; Star Trek: The Next Generation; Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine; Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. Movies? A dozen so far, including the 2013’s “Into Darkness.”
- Gene Rodenberry’s interracial vision for the future with black and Asian characters on the ship was controversial but Rodenberry
insisted. Mr. Sulu, the Enterprise’s first lieutenant, was named for the Sulu Sea, which lies between Japan, Korea, China, the
Phillipines and other Asian nations. Nyota Uhura, the ship’s communications officer, was the first black main character on television.
- Mr. Spock’s first name on the show is actually Edward, which is apparently a common Vulcan name as well.
- Most of the intelligent species on the show are humanoid, though they may be of a different color or have some bumps or wrinkles
on their foreheads. According to the show’s mythology, an ancient race seeded the universe with life that evolved in parallel way,
which is why aliens all look alike.
- It’s a good thing we’re all the same species, because Star Trek didn’t just break racial lines, it also broke sextraterrestrial lines as
well as Captain James T. Kirk boldly went where no man had gone before and made out with a Vulcan, a green-skinned alien, an
alien cyborg and an alien shapeshifter in just three short seasons.
- The Star Trek flagship, the USS Enterprise, can travel up to 90 times the speed of light using its warp engines. Ironically, the “USS”
part is never explained, but some think in means “United Starfleet Ship.”
DID YOU KNOW?
- The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be offline until 2015 as researchers make upgrades and repairs that prevented the highpowered particle collider from working at full power.
- Despite not working to its full potential, the LHC – the largest machine in the world with a circumference of 16.5 miles, 9,300
magnets and a cryogenic system eight times bigger than the next-biggest cooling system on the planet – made several important
discoveries.
- The LHC fires trillions of protons into the accelerator ring until they reach 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light. Particles fly
around the ring 11,245 times per second before being directed into paths where they can collide with one another in front of
instruments that detect particles and electrical charges.
- Dozens of supercomputers around the world are required to help to interpret the data with some 600 million collisions taking place
every single second. Each collision releases subatomic particles in reactions that are hotter than the surface of the sun.
- The biggest discovery so far is something that resembles the Higgs bosun particle — a subatomic particle theorized 50 years ago as
a way to explain why particles have mass. It has no spin or electrical charge, but helps fill in a lot of gaps in astrophysics - like how
gravity works at a distance.
- The upgrades will increase the power of the LCH by a factor of 10. Instead of billions of particle collisions, scientists will be about to
measure some 200 quadrillion (a quadrillion is a thousand billion) collisions per second.
- There are some who still think that the LHC could trigger a chain reaction that could endanger the planet by creating particles that
destroy other particles or form a small black hole. It’s probably not going to happen but we’ll know for sure in another two years.
DID YOU KNOW?
- In 1965, Intel co-founded Gordon E. Moore noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had more or less doubled
every year since 1958 and he predicted that the trend would continue for at least 10 more years.
- As of 2013, 48 years later, Moore’s law is still going strong. In 1971, the top 4004 chip had a transistor count of 2,300. As of 2011,
the 10-core Xeon Westmere-EX chip had a transistor count of 2.6 billion.
- Every time experts predict that Moore’s Law will end because of the limitations of manufacturing techniques or materials,
somebody makes a breakthrough. In the last few years, multicore processors and nano-scale manufacturing techniques have kept
Moore’s Law alive.
- In 1971, the thinnest that companies like Intel could print a thread of copper wire on a microchip wafer was 10 microns, or about
10 one-thousandths of a millimeter. By 2012, chipmakers could print at just 22 nanometers, or 22 one-millionths of a millimeter.
That's about 50,000 times thinner.
- Widths are expected to continue to shrink, to 14nm in 2014 and to 5nm by 2020. A nanometer is about the width of a helium atom.
- What’s next? Where do you go from five nanometers? Once printing reaches that atomic level there really is nowhere left to go,
which should signal the end of Moore’s law… except…
- Researchers are now working on quantum computing. In conventional computing a transistor can either be on or off, which allows
them to be programmed using binary code. In quantum computing, a transistor would be able to exist in multiple states, allowing
Moore’s Law to continue for several more generations as the process is refined.